Originally Posted by
Rowan
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But if people really want to get serious about safety issues, and particularly on randonnees, how about an exhausted cyclist riding a bike on usually unknown roads, often in limited visibility, concentrating on a computer distance and route instructions. If you were talking about a driver doing the same thing, you would be demanding the driver's licence be torn up and thrown away.
Hi, Rowan,
I agree. But I can't resist giving the somewhat flippant reply: Yes, but at least the randonneur isn't simultaneously talking on the cell phone (or worse, trying to send a text message) while they're doing all this!
FWIW, the mirror that I use is the "Take-a-Look" mirror, which tends to stay focussed where you put it, regardless of how rough the road is or how windy it is. I set it so I can see my ear and the top of my shoulder, so there's always a frame of reference to help me tell where I'm aiming. So it's very easy to just take a glance backward every thirty seconds or so to see who's coming up behind. Even at night, it takes only a glance to scan the road behind. About the only time that the mirror doesn't "work" as well is when I'm down in the drops and my shoulders tend to block my vision a little. As I said in my post, I don't think of mirrors as a miracle panacea. Every so often I'll be passed by a car that I neither heard nor saw. On our recent 600Km, that happened twice in 37 hours. I agree that it's important to be constantly scanning for escape routes, but you can only use one if you know that you need to do it, and if you don't know what's behind you, then how can you know whether to bail out?