Engage With The Traffic

who's your mate? ;)

YOU! www.fyxomatosis.com

Any other traffic tips from the master?

Wade, loving your articles and loving that they're in the Fairfax newspapers. You give a really balanced view of cycling and hopefully this will encourage all road users to share the love.

I agree, I think making eye contact makes us less pesky cyclist and more human. I also give a quick wave to cars that give way to me when others would have pulled out/driven across in front of me. I know we have the right of way in these situations but showing appreciation for good driving behaviour hopefully encourages these drivers to keep doing it and to think better of cyclists in general. It's such a "them" and "us" war, it's nice to start diffusing it.

Hi Wade
As an everyday cyclist and sometime reader of your blog, just wanted to let you know that I've posted a comment about your Age article at Melbourne Cyclist at http://bit.ly/9GxOxD
It's a really good piece and congrats on the media asking you to write for them. Who would have thought that the media is seeking expert opinion on something that so many more people are doing more of these days?
Well done.

Thanks for the kind words and the post Richard.

yup, great article. Good to see it on the front page of The Age, hopefully this message will get out to the "casual" cyclists out there who haven't yet heard of cyclingtips.

I can bring up an example (thankfully becoming a rarer example) only tonight on the way to the Kew crits of some numnut who kept running red lights by getting ahead of the traffic before the lights turned green. When we pulled him up and asked him to wait until the lights turned green before he entered the intersection, he gave the flabergasting response of "Oh, I've had a few run-ins with cars pushing me to the side of the road, so I head out into the intersection early to get ahead of them".....us: *slap forehead*. Not a surprise then that he's had some "run-ins" with cars, hopefully he does get to read your article, then perhaps he won't have any more run-ins....

keep up the good work Wade.

This was a really great article Wade. I've really tried changed my attitude when riding in traffic over the years. I engage with drivers much more now and always try remain calm no matter what happens, (yes sometimes it requires all my self control to remain calm). It has not been easy and it has taken a few years to get there, however I find I enjoy my riding in traffic a lot more these days.

The signals, waves, nods and smiles were the easy part for me, and I think they do an incredibly positive job in changing drivers attitude to cyclists. The more difficult aspect for me was anger management :)

I used to be a mirror slapper, spitter, bonnet basher (hotheaded youth days). After a while I noticed how ugly it looked when I saw other cyclists yelling abuse or collecting mirrors and I realised all it did was make me look like another crazy, erratic road user. I have see many times a cyclists almost have a second accident while doing their best to abuse a motorist for almost causing a first.

yep - stay calm, concentrate on the road - just try to look pro.

Now if I don't have something positive to say in a situation I just stay silent, look ahead and stay safe. Silence is an incredibly powerful tool I found. If a driver starts to abuse you for whatever reason, usually for just being on their road, your silence and professional attitude on the road just makes them look like a tool. To other motorists he looks like a tool and you look pro. It's great.

A few weeks back while doing my usual ride to work, going down Londsdale Street in peak hour, a driver did a sudden left lane change into my lane without indicating. I did a big lockup and swerve into the gutter but managed to avoid getting swiped or falling off.

At the red light I rolled by the drivers open window, when I didn't abuse him, or spit on his window, or slap his mirror, he stuck his head out and said "sorry mate I didn't see you".

I replied with "all good mate no harm done".

I'd like to think that I left the guy with a better opinion of cyclists and in a frame of mind to drive with a little more care. If it resulted in agro and abuse the only thing each of us would have taken away is a highly enraged state for the remainder of our journey.

Actually I find most of my road rage now is generated by cyclists who run red lights. I don't even understand why they do this? Most are not even pedalling that fast so they can't be in a hurry? It does nothing but create anger in fellow road users. And while Mr Colour Blind is safely up the road I've gotta' cross the intersection with a bunch of now agro cyclist haters piloting 2 tones of metal past me. Terrific, thanks mate!

Good article Wade! And great to see the number of comments over at the age, keep it up!

(smart*rse alert)

Can I just confirm that you're saying you like pedalling on smooth roads that wind through the mountains, and not that you like pedalling on smooth roads in the wind? ;-)

Maybe that was just me, but I first read it as "windy" (rhymes with...Cindy) my bad.

I saw this one coming..."windy" is spelled the same way as "windy", as in twisty. I gotta think of a better word ;-)

Smooth, WINDING roads. ;)

Good article... the first response to your article was the best:

"First - I use a full lane. This potentially upsets motorists, but it keeps everyone safe and predictable."

Since I've been doing that the number of incidents have dropped significantly...

Cheers

Paul

You're sans sunglasses on The Age now. But when are they doing to make your blog easier to find? It's impossible to get to from the front page and from the sport landing page. It's great that Fairfax have got you doing this blog but no one is going to just stumble across it.

Yes, I spoke to Fairfax about trying to navigate to the blog.

You can find it under:

http://www.smh.com.au/sport/cycling/

I'm still working on getting it more obvious in the other papers.

Was on the front page of the Age today though. I've been given some advice by the Editor on how to get the blog to the front. Should start to get easier to find as we go on.

just type in fairfax's search engine for" the guy who looks like james brayshaw" and hit enter........

I propose a viewer campaign to get it moved from Sport and into Lifestyle. Anyone know how we'd go about that?

I'm just getting warmed up Kylie! We'll turn this into a full-on bike racing blog in the near future

Oh no sorry that came across wrong! I mean that cycling isn't just a sport, it's a lifestyle. Getting represented in the Lifestyle section will get more viewers, and help dissolve the idea that cycling is just for skinny athletic Lycra clad freaks...like us ;-) Sporty cycling still rocks my socks off don't worry

I agree. I can click thru the link WW provides but I can never "find" it via searching The AGE website.

Nice article.

It still might not be found in the "find" area, but it's front page on The Age website now. Great exposure.

Easy to find now, it made the front page of The Age online (http://www.theage.com.au/) @ 1pm. Great Article.

Great article Wade, I often find it funny to see the expression on a drivers face when you give them a thanks you and a smile when 9 out of 10 drivers are expecting aggro - it's kind of a shocked look....

Perfect Advice.

I hope a few drivers read ot tooo :)

Great article Wade! Your ability to avoid falling into the 'Us vs Them' approach to this debate makes you an excellent advocate for...Us (sorry, but old habits die hard).
Riding home last night a cyclist in front of my just rolled on through a red light. The driver at the front of the queue opened his door and yelled 'F#^&ing typical cyclist. You're all f$&%ing wankers', just as I pulled up at the lights. I gave him a knowing laugh, and he wound down his window and said that he 'Sees it all day' and I said that I knew what he meant and that it gave me the sh!ts too...he then said 'It makes the rest of you look bad'. So just by engaging with this guy he had gone from 'Every cyclist is an f%&#ing wanker' to 'that guy makes the rest of you look bad'.
The minute you go from 'just another cyclist' to an actual person, you've won the battle.

Spot on Wade & Chris, once you show some respect and courtesy yourself (as well as eye contact), 99% of drivers will treat you fairly.

The us vs. them thing gets whipped up by Neil Mitchell on 3AW every six months when he's run out of ways of generating phone calls from Mums, truckies, taxi drivers and the mentally ill. The way to solve it is not through attacks, it's through getting cyclist to behave better.

As a regular cyclist (300km's a week) and driver (can't drop two kids at child care on my roadie) it frustrates me to see cyclists rolling through red lights, no helmets, no lights, etc. and I usually toot cyclists I see doing this. If I get the chance I might ask the cyclist without a helmet if he has a brain worth protecting? I have a relative who treats brain injured in hospital and the end results are not worth it.

It has more effect if another cyclist tells these muppets though. Their behaviour makes it harder for the rest of us to get any respect or be treated safely.

Same goes for cyclists who roll up to cars already stopped at lights, then swarm around the car so that when the light goes green the driver has to navigate around cyclists in front, alongside, etc. Why do that?

Then again, when some driver swerves into my lane alongside me yabbering on his/her mobile I don't usually toot (there's that thing about road rage in Melbourne - it's common enough, just not worth dying for). The difference is that I don't think all drivers are w@ankers, but I would argue the most prevalent drivers' view of cyclists is not the same.

One thing I do is wave dramatically to a driver who I let ini but refuses to say thank you (pet hate = drivers who cut in but don't thank you). The EPA has a dob in a litterer (including cigarrette butts) thing on their website, you fill in details of the driver and they get sent an infringement notice. I wonder if there was anything for cyclists if that would work or just inflame things?

Very good and very important for new cyclists and pros alike. When I'm leaving a neighborhood area and need to make a turn across traffic (left turn for us in the U.S.), I will wave motorists behind me to go around, since I have to wait a lot longer to cross two or four lanes than a car does. 99% of the time they wave at me in thanks.

Making eye contact has - I believe - prevented potential accidents when I'm on the road. Sometimes I'll look at the driver, give them a precursory "thank you" wave AND a smile. The translation is: please don't pull out in front of me and hit me, and thanks for waiting an extra five seconds while I pass. I like to think that I'm slowly training the motorists with whom I share roads.

That's the best goddamned article I've ever read. Hopefully it'll make people realize that a happier riding experience begins with us, not with everyone else on the road. I tend to do exactly as you say in your article and tend to have about as many problems with drivers as you--that is to say, very little. Coincidence?

That should be "very few." Sorry, I'm an English major and bad grammar grates at my soul.