I got a ping­back from Adrian Trenholm who has writ­ten a great piece, 10 tips for safe cyc­ling, partly inspired by my recent acci­dent. He lists

1. Wear a helmet.
2. Know the rules of the road and stick to them
3. Con­cen­trate.

and more, each with a good explan­a­tion why. I’d like to add a couple more points:

Look after your bike. In the past I have found that a com­bin­a­tion of worn brake blocks, stretched cables, and wet rims meant that I sud­denly found noth­ing was going to slow me down!

Don’t run red lights. This is really part of Adrian’s num­ber two item, but I sus­pect the single most annoy­ing thing cyc­lists do to city motor­ists is ignore red lights. Or rather, not ignore them, but go through them any­way. I know it annoys me when I’m driv­ing, and I never do it when I’m cyc­ling. Just remem­ber that those drivers you’ve just left at the lights will be passing you in a minute. Only now they’re annoyed with you. When you need to swerve to avoid that pothole, they’ll be much less inclined to give you the room you need.

Adrian also has a great dis­cus­sion, “Never, ever get into a fight with a ‘bike-hater.’” in the same post. I couldn’t agree more. I some­times shock myself when I react badly to a car ‘buzz­ing’ me, or to a beeped horn because someone thinks I shouldn’t be on the road. It’s easy to want to be aggress­ive when you are ‘bul­lied’ by a car, but as Adrian says…

Let’s be clear about this: you might be in the right, but your ant­ag­on­ist has over a ton of metal at his dis­posal. When a cyc­list mixes it up with a motor­ist, the cyc­list will always lose. Just let the motor­ist go.

Don’t let us put you off though. Cyc­ling to and from work is a great way to get fit. My trip home takes pretty much the same time as pub­lic trans­port, so I’m not tak­ing more time out of my day. Because it serves a pur­pose (get­ting me home) it’s much easier to stick with it than, say, going to the gym. When I had a gym mem­ber­ship it was easy to say to myself “I’ll leave it tonight and go tomor­row… or next week”.

Give it a try. Get that bike out of the shed and try rid­ing to work a couple of days a week.

In other news, I had another acci­dent on my bike yes­ter­day. On my way home from work, a truck pulled out on me whilst on a round­about (here is a great intro­duc­tion to round­abouts for Amer­ic­ans). This ought not to hap­pen as I had right of way, but I can only assume that either the truck driver didn’t see me, or that he assumed that I was going slowly. As a res­ult, he pulled out on me; slowly because it was a big truck; and I had to swerve round him. Unfor­tu­nately he was too slow for me to get com­pletely round the back of him. With a 4 or 6 inch high kerb approach­ing, I had to turn the bike and slide it and thus me along the floor to stop.

I hit the floor hard and slid to a stop. As I got up a chap pulled my bike off the road and star­ted ask­ing if I was OK. A couple of other people kindly stopped to check too. The truck driver was, of course, long gone. My arm was badly grazed and my ribs hurt. After a couple of deep breaths, I figured they weren’t broken. Luck­ily too, my bike wasn’t dam­aged, though my shorts now have a hole, and the screen on my mobile phone is cracked and it only shows about a third of the display.

So, after thank­ing the people who had stopped, I got back on my bike and cycled the rest of the way home — I had about another 9 miles to go. By the time I got home, my ribs were hurt­ing a lot and I knew I would be off my bike again for at least a few days. That’s a real shame too as I’d just got back into doing a full 70 miles a week.

After some more hassle I won’t go into right now, Jan gave me a lift up to our local A&E depart­ment. It was busy and I ended up wait­ing for two and a half hours to see a doc­tor. He listened to my chest and decided noth­ing was broken or even cracked and that I didn’t need an x-ray. I waited another half hour to get a dress­ing on my arm and then made my way home.

I’ve had to have the day off work today, it’s quite pain­ful to move around. When I sit or stand still, it feels fine. But as soon as I move the pain kicks in. I’ll prob­ably be off work tomor­row too.