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Do you get surprised by cars sometimes while you ride, showing up where you didn’t expect them? Do you find yourself getting stuck in traffic patterns with aggressive or unpredictable drivers? Here’s a random tip, a short one… Here’s the way to keep this from happening: Move through traffic and not with traffic. Moving through traffic allows you to choose the traffic pattern that you’re in and stay out of other people’s blind spots; moving with traffic gets you stuck with whatever is there, often inattentive drivers or overly aggressive cabs and trucks. Moving through traffic puts you in control of your surroundings which is where you want to be.

Overly cautious riders put themselves in danger by going with the flow of traffic, staying stuck behind slow drivers or buses. Slow cars cause other drivers to become more aggressive in trying to get past – which puts motorcycles and scooters in jeopardy. You need to swiftly and smoothly move through traffic by understanding how the cars in front of you fit into the overall traffic pattern, and finding ways to safely get around them.

How do you do this? There’s no shortcut to learning to drive/ride well in the city. But what you want to go for is to be moving slightly faster than the overall traffic pattern. Accident data (for cars) indicates that accidents are most likely to happen with larger differences in speed. When one car is going 30mph and another 50, the difference in speed (and not the speed by itself) contributes most to the likelihood of accidents. So you don’t want to pass cars going much faster than them, but you do want to get by. Slipping by 5-10 mph faster than the flow of traffic will keep you in control of your surroundings, while leaving a margin for merging cars and unpredictable drivers in front of you. See you at the front of the line. Cheers!

Related posts:

1. Traffic Riding Mojo
2. Riding Skills: An Exit Strategy
3. The Problem with Trucks…
4. Top Four Gotcha Moves
5. The Safest Roads…