Badge Kids › Road Badge › Section 1 › Lesson 1.5

Ages 11-16 · Road Badge · Section 1

Riding when you are not right

Name the five states that make you unfit to ride tonight, and have a way home that does not involve riding already arranged with a named person.

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Step 1 of 10

1Watch

The last twenty minutes of a long day

Film

The last twenty minutes of a long day

A rider stands over a machine outside a friend's house late in the evening, keys and helmet in one hand, looking down the road; the frame freezes before they get on.

20 seconds

This is the most ordinary moment in the badge, and it is the one that decides more than the junctions do.

2The idea

Impairment has its own unit, next to cornering

The adult motorcycle course does not tuck this in at the end as a warning. It gives it a numbered unit of its own called Rider Impairments, in the same list as the braking and the turning, and it examines you on it.

That is the framing we are using too. Being unfit to ride tonight is not a moral event. It is a condition of the rider, exactly the same kind of thing as a soft brake lever is a condition of the machine, and you deal with it the same unbothered way.

3Look

Five conditions

Five simple icon cards in a row: a rider yawning, a rider with a hand on their stomach, a rider mid-argument with a jaw set, a rider looking at a watch and moving fast, and a hand holding an unlabelled glass. — Five conditions

None of those five are permanent and none of them are about who you are. Every one of them is over by tomorrow.

4The idea

The five, and what each one takes off you

Tired — the deciding half of every stop gets longer.
Ill or hurt — your hands and your balance are not the ones you practised with.
Upset or angry — the gap from the last lesson gets wider.
In a rush — you spend the margins you built on purpose.
Anything you have taken that changes how you think.

Each one of those makes you slower at the exact job the road is about to give you. Not clumsier, not worse as a person. Slower at deciding, which the last lesson showed you comes out as metres of road.

5Decide

You have been up since five, it is dark, and it is twenty minutes home on the machine.

Yes, and notice what it cost. One message, one slightly annoying morning, and the machine is still there. The training standard writes this as one of the two correct answers to its first question — able to ride independently, or require assistance. Asking is inside the standard, not outside it.

Both of those keep you on the machine, which is the part that changed. A quieter route does not give you back reaction time, and a break by the kerb does not fix being awake since five. The thing to change tonight is the rider, and the only way to change the rider is to stop being one for a few hours.

Pick one to carry on.

6The idea

The one nobody says out loud

In one hospital series of e-bike and scooter riders, about one in five tested positive for alcohol, and those riders had worse brain injuries and had worn helmets less. Nationally, alcohol was involved in thirty-four per cent of fatal pedalcyclist crashes in 2020 — on one side or the other.

Read the last part of that again: on one side or the other. Some of those were the driver. So this is two rules, not one. Do not ride it yourself, and ride the late evening on the assumption that somebody out there is not right either.

7Build it

Four ways home

Interactive

Four ways home

Build your own list. Pick from walk it, push it, lock it and come back, ask a named adult, ask a named friend, public transport, and stay put and wait it out. The card asks you which two you would actually use at eleven at night, and who the named person is.

The point is having two you would genuinely use, not seven you would not.

8Find them

Which of these mean you are not riding it tonight?

Tap the ones that count.

Find all 4.

9Say it

The ask, which is the whole skill

Say it out loud, in your normal voice

“I'm not riding it back tonight. Can you come and get me?”

That sentence is much easier at eleven at night if it has been said once at four in the afternoon, in a kitchen, with nobody upset. Say it now so it is not new later.

10Do it

Before you leave this page

Work out tonight your two ways home that do not involve riding, and the one person you would ring. Then go and tell that person they are the one, and check they are happy to be. Two minutes, and it never has to be invented at eleven at night.

Tick it when you have done it.

Lesson done.

Not right is not a character flaw, it is a condition. It has an expiry date and it has a way home.

Take the Section check

Section 1 · Fit to Ride

1.1Fit to ride, before you touch the machine 1.2The helmet 1.3The phone, the music and your ears 1.4Why this is harder at fourteen than at forty 1.5Riding when you are not right ★Section check

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