I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I don’t remember my driving instructor telling me anything about how to manage bikes. They may have done, but it clearly didn’t stick. I learned a lot more from training as a Bikeability instructor some 10 years later.
Went out for a road ride yesterday, which is a rarity for me. Dartmoor is lovely, but has a lot of sudden hills, blind bends and indeterminate width roads… Can lead to difficult interactions with road users. I decided to go at it with a positive mental attitude, and make a big effort to communicate with others (particularly cars) what I intended to do, and what I expected from them.
I made a special effort to look behind and make eye contact when I could hear a car approaching, and took primary position when I felt it was not safe for cars to pass. Vast majority of cars respected this and hung back. As soon as I could see it was safe for them to pass (and sat on the bike I could see a lot further than a lot of car drivers) I would go to secondary position, look behind again and then beckon then to pass.
The result? Lots of nice wide overtaking and waves of thanks- lots of waves.
Of course it’s not possible to draw definitive conclusions from a very specific set of conditions (Devon roads on a Wednesday afternoon) and it probably wouldn’t work as well on a busy commute, but it did appear n this instance that drivers appreciated me taking charge of my situation on the road, and communicating clearly my intentions to look after both our interests.
