Ready Kids › Road Badge › Badge 5 › Lesson 5.4
All courses›Road Badge›Badge 5
The people on it
Pass with a few feet of room, pull right off the surface when you stop, and ride with friends without taking the whole path.
1Look
Four riders and one family
The whole width
Four riders spread across the full width of a shared path talking to each other, with a family walking towards them and nowhere obvious to go.
Nobody in that picture is doing anything dramatic. They are just having a conversation, and between them they have taken every foot of the surface anybody else could use.
2The idea
A few feet, not a handlebar's width
The guidance asks for a comfortable space of a few feet when you pass. Not a gap you would fit through. A gap you would still fit through if the person moved half a step at the exact moment you arrived, which is a thing people do constantly and without warning.
Nobody walks a straight line. Walkers drift, runners change their mind about which side, people turn to answer somebody behind them. The room you leave is what covers all of that, and it is cheap, because it costs you about a metre of path.
3The idea
When you stop, get off the path
Move off the pathway when stopping. Every time, whether you are stopping for a message, a drink, a mechanical, a photo or a conversation. A stopped rider on the surface is a fixed object that everybody else has to solve while moving.
Off means genuinely off — you and the machine both, clear of the surface, out of the line people ride. A machine leaning half onto the path is the same obstacle as a machine parked across it, and the person who finds it may be coming round a bend.
4Say it
The line for the friend who stops dead in front of you
Say it out loud, in your normal voice, not shouted
“Off the path first. Then we talk.”
You will need it the first time a group of you stops to look at something. Somebody has to say it, and it goes better as a flat six words than as an argument after somebody has had to swerve.
5The idea
Riding with your friends on it
The rule for a group is short: when travelling side by side, stay on the right half of the path. Two of you, on your own half, leaving the other half of the surface for everybody who is not in your group.
A group is the one situation where nobody feels responsible for the width. Everyone assumes somebody at the front is watching. Where the path narrows, or anybody is coming the other way, you go single file, and the person at the back is usually the one who has to call it.
6Decide
Three of you are riding the path together and a runner appears ahead coming your way.
Pick one to carry on.
7Look
Two stops
On and off
The same rider photographed twice at the same spot: once stopped on the path surface looking at a phone, once standing with the machine on the grass a couple of metres clear of the edge.
Both of those riders would say they had pulled over. Only one of them has actually left the surface that other people are moving along.
8Find them
Which of these are proper stops?
Tap the ones that count.
Find all 4.
9Build it
Put the group somewhere
Four of you on one path
Four riders you can drag into formation on a path that narrows, widens and bends. Walkers and riders come the other way. The card marks every point where somebody coming the other way had no half of the path left to use.
Try it once with everybody spread out and once with two and two. Then try the narrow section, which is where every arrangement stops working.
10Do it
Before you leave this page
Go to the place on your usual path where you always stop – the bench, the bridge, the top of the hill. Walk your machine to where you actually stop, then find the nearest spot that is properly off the surface, and stand in it. That is the new one.
Tick it when you have done it.
Lesson done.
A few feet when you pass. Off the path when you stop. Two abreast stays on the right half.
Next lesson: Who gets hurt