Stay Safe on Your Bike Around Cars and Potholes

Are you biking much this summer? I know, it's either been raining, too cold, too hot, or too windy. But if you've been out, have you noticed the minefield of potholes this year? I seem to be dodging them on every street. If you've ridden down Watertown Plank Road, particularly going east, you've experienced the ka-thunk ka-thunk firsthand. And I'm sure you are familiar with the potholes in your own areas of town.

My boyfriend and I are training for the annual bike ride across Iowa in July so we're putting in a lot of 20- and 50-mile rides. I've come to know the road conditions on all our routes and have become a bit of an expert at negotiating gnarly surfaces while staying out of the way of vehicles.

For most residents on an occasional bike ride, you can't anticipate potholes or other obstacles as readily and that creates a hazard to both yourself and vehicle drivers. A bike weaving around a pothole is similar to a child darting out into the street. Both behaviors are unexpected from the point of view of the vehicle driver.

My advice for handling this is to give yourself enough time and information to make a smart decision about merging into a traffic lane. The enormous challenge with this is that you don't know you need to avoid a pothole until it's almost too late! The situation rarely gives you time to swivel your head and think, "Shall I, or shall I not, merge? What's the velocity of the car, the velocity of my bike, and the distance between me and the pothole?"

As a result, you will do yourself a favor if you go buy a mirror for your helmet or bike. You can buy a great little helmet mirror for $20 and spend even less on a handlebar-mounted one. With a mirror, you can learn to monitor traffic behind you, similar to how the drivers ed instructor taught you to use the rear view mirror in the car.

You should always know what's behind you. Always. Then when you find yourself staring down at a pothole, you can either merge left because you know how much space you have, you can weave right, or you can head straight through the hole, as the situation requires.

So this year, practice “pothole safety” on our streets. Learn to use a mirror and recognize that vehicle drivers cannot read your mind. Most of us are lucky enough to ride bikes and drive cars as well, and when we're behind the wheel, we hope our neighbors on bikes will be as safe as possible.