Ready Kids › Road Badge › Badge 6 › Lesson 6.2
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Distraction
Set the route and the music before the wheels move, ride with the phone away and your ears open, and stop with both feet down before you touch it.
1Watch
One hand, one message
One hand, one message
A rider holds the bars with one hand and lifts a phone with the other, eyes down on the screen, while a driveway with a car nosing out of it comes up on the right; the frame freezes with the rider's eyes still on the phone.
20 secondsThe rider in that shot is a competent rider. Everything they learned in Badge 4 about driveways is still in their head. None of it is being used.
2The idea
The instruction, in the words it is written in
The e-bike safety course written for adults gives it as one line with no argument attached: do not ride when impaired or distracted, and put away your phone and earbuds. Massachusetts Safe Routes to School says what the cost is: distractions, such as phones, music and fatigue, delay your response time.
Notice what is on that list beside the phone. Music counts. Being tired counts. It is not a rule about screens, it is a rule about how much of you is available for the road, and there is more than one way to spend it.
3The idea
Response time is not time, it is distance
You already know the shape of this from Badge 1. A stop has two parts: the ground you cover while you are still deciding, and the ground you cover once the brakes are on. Only the second part is about brakes.
Everything on that distraction list makes the first part longer, and the machine keeps travelling the whole time. That is why a delayed response is not an abstract thing. It comes out as metres of road, added to the stopping distance you measured yourself with cones.
4Your turn
Watch the first bar grow
The deciding bar
The stopping-distance diagram from Badge 3, with its two bars: deciding and braking. Toggle a message arriving, one earbud in, both earbuds in, and a tired rider. The braking bar never moves. The deciding bar does, and the crossing at the end of the road stays where it is.
Turn them on one at a time, then turn them all on together, and watch where the front wheel ends up relative to the crossing.
5The idea
Ears are not a bonus sense on a road
A car coming up behind you, a driver braking hard, somebody shouting, a dog off a lead. Most of those reach you as sound several seconds before they reach you as anything you can see, and a rider with both ears full has given that away for a playlist.
The household rules that paediatricians recommend to families put it plainly: no earbuds, and no riding in traffic or at night. You can have the music at either end of the ride. The middle of it is the part where your ears are doing a job.
6Decide
Your phone buzzes twice in your pocket, halfway down a road you know well.
Pick one to carry on.
7The idea
What to do instead, which takes about ten seconds
Set it before the wheels move. Route in, music chosen or off, phone away in a pocket or a bag rather than in your hand or your lap. Anything you would want to change mid-ride, change now.
And if you genuinely have to answer something, the answer is not one-handed. Pull off the road properly, put both feet down, stop the machine, then deal with it. Stopping costs you thirty seconds. The other version costs you the first half of every stop for the rest of the ride.
8Say it
The line for the buzz in your pocket
Say it out loud, in your normal voice
“It can wait until I have both feet down.”
Say it once on your next ride, the first time the phone goes. Having a sentence ready turns it into a thing you do rather than a thing you decide, and decisions in traffic are the expensive kind.
9Find them
Which of these delay your response time?
Tap the ones that count.
Find all 4.
10Do it
Before you leave this page
Go to your machine and work out where the phone actually lives while you ride. A zipped pocket, a bag, anywhere you cannot reach it one-handed. Put it there now, and take the earbuds out of whichever pocket they live in so you do not find them on the way.
Tick it when you have done it.
Lesson done.
Phone away. Earbuds out. Distraction delays your response time, and response time is ground you have already covered.
Next lesson: Passengers