Somewhere with no cars in it

1Look

The far end of the lot

Nothing about that picture is impressive, and that is the point. Every riding programme that exists spends hours somewhere like it before anybody goes near a road.

2The idea

Three places, always in the same order

Strip away the country and the vehicle and every serious programme obeys one venue rule: classroom, then protected area, then real road. Never skipped, never reordered, never collapsed into two.
Motorcycle training: online course, then the range, then the street.
The UK cycle standard: traffic-free, then quiet roads, then complex ones.
Canada’s programme: off-road, then residential, then everything.

You have just finished the classroom half. This badge is the middle one, and there is no version of this where it gets skipped. Across every curriculum surveyed for this course, the protected space was not optional in a single one of them.

3The idea

How long the real programmes spend in a car park

Adult motorcycle basic training gives the range eight separate exercises and around four hours before anybody sees a street. The UK cycle standard gives its traffic-free level a two-hour minimum, one instructor to twelve riders. Nobody treats this stage as a warm-up for the interesting part.

There is a rule hiding in those ratios. One instructor to twelve in the playground, one to six on quiet roads, one to three on complex ones. Supervision is not a fixed cost. It rises as the venue gets more dangerous, which tells you exactly how the venue you are standing in is being rated.

4The idea

What the space has to be able to hold

The drills in this badge arrive with dimensions, and they are all small.
A corridor one to two feet wide and twenty to thirty feet long.
A ring about twenty-five feet by twenty-five.
A line of markers twelve feet apart to weave through.
A stop box three feet by five.

Put them together and the whole badge fits inside something about the size of a tennis court, flat, with a surface you can draw on with chalk. A space that cannot hold the corridor cannot hold this badge, and the corridor is the cheapest and most useful drill in the entire course.

5Decide

The nearest big flat space is a supermarket car park at four on a Saturday.

It is empty enough at the far endSame lot, eight in the morning, before it opensA quiet residential street with almost no traffic

6Look

The four things that spoil a good lot

Loose stuff, drain slots, a way in a car can use, and a slope. Walk the space once before you ride it and you will find all four inside a minute.

7Find them

Which of these make a space usable for this badge?

Tap the ones that count.

8Say it

The ask, which is most of the work

Whoever owns that tarmac is a person, and asking turns you from a problem into somebody they have met. The police-run teen programme this course borrows from makes a parent turning up part of the course itself.

9Do it

Before you leave this page