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AG: Make some noise
On 11/16/2014 10:23 AM, Andrew Chaplin wrote:
Joy Beeson wrote in : One day while strolling down the center of a recreationway without a thought in my head, I was startled by the whirr of off-road tires to my right: two bike riders were overtaking me. I was only mildly startled, so it was only mildly rude -- but suppose a squirrel in the trees to my right had done something cute and I had swerved in that direction to look? Both riders could have ended up in the hospital or, with only a little bad luck, the morgue. Before you overtake someone, MAKE SOME NOISE. "Hi!" is popular for this purpose when overtaking another bicycle on the road. When overtaking a pedestrian on a recreationway, I like to give a little more information. After experimenting with many phrases, I settled on "I am on your left". This usually elicits a smile and a step to the right. Cyclists who train in a pack often say "left!" or "on your left!" when overtaking. If you address either remark to a random stranger, he will jump to his left. By the way, *always* overtake on the left, unless you are across the pond or in the 5-Boro Bike Tour. On that tour, the cry when overtaking was "Keep Straight!" (It would have been a *much* more pleasant ride if they had told us that the front was being motor-paced to a maximum speed of six miles per hour. For one thing, I'd have worn walking shoes.) If you're on foot, cyclists should overtake you on your right and they should sound a bell or other warning close enough that you should hear it but far enough away that they will still have time to evade should you move to the right. Multiuse pathways are like rural roads, and the watchword should be that wheeled traffic keeps right and foot traffic keep left. When suburds without sidewalks were in vogue in the '50s and '60s, the Ontario Ministry of Transport ran public service ads on TV exhorting us, "Where there are no sidewalks, walk on the left facing traffic." I would propose that modus vivendi be observed on multi-use paths. I agree in theory; but I'm sure it would never work in practice. For whatever reason, American pedestrians tend to stay to the right on walking facilities, passing opposite direction walkers left shoulder to left shoulder. It's not 100%, but it's the strong trend, even in places like indoor shopping malls. And that same scheme is socially enforced on the local multi-user paths. I don't think signs or rules are likely to succeed in changing it. I remember (somewhere out in the central U.S.) encountering a MUP that had signs telling cyclists to ride on the left, and walkers to keep right! I suppose the motivation was the same - let the peds see the oncoming cyclists - but that was even worse. We don't need to be training any more cyclists to ride on the left side of roads. Unfortunately, the root problem is that bikes and pedestrians don't mix very well. Bikes actually mix much better with motor vehicles. This is why I almost always prefer riding on roads, not MUPs. -- - Frank Krygowski |
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