Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
hint of colour that indicates a diesel spill, metal manhole covers slicked with rain or a
patch of damp autumnal leaves lying in a shady corner.
The point is that a car just sits there. You don't get out of a car and have it fall over.
(I'm told this even applies to three-wheelers.) Cars are, essentially, stable. Get off a bike
and forget to put its side-stand down and the bugger will fall over with a loud and prob-
ably surprisingly expensive clunk. The same applies when you're underway. The gyro-
scopic effect of the wheels means that once you're going at even extremely modest speeds
you're kind of dynamically balanced, but it's still all about equilibrium, about poise.
Compared to driving a car, riding a bike feels like halfway to flying. There's suddenly
a third dimension involved. Cars basically stay flat. They'll dive under braking, squat un-
der acceleration and roll in a corner (being in a Citroën 2CV taking an average corner
at, oh, twenty miles an hour is an extreme ride all by itself if you're not prepared for it),
but the movements are relatively mild. On a bike, with a little experience and confidence,
you find yourself leaning all over the place; you, the bike, and the whole tipped world
suddenly take on angles you'll never see in a car unless you are, technically, crashing.
All of which is entirely fine, dandy and fun as long as there's lots of nice sticky grip
between your one powered wheel and the road surface, but which brings on instantaneous
gut-freezing fear the nanosecond you feel that grip start to go and the wheel - and the
rear of the bike, and with it
your
rear - start to slip. I've had a few moments on the three
bikes I've owned, a couple of micro-skids which I've managed, probably more through
good luck than inherent skill, to control, but it's arguably those instants of fear, and the
associated gut-level, bone-level appreciation of the dynamics of the balancing forces of
grip, power and the relationship between the bike and the road that help make you a bet-
ter, safer rider in future and to some extent a better road user in general.
Heading across the Forth Road Bridge, I take the main road into Edinburgh rather
than the signposted route to the city bypass. This avoids the ludicrous A8000, a stretch
of ordinary two-way road between the motorway and the bridge that should have been
upgraded at least to dual-carriageway standard 40 years ago when the bridge was built. A
bit of jiggery-pokery on some quiet wee roads and I end up on the bypass later anyway.
You have more choices on a bike, because even if you do end up in a traffic jam, you
can thread your way through towards the front by taking the narrow channel between two
lanes of cars, or just overtake a single lane. Routes that you might avoid in a car because
you know there's going to be stationary traffic ahead you'll happily tackle in a bike be-
cause the jam will only slow you down a bit.
It's a hot old day, and so there are a few Random Indicator Events. These are when
people leave their indicator lights flashing long after the manoeuvre they were warning
people of has been completed, so that you find cars and vans sitting in any given lane
with either set of indicators blinking merrily away. You see a lot more of this sort of thing
