mr_bill

The corner

-mr. bill

CB HI

A nice tractor or farm truck like a Ford 350 would help teach the motorist to stay on his side of the road.

Number400

I'm with FB on this one. Fun, but too fast for conditions. The 3rd rider was barely ready for the corner anyway and his split second decision to go left is usually a poor choice. If the driver corrected, he would have been hit worse. The camera bike was in the drops and that to me shows a level of commitment to speed. If there is any chance of things getting sketchy, I favor the hoods. I am no bike handling pro though...

caloso

I'm sorry, you have it exactly backwards. It's not a commitment to speed, it's a commitment to control. In the drops your center of gravity is lower, you have more leverage on the brake levers, and less chance of your hand slipping off. Not to mention you protect your bars from getting snagged by a rider who is alongside you. We teach our juniors that the only time you should be on the hoods if you're off the front, off the back, or just toodling along. Any time you're under stress, you should be in the drops.

PaulH

Replace the group of cyclists with a single car, and I think there still is a collision,

Number400

Yes, but this was not a race and not even a tight group. And when you are using the road as your personal race course, things that apply in a race like protection from hooking bars and weighting the outside pedal and maximum velocity while cornering on a descent are not really important/smart in every situation. I don't recommend riding the fine line on rides. I have no problem with tearing around on a bicycle, I just leave a bit more of a buffer for the unknown when speed it is not really necessary.

To each his own. I have taken worse chances and have managed to survive so far...I feel for those riders and hope that I am not in a similar situation. Think if that was a family pushing a baby stroller around the inside of that corner, they would have crashed as well. Too much commitment.

CB HI

You completely ignored caloso's main point. It is hard to learn when you do that.

PS - caloso is right and you really should try and learn something from him.

italktocats

3 + 1 = 4 no problem

phoebeisis

Everytime I watch it
I find myself tightening up gritting my teeth before impact
They lucked out-scary!

Oh on the hoods you have better sight lines-much better.
And your eyes are better positioned to detect movement earlier(you naturally slightly move your head left right when "standing" upright-this helps detect movement)
even .1 seconds matter in these situations

Humans didn't evolve using our eyes the way you do in the drops-

Rollfast

I have modern crossbraced on Tempest, Wald maybe on Rosa and I forget what on Germaine...I can't look back very well in a dropped position and even when I've had bikes with those bars I grabbed the top. It's really uncomfortable for me and I feel compromised.


It can be just as dangerous upright. Making a lot of assumptions is probably not very useful here though, till that's part of the reason I'm a 'cruiser' rider, that and I do not like breaking cables.

phoebeisis

82 here now same yesterday suburb of NOLA
In countries where people use/used bikes -large scale-for transportation
every bike is a normal upright posture bar bike-no "drops" need apply
so you they can comfortably see where they are going.
Drop bars are for speed/racing-

CB HI

You must have had a much different evolution line than I did, or maybe your wrong about it being evolution by ignoring physical factors between different humans.

I grew up target shooting with a rifle from a prone position, as well as the other positions. If your claims are true for all humans, seems odd that I (or any other youth) would be able to qualify as a youth NRA Distinguished Expert Marksman.

Maybe it is just physical training, making is easy for some to have the neck strength to lift and hold their heads higher and longer than others. In addition to shooting practice strengthening my neck muscles, doing specific weight exercises for the neck muscles for football and rugby gave me strong enough neck muscles that I have never had neck soreness from cycling that I hear so many other complain about.

I really do think your problem is not enough physical training and little to do with evolution.

phoebeisis

CB HI
No we all evolved the same
As we slowly evolved from 4 legs to 2
our neck neutral eye socket position changed so our natural sight picture remained downrange
a dog would be looking downrange "in the drops" neutral head neck position-
but a walking on two legs dog would be looking skyward

Besides it hurts my beat up old neck to use drops(wrestling other sports and age 65 yo)
so I'm biased against drops
I have trained plenty-college wrestler-- still ride bike daily-do mild weight training

I shoot also(target self defense no interest in hunting- currently air rifles in hallway-lock cats dog out)-if you train-
you can shoot pretty well
either hand either eye
I was born left eye dominant but right handed-so shot left handed-rifles and pistols-until recently-arthritic left trigger finger

Yeah humans can adapt-but we detect movement BEST the way we evolved
(I'm still best left handed left eyed(dominant eye despite the finger pain)-like crude LC9S because of the too light trigger
but 2 billion bike riders probably have a point-drops suck unless you race-

winston63 

Completely agreed.

I actually was involved in a head on collision with a car, mostly due to me taking a fairly sharp corner too wide with just a bit too much speed. It was on a very quiet, small dead end street in an area I know well where you'd almost never encounter a car.

But on this particular day at this particular moment, one happened to be coming in precisely the right (or wrong) time and we hit. Fortunately, the driver was approaching a stop sign and was already slowing down: our collision wound up being relative low speed, and nobody (including me) was seriously hurt beyond some road rash and a few bruises.

Even my bike was largely OK, so this wound up being more of a warning for me than the serious life changing (or ending) event it could have been.

Once you do something like that, you never repeat that same mistake! I don't screw around on any blind corners now.

phoebeisis

Yep
I also have had my share of "somewhat my fault" collisions wrecks
Once I blew by-on the left-a stopped VW who was just stopped for no apparent reason(no oncoming traffic no blinker so he couldn't be stopped to make a turn)

Well he WAS going to make a turn-but no flasher on and he was distracted -lighting a cigarette or swigging a beer-who knows
yeah I took our his outside mirror -dented his left front fender
learned a lesson-don't ever pass on the left or right a stopped for "no reason" car

You will become a hood ornament
bike's frame got bent a little-but no big deal with that crude heavy "pipe tubing"

Jim from Boston

I replied earlier on this thread in response to the OP video, but now I’m replying specifically to @FBinNY’s post. Well said, as a fact of cycling life.

I was hit from behind by a “distracted” (? inebriated) hit and run driver on an otherwise seemingly safe and peaceful route. By good fortune, I’m alive and relatively unimpaired.

Over the past few months I have come to realize that my safety aphorisms, collected over the years by personal or vicarious experience, are my way of actively aligning the stars in my favor, to anticipate those unseen and otherwise unanticipated dangers.

FWIW, for my own information at least, my other aphorisms beside those above are:

• Make yourself as visible as possible,and assume nobody sees you.
  
  
• When riding at night, look for cars, not just headlights

• To know where a car is going, watch the front wheels, not the body or hood.
  
  
• You don’t have the right-of-way until the other yields it to you (learned from my teacher in driver’s ed).
  
  
• Jim’s Law of the Road: “No matter how well-paved and lightly traveled the Road, a vehicle is likely to pass on the left as you encounter an obstacle on the right.”…my argument to wear a rearview mirror.

Also, no aphorism but I’m also wary of passing on the right at an intersection, especially next to a bus or truck, after reading of fatalities on my routes. ["Truck at corner in sight, don't go right." ]

Those are all I remember for now, and they all pop-up in my mind as I encounter the situation.

scott967

Sort of like aphorism about no "old and bold" pilots.

scott s.
.

genec

BTW, added spaces... I guess your space bar was sticking... some words were really tailgating.

Add this one... "Any time there are three moving objects on a narrow road... such as two cars and a cyclist, they will always somehow come together at the same time."

wphamilton

I'll probably get flamed for this, but if Green Jersey hadn't juked to his left, the driver might have been able to miss the inside cyclist or possibly even ditched to his right. Yes the driver was going too fast and in the wrong place, but Green Jersey cut off his escape route.

Jim from Boston

Thanks for your reply. Ever since the computer change back around June, it's gotten really tedious to edit quote boxes...especially word spacing, nested quotes, and even sometimes I can't turn off the italicizer. I wrote my post above while waiting for a meeting, and didn't have a chance to edit it after submitting, which I will do now.

Your comment sounds like a variant of Murphy's Law, not unlike Jim's Law of the Road. If I were to make it into an aphorism, to defeat Murphy, I might say something like, "Stay away as far as possible from anything else moving on the Road." though that might eliminate drafting. [See what I mean about italics? ]

caloso

Maybe, but where else would Green Jersey go?

FBinNY 

How dare you assign any fault to a cyclist here on BF!!!!!

Seriously, his lane placement was poor from the get go, and his decision to move to the left might have been an outgrowth of that. In fact his lane placement was comparable to that of the driver, so I have problems with the double standard applied by any here.

While we're at it, the lead rider had room to clear but didn't, either because of target fixation, or excess speed for the bend.

Let nothing I say here be interpreted as absolving the driver for any fault on his part. But we shouldn't let blaming the driver close our eyes to the riders' errors and complicity in their own misfortune.

So, while there are some here who focus on the driver's lapses, I see it as a reminder that we need to ride in such a way as to remain in control of our destinies.

FullGas

this.

moron in the car needs to meet something big and bad to reinforce the concept of staying in your lane and not cutting thru the apex of a curve.

CB HI

Your neck may be fussed, but my neck is not and works just fine for looking down range in many positions. Maybe you should be comparing the evolution of dog necks vs human necks.

CB HI

No flame. I and likely others had the same thoughts.