Introduction

The Joys of Cycling

Cycling is great sport. Most Americans think of it as a good way to exercise, preferably by riding along bike paths at 10 miles an hour. But not many do it regularly, because cycling has a bad reputation. People think of it as being hard work—riding an uncomfortable and complicated machine on unsuitable roads in dangerous traffic where they don’t belong and aren’t wanted. These two opinions explain the American bicycling scene: there are many bicycle owners but far fewer active cyclists. Too many people have never felt the real pleasures of cycling because they haven’t learned the easy, safe, and efficient way to cycle.

Cycling is real travel. It is the ability to go where you want with the pleasure, in both mind and body, of knowing that you have powered yourself to your destination. There is nothing like the satisfaction of having gotten yourself to where you want to go, a satisfaction amplified by moderate fatigue.

Cycling is also really good exercise, but not if your limit yourself to bike paths at 10 miles per hour. Once you learn proper pedaling technique, you will find yourself rolling at 15, 20, or even 25 miles per hour, enjoying the feeling of smoothly coordinated muscles powering you along as your body expresses its joy in its own proper functioning. Cycling is the easiest form of exercise, once you have learned the skill; it is also the hardest, for you can produce more power for longer periods on a bicycle than in any other sport. Many people think of exercise as a means of achieving aerobic fitness. For enthusiastic cyclists, as you will learn, aerobic fitness is merely the first stage in developing one’s physical abilities. Even the century ride, 100 miles in a day, which is an ordinary part of club cycling, requires more than aerobic fitness. Many cyclists enjoy doing far more.

The bicycle is admirably designed to enable cyclists to work comfortably and efficiently. Once you have a bicycle of proper size and have adjusted it to suit your build and cycling style, you will realize that it is much more comfortable than uncomfortable and that any further changes would make it harder to use. The gearing system may seem complicated at first, but once you understand its principles, you will realize how much it eases your riding and raises your speed. A well-built bicycle responds to your every move, and in steering it seems to respond to your every thought. It will come to feel like a part of you, enabling you to cover miles, climb hills, and fly down descents with a power you have never before possessed. Oh yes, bicycles do need frequent adjustments, and flat tires are regrettably common, but once you learn how each part works and the easiest way to fix it, you will rarely be stopped for long. And bicycle repairs are mostly accomplished with simple tools. Even people with no mechanical experience can feel a real sense of accomplishment as they make their bicycles work better than ever.

Most people start by believing that cycling in traffic is dangerous and threatening and that they don’t belong there. Heavy traffic is not one of the joys of life, but once you learn how to ride in traffic, you will realize that you are a partner in a well-ordered dance, with drivers doing their part to achieve a safe trip home. Then traffic ceases to be a mysterious threat and becomes instead just one of the conditions that you can handle with reasonable safety.

Once you can ride comfortably and efficiently, without worrying about traffic, on a machine that you trust, you are ready to experience the full joys of cycling. Cycling is the pleasure of seeing round the next bend in the road, of smelling the flowers by the roadside and hearing the birds sing, of feeling at one with nature. Cycling is the skill and thrill of following a steep and winding descent between towering redwood trees, with a mountain torrent foaming beside the road. Cycling is observing the fruit orchards and dairy cattle of farming communities, cottages beside the road, reed-fringed ponds, and village squares. Cycling is the surprise of seeing the gardens and window boxes of houses in your own town that you had never noticed before. Cycling is cresting the pass in a high mountain range, seeing far ahead and knowing that there are miles of easy descent before you reach the plains. Cycling is the snug tent or fashionable hotel halfway across the world, and the glory of sunrise with a new day and new miles to travel. Cycling is doing your shopping without the hassle of parking a car or waiting for a bus. Cycling is the freedom of not having to wait until the car is available or not having to get someone to drive you. Cycling is also the hard pull into a howling gale that hurls water in your face and pains your fingers as they grip the bars. But then cycling is also the comradeship of the road, the joy of traveling with friends and lovers through the springtime of the world, and the steadfastness of comrades making their long way home as the sun lowers to the horizon. And cycling is the telling and retelling of trips and adventures, of achievements and disasters, of far places and different people, as clubmates gather around tables laden with all the food that hungry cyclists need.

Competent Cycling versus Popular Cycling

The joys of cycling ought to be easily attained; cycling done well is easy, and even easy to learn. However, you may find that the traffic cycling taught in this book is not what you have been taught, either in bike-safety classes or just by growing up in America. In this book, you are being taught to drive your bicycle according to the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles. That is the way that works; it works for drivers of motor vehicles and it works for drivers of nonmotorized vehicles such as buggies and bicycles.

But in America, the home of the car, since sometime about the 1930s, all the cyclists have been considered to be children. So they were treated as children who were unable to obey the rules of the road, but had to ride at the edge of the road, or on the sidewalk, so they wouldn’t get run over by the cars. They were told to be afraid of riding in traffic.

That suited the motorists just fine, so nobody questioned it except the few adult cyclists who knew proper cycling but had no political power. Several generations of Americans grew up afraid of cycling in traffic as normal drivers do. The motorist-dominated institutions wrote laws that treated cyclists as children, and then designed and built bikeways designed for childish operation. Then, when the nation decided that it needed a lot more bicycle transportation, it was obvious that only childish cycling on bikeways was sufficiently popular to persuade so many motorists to cycle instead.

That is why what you are learning in this book does not agree with the nation’s view of and policy for cycling. American society and government deliberately discourage safe and competent cycling so they can have a program of incompetent, childish, and fearful cycling on bikeways. Motorists like that program because they believe that it makes motoring more convenient. Those opposed to motoring like that program because they believe that it will cause many motorists to switch to bicycle transportation. The government’s program for bicycle transportation is based on falsehood. It uses the fear of same-direction motor traffic and the feeling of trespassing on roads that are owned by cars, emotions ingrained into most Americans, to gain political acceptance for its program of cycling in the childish manner using bikeways where possible.

Cycling in any reasonable way requires interacting with motor traffic; nothing the government has been able to do eliminates that need, although government pretends that its bikeways make cycling safe for unskilled beginners. Any typical American who wishes to safely enjoy cycling has to work to overcome the emotions produced by these political, social, and legal forces, emotions that make such learning difficult, or even seem impossible. The American who learns lawful, competent cycling has attained a level of safety and competence that far exceeds the socially desired inferiority cycling and has rightly earned a status of which to be proud. However, this is not an elite status, for almost anyone can learn the skill; it is just that Americans boast of incompetent cycling as the saving of the world. Doesn’t seem to make sense, does it? Well, you who wish to learn have to start out by realizing that practically anything done by government about bicycle transportation is driven by superstition contrary to traffic-engineering knowledge.

You cannot be expected to believe such an incredible accusation simply because I say so. Therefore, part of the instruction in this book has to go beyond matters of cycling into the methods by which traffic-engineering knowledge was perverted into a method for opposing safe and lawful cycling. Traffic-engineering knowledge says that cyclists should act as drivers of vehicles, which is what one half of traffic law says (the other half says they must not), and the cyclist who realizes that he is doing so much better than the rest of the population because he follows traffic-engineering knowledge has realized that the government’s bicycle program is based on emotion and superstition for purposes that exclude the welfare of cyclists.

Dare to learn safe and useful cycling for the joys that it provides. Cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles.

How to Use This Book

Effective Cycling is a book for all cyclists, from beginners to experts. It contains all the information I think is necessary for using a bicycle every day, under all conditions, for whatever purpose you desire. However, you won’t need all this information when you start, and you cannot learn it all in one reading. Besides, different people need the information in different sequences, because they start with different experiences and have different cycling interests. (Of course, if you are reading this book as part of a course, your instructor will assign readings to suit the instructional sequence.) Therefore, don’t sit down to read this book straight through from beginning to end. It is too much to learn at one time, and to learn well, you will need to practice each activity as you read about it. So start by looking up the subjects that you feel you need to know first. Read about one, then get the necessary equipment and practice the required skills. Then go on to another subject.

You may already have a bicycle that seems satisfactory and that you plan to use, at least for learning, in which case you don’t need to learn about bicycle selection now. Read chapter 1, “Mechanical Safety and Operational Inspection,” and decide what you need to do to put your bike in reasonable operating condition. Particularly in parts I and II, don’t try to learn all the subjects at once. The book is meant more as a reference guide than as an instructional sequence, and it doesn’t matter where you start. When you need to do something, read about it and learn the principles. Then put them into practice.

Learning to ride a bicycle well, or to ride well in traffic, seems to require knowing a lot of things all at once just to start. But by progressing from one principle to the next, you can manage well enough, even if there is a lot you don’t know. Start reading chapter 22, “Basic Skills: Posture, Pedaling Technique, and Maneuvers.” If you already know how to do these things, consider it review material until you reach something you don’t know. Then go out and practice these skills in an empty parking lot, in a park, or on a road with infrequent, slow traffic. Once you can control your bike, read chapter 26, “Basic Principles of Traffic Cycling.” Learn the five basic traffic principles; you probably know some of them already, although maybe not in these words. Then you can start riding on streets with low-volume, low-speed traffic. If you follow the five principles, you are unlikely to get yourself into serious traffic trouble on such streets.

You will now be able to travel about by bicycle on easy-traffic streets, which gives you the opportunity to learn real cycling. Until you can travel about to some extent, you cannot get enough practice to improve your skills or get to places where you can develop these new skills. As far as traffic cycling is concerned, read chapter 27, “The Why and Wherefore of Traffic Law,” and chapter 29, “Where to Ride on the Roadway.” As you read more, ride to places that have the conditions discussed and practice the principles you have learned. If the roads you have to ride to leave your home have conditions that are discussed later in the book, read those sections first. You need that information now, but don’t forget to return to the earlier material and then to review the later material. Learning is a process of building from fundamentals to advanced knowledge. In this way, you should learn all of part IV, apart from riding at night, or in the rain, or in cold winters until you need these skills.

Even at this level, cycling shouldn’t be all study and practice. You may have to make repairs to keep going; you may want to improve your bicycle; and you should be having fun and enjoying your better physical condition. Suppose your derailleur doesn’t work easily, and in any case you think that your gears are not correctly chosen. Then read about derailleurs and proper gear selection, so you have the necessary information for changing your gearing system. Suppose that you want to go cycling with other people. Then read chapter 38, “Club Cycling,” and learn what to do on your first club ride. That experience may make you want to go faster and further, if only to stay with the leaders. Then read chapter 24, “Keeping Your Body Going.”

So ride frequently, enlarging your horizons and meeting new conditions and new people. As you find you want or need to learn more, return to Effective Cycling. You will go a long way in cycling before you need a book that has more details on some part of cycling.