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Who gets hurt
Say plainly who takes the worse outcome when a rider hits somebody walking, and ride a path as the person carrying that risk for both of you.
1Watch
One step sideways
One step sideways
A rider moving along a busy path at a fair clip while a person ahead turns to answer somebody behind them and steps sideways into the middle of the surface; the frame freezes with a couple of metres still between them.
20 secondsThat person did nothing unusual. People turn round to talk to each other constantly, and none of them are checking behind first.
2The idea
The number nobody puts on the sign
A New York hospital studied 914 e-bike and e-scooter patients over five years. Sixty-nine of them were not riding anything. They were people who had been walking, and had been struck.
Those 69 pedestrians suffered brain injuries at nearly double the rate of the riders. Not a similar rate. Nearly twice. That is the finding, stated the way the hospital stated it, and it is the single most useful thing in this badge.
3The idea
Why that lands the way it does
You may be wearing a helmet, and wearing one reduces head injury. Nobody walks to the shops in one. You also have a machine and handlebars in front of you and some idea, half a second earlier, that something was about to happen.
The person walking has none of that. They did not know, they were not braced, and there is nothing between them and the ground. The same collision is not the same event for the two people in it.
4Look
From where they are standing
The view from the path
A shared path photographed at eye level from a walker's position, looking along it, with a rider closing from behind visible only as a shape in the near distance.
That is the amount of warning the other person gets, and only if they happen to be looking that way. Most of the time they are looking at whoever they are walking with.
5The idea
So the margin is theirs
This is the reason everything else in this badge is written the way it is. The slowing, the calling, the waiting for a reaction, the few feet, the refusing to pass into a bend. None of those are politeness, and none of them are about your comfort.
They exist because the person you might hit is the one who takes the worse outcome, and they get no say in any of it. Every one of those decisions is made by you, at your speed, on your side of the path.
6Decide
A rider and somebody walking collide on a path. Who is more likely to end up with a brain injury?
Pick one to carry on.
7Say it
The sentence for the path entrance
Say it out loud once, before the wheels touch the path
“I am the fast one here. The room comes out of my ride.”
Say it at the entrance, not halfway along. It is easier to set a speed before you are carrying one than to give one up after you have got used to it.
8The idea
What that turns into, on the surface
It is not a mood, it is five things you already know how to do.
Keep right.
Come down to the speed the path is asking for.
Call out early and wait for a reaction.
Leave a few feet.
Get off the surface to stop.
None of them cost you more than a few seconds, and all of them are spent on somebody else. That is what makes them easy to skip on a day you are late, and it is exactly why they get decided at the entrance rather than at the moment they are needed.
9Find them
Which of these give the room to the other person?
Tap the ones that count.
Find all 4.
10Do it
Before you leave this page
Stand at the edge of your local path, off the surface, and get somebody to ride past you at the speed you normally ride there and at the distance you normally leave. Stand with your back to them so you find out about it the way a walker does. Then decide whether that was a few feet.
Tick it when you have done it.
Lesson done.
In a collision between you and somebody walking, they come off worse. All the room comes out of your ride.
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