tokolosh

this comment from roody on cradduck's thread 'first bad experience' made me curious to know what other commuters' experience has been in other (non-car and non-bike) modes of transportation. how many used to drive almost everywhere and just changed directly to biking? how many were primarily pedestrians and transit users before they started biking?

i've done all three, in a progression that started with pedestrian, grew to include transit, went to driving, and then became biking. i'm still about an even mixture of the three, with biking probably out in front as far as mileage. it never really occurred to me before, but now that i think about it, i guess a lot of adults in my city might go directly from a car to a bike, without ever really learning or needing the street-smarts that become second nature to pedestrians.

jumpr

I think it's less of a consciousness and more of a mindset - a mindset to look around you all the time, to listen to traffic, and to be aware of all traffic at all times.

I'm slowly switching from car to bike (I drive to a commuter lot and bike the rest of the way; and I can take the bus if I need to). It's amazing how much more aware I've become in only 1.5 weeks of commuting! It's hard to believe how much different the streets are when you've only got a helmet and a jacket to protect you.

Toasted

Well said! I blew past a couple of peds today (one was in the middle of a bend), who I couldn't see due to foliage, so I had to jump into the other lane really fast. Part of the problem, I find, with being a ped is simply the lack of need to be so aware unless you're jaywalking in some way. I can't tell you how many times I've almost lost an arm or been completely taken down while walking simply because I was unaware of how close I was walking to the road because I didn't think I needed to worry about such things...it is, after all, the driver's job to be aware of me...

tokolosh

heh. we must be living in different cities. where i am, you need to be aware any time you're on blacktop instead of concrete, even in legal crosswalks where you technically have the right-of-way. i don't feel much more visible to drivers when i'm on foot than i do on my bike. possibly less, at some times.

i just brought it up because of the times we get off the bike and become pedestrians-pushing-a-bike. with me it's automatic to keep the radar on and just flip to pedestrian-view, but maybe it's different for other people. my biggest change has been to add bike-awareness to my pedestrian vision. i used to just look for cars, and the mindset was all 'i could get hurt'. now i look for bikes too, and it's changed to 'i could get hurt, but i could also get someone else hurt.'

chephy

I've never driven a car; pedestrian and public transit all the way before biking. I don't think that helped me develop any "street smarts" though. In fact, driving would've probably helped me more in learning the rules of the road (of course, I learned them anyway, but it would also be useful to be able to consider things from a motorist's perspective).

pinkrobe

As far as commuting goes, I walk whenever I can get to where I'm going in 30 minutes or less, bike when it's going to be 3-10 km and drive the rest. I'm a very defensive ped, doing double-checks and making sure I'm safe when crossing streets and such. My wife [in my view] just wanders out into traffic, assuming that all vehicles can and will stop. She seems to have an invisible bubble around her that protects her from harm. When biking, we're the opposite. I whip through traffic with my spider-sense warning me of danger, while she tends to take it a lot easier. It's weird that we have such a different way of behaving on and off the bike.