The person you hit is hurt worse than you are

1Watch

Nothing has happened yet

Four people, none of them doing anything wrong, and only one of them knows the situation exists. That is the ordinary condition of a path, and it is the condition this badge is about.

2The idea

The finding this badge is built on

A hospital group published a series of e-bike and scooter crashes it had treated. Alongside the riders it counted sixty-nine people who had been struck while on foot, and it reported something about them that is easy to read past.

Those sixty-nine struck pedestrians suffered brain injuries at nearly double the rate of the riders. Not a similar rate. Nearly double. The person who gets hit on a path is, in that series, the one more likely to end up with the injury nobody fully recovers from.

3The idea

Why that is not surprising once you look at it

The study reports the rate. It does not print a reason, so here is the reasoning, and you can check every step of it yourself. You are wearing a helmet and they are not. You know a collision is possible and they do not. You are holding on and they are not braced for anything.

And the last one is the biggest. You are carrying all of the speed and all of the weight. A machine with a motor and a battery on it, plus you, arriving at a person who weighs less and is doing walking pace. Everything that gets shared out in that collision was brought there by you.

4Look

What each of you brought

One of those two lists is long and the other one is empty. That difference is not about who is careful. It is about which of you is the vehicle, and on a path it is always you.

5The idea

So a path is a road with the roles swapped

On a roadway you spent two whole badges learning that you are small, that drivers do not see you, and that the vehicle carries the duty of care. All of that was true and none of it has changed.

On a path you are the car. You are the fastest and heaviest user, you are the one who arrives from behind where nobody is looking, and every rule in the rest of this badge exists for the same reason the rules in badge five existed. The role swapped when the surface changed, and most riders never notice the swap.

6Decide

A path is quiet, and you are running late.

7Your turn

How much path do you actually have

Run it once with the bend in and watch what your own numbers do to the seconds you have. Nothing in that is our claim about anything — it is your two numbers and arithmetic.

8Find them

Which of these are true of the person walking in front of you?

Tap the ones that count.

9Say it

The sentence for the top of every path

Say it at the trailhead, before your wheels are on the path. It is four words and it moves you from the middle of the picture to the edge of it, which is where you actually are once the surface changes.

10Do it

Before you leave this page