Ready Kids › Road Badge › Badge 4 › Lesson 4.3
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Junctions and driveways
Treat every junction and driveway as a place a vehicle can cross your line, and make a left turn you can complete one move at a time.
1Watch
The car that is about to turn
The car that is about to turn
A rider comes down a straight suburban street towards a junction where a car is waiting to turn across their path; the driver is looking in the rider's direction, and the frame freezes as the car's front wheels begin to move.
20 secondsThe driver is looking straight at the rider in that shot. Hold on to that, because it is the part that catches people.
2The idea
Where the crashes with cars happen
In one hospital series of e-bike and scooter crashes, about half were collisions with a vehicle. That is the biggest single category in the whole set, and it is not spread evenly along the road.
It happens where two paths cross. The federal list of crash-producing situations is a list of exactly those places: driveways, riding against the traffic, riding next to parked cars, and not obeying the traffic controls at junctions. A junction is not a hazard because it is busy. It is a hazard because it is a crossing.
3The idea
The one that turns across you
The classic is a driver crossing your line rather than hitting you from behind: turning left across you from the other side, or turning right into a driveway from just in front of you. In both, the driver is judging a gap.
They are judging it against how fast a bicycle closes on them, because that is the judgement they have made all their driving lives. Nothing about the machine tells them otherwise from a hundred metres away. You close the gap faster than the picture in their head says you will.
4Your turn
Where the lines cross
Two hundred metres
An aerial view of two hundred metres of a residential street you could be riding. Tap every place a car could cross your line. The card then shows all of them, including the ones nobody taps: the alley, the parking lot exit, the driveway behind the hedge.
Most riders find about half. The half people miss is mostly driveways, which is the half that is hardest to see into.
5The idea
The left turn is the one to plan
There are two ways to turn left. The vehicular left: move across into the turning position with the traffic and turn like a car. The two-stage or box left: ride straight through the junction, stop at the far corner, turn the machine ninety degrees and go on the next green as if you were going straight on.
The two-stage version never asks you to cross a lane of moving traffic. Which one belongs on which road is a judgement, and it is one to make with whoever is teaching you to ride the route. On a big fast road there is a third answer: get off and cross it as a pedestrian.
6Decide
You want to turn left at a four-way, and there is traffic behind you.
Pick one to carry on.
7The idea
Slow enough to be wrong about
The countermeasures at a junction are dull and they work: get your speed down before it, put yourself where you can be seen from every arm of it, and do one thing at a time so that what you are doing is obvious the whole way through.
Speed is what turns a mistake into a crash here. You are closing on drivers, walkers and other riders faster than any of them expects a bicycle to close, so the room they leave you is sized for something slower. Arriving slower gives everybody, including you, time to be wrong about something.
8Find them
Which of these can put a vehicle across your line?
Tap the ones that count.
Find all 4.
9Say it
The three moves, before you make them
Say it out loud on the approach, every time, until you stop needing to
“Straight through, stop at the corner, then turn.”
Saying the three moves before the junction is what stops the second one turning into an improvised swing across the lane when the light changes earlier than you expected.
10Do it
Before you leave this page
Walk to the junction where you turn left on your usual route. Stand on the far corner and work out exactly where you would stop and which way you would be pointing. Then look back and find the driveway nearest to the junction, and see how far into it you can see from the road.
Tick it when you have done it.
Lesson done.
The crash with a car happens where two paths cross. Slow before it, be where you can be seen, and make one move at a time.
Next lesson: Signalling, and no surprises