Badge Kids › Road Badge › Section 7 › Lesson 7.5

Ages 11-16 · Road Badge · Section 7

Six of you is a different vehicle

Ride in a group without taking more than your half of a path, name the three jobs in an organised ride, and say who the group yields to.

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Step 1 of 10

1Watch

Five of you, and one of somebody else

Film

Five of you and one of them

Five riders come along a shared path in a loose bunch spread across the full width, talking; ahead an older man with a walking stick is coming the other way and has stopped at the edge; the frame freezes with the group about ten metres from him and still spread wide.

20 seconds

Nobody in that group has done anything they would call wrong, and the man has already had to stop and get out of the way. That is what a group does without anybody deciding to.

2The idea

What changes when there is more than one of you

Riding with friends changes three things at once and none of them are about skill. You are longer — a person on foot has to wait for all of you, not for one of you. You are wider, unless somebody decides otherwise. And you are looking at each other rather than at the path.

So a group has to be organised, or it organises itself badly. The path rule for it is short and it is in every source: when you travel side by side, stay on the right half of the path. Your half is your half whether there is one of you or six.

3The idea

The four formations, and how you choose

School bike-bus guidance names four, and the choice is made by the road or path, never by preference.
Side by side, no more than two riders.
Single file.
The whole roadway, on streets with low traffic and low speeds.
The sidewalk, where that is the best option in that location.

Two cautions on that last one and they are real. Where you live, sidewalks are set by your town, not your state, and for a group of e-bikes that formation is simply unavailable in a lot of places. And how many riders may go abreast on a roadway is a local answer that varies — that is a badge six job, and you already know how to go and find it.

4The idea

Three jobs, and they are named

An organised ride has three adult roles with names, and knowing them is useful even on a ride of three friends.
Front rider — sets the pace, holds the line everybody follows, and watches ahead for junctions and traffic.
Corker — goes ahead at a junction and holds the crossing traffic until the group is through.
Sweeper — rides at the back, and their whole job is that nobody falls behind.

The guidance also puts a ratio on it: one adult for every three to six children is advisable. And the rules given to the riders themselves are three: stay behind the lead rider, give space to the riders around you, and communicate with the riders near you.

5Build it

Put the group on the road

Interactive

Choose the formation

Six stretches arrive one at a time: a wide quiet residential street, a busy shared path on a Saturday, a narrow path with walkers on it, a low-speed street with almost no traffic, a junction the group has to cross together, and a section where the path narrows to a bridge. Choose a formation and place the front rider, corker and sweeper. The card gives the guidance's own answer and what goes wrong with the others.

The junction is the one worth running twice. It is the only one of the six where somebody has to leave the group to make it work.

6Decide

Four of you are riding two abreast on a path and a runner is coming the other way.

Yes, and the call out loud is the part that makes it work. Four riders do not go single file because they each individually thought of it. Somebody says it. Faster yields to slower, and a group of four is the fastest thing on that path by a distance.

Both of those hand your problem to the runner. Making somebody step off the tarmac is you taking their half as well as yours, and it is exactly the yield rule pointing the wrong way. And arriving faster just gives them less time to work out what six wheels are about to do.

Pick one to carry on.

7Look

How long four of you actually are

A shared path seen from above with four riders in single file drawn end to end, the whole length of the group measured against a person walking the other way who has to wait for all of it to pass. — The length of a group

That measurement is the thing nobody in the group can see, because every one of you is looking at the rider in front. A person coming the other way is dealing with the whole length of it, not with you.

8Find them

Which of these are actually somebody's job on an organised ride?

Tap the ones that count.

Find all 3.

9Say it

The call that changes the shape

Say it out loud the way you would need it heard four bikes back

“Single file. Coming through.”

Say it early, so the shape has changed before the meeting rather than during it. On a ride with friends, whoever sees it first calls it, and there is no rule that the person at the front has to be the one who notices.

10Do it

Before you leave this page

Get one other rider and a witness onto a quiet path or an empty lot. Ride two abreast on your half, and on the witness's signal go single file within about three seconds, with one of you calling it out loud. Do it five times, swapping who calls. They only tick a run where the call came before the change and both of you stayed on your own half of the width.

Tick it when you have done it.

Lesson done.

A group is one long vehicle. Right half of the path, single file where it is busy, and somebody at the back whose job is that nobody is dropped.

Take the Section check

Section 7 · Paths and People

7.1The person you hit is hurt worse than you are 7.2Keep right, pass left, and the half everybody skips 7.3The speed on the sign, and the speed for right now 7.4People do not travel in straight lines 7.5Six of you is a different vehicle ★Section check

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