Road Badge › Fit to Ride › Your phone, music and ears

A teenage rider stopped at the top of a hill, one earbud out, phone face down in a jacket pocket.

Your phone, music and ears

Phone away, ears open, before you move.

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Step 1 of 10 All lessons

1The buzz at the top of the hill

A boy on a bike on a quiet suburban street, helmet on and the strap fastened, both hands on the bars, his eyes dropped to the phone in his pocket instead of the road. — One hand off the bars, a driveway ahead.

You are freewheeling down a road you know, both hands on the bars. Your phone buzzes in your pocket. One hand comes off to reach for it, and the first driveway is coming up.

Nothing about the rider has changed. What changed is that everything they know about driveways is still in their head and none of it is being used, because their attention went into a pocket.

All lessons

2The 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. A state safe-routes-to-school program says what the cost is: distractions, such as phones, music and fatigue, delay your response time.

Look at what is on that list next to 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 that.

3Response time is really distance

A stop has two parts. The first is the ground you cover between seeing the problem and your hands actually squeezing. The second is the ground you cover with the brakes on. Only the second one is about brakes at all.

Everything on the distraction list makes the first part longer, and the machine keeps traveling the whole time. That is why a delayed response is not an abstract thing. It comes out of the far end as feet of road, added on before the brakes have done anything.

4Watch the first bar grow

A rider approaching a marked crossing, with two bars underneath: the ground covered deciding, and the ground covered braking. Toggle a message arriving, one earbud, both earbuds, and a tired rider. The braking bar never moves. The deciding bar does, and the crossing stays where it is.

Turn them on one at a time, then all together, and watch where the front wheel ends up relative to the crossing.

5Your phone buzzes on a road you know well.

Pick one.

Right, and the reason is the first bar. The phone costs you the deciding half of every stop, on a road where you have already quietly decided nothing is going to happen. If it matters, it still matters in four minutes, and it will matter from a curb with both feet down.

Low and quick is the version everybody thinks is safe. Your eyes are still off the road and your response is still slower, on exactly the kind of familiar street where riders stop looking for driveways. The message is not the problem. The feet are.

6Ears are not a spare 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 could have seen, and a rider with both ears full has traded that away for a playlist.

The household rule paediatricians recommend to families is short: no earbuds, and no riding in traffic or at night. You can have the music at both ends of the ride. The middle of it is the part where your ears are doing a job.

7The line for the buzz in your pocket

Say it out loud, in your normal voice

It can wait until I have both feet down.

Use it the first time the phone goes on your next ride. Having the sentence ready turns it into something you do rather than something you decide, and decisions taken in traffic are the expensive kind.

8Which of these delay your response?

Pick every one that is right, then press Check.

Find all 4.

All four take your attention off the road. That is the cost, every time.

Two of those are equipment, not attention. A bell and a helmet do not slow you down.

9Three places a phone can live

A phone clipped to a handlebar mount, a phone lying on a folded jacket and a phone in a backpack pocket. Nobody is in this picture. — Three places a phone can live on a ride.

A handlebar mount. A folded jacket on the rack. A zipped pocket in a backpack.

Two of those are away. The third one is not away, it is just parked in front of you, which is the whole trick of it.

10Before you leave this page

Put the phone where you cannot reach it.

Go to your machine and decide where the phone actually lives while you ride — a zipped pocket or a closed bag, somewhere you cannot get at 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.