While in Austin, I discovered bicycle commuting, and how terrifying bicycle commuting could be. I didn’t know anything about biking. There seemed to be all sorts of information out there about how to ride in different situations — each person had the best way to ride and stay safe.

I started reading everything I could find — what ‘officially-sanctioned’ information I could find, suggestions in bicycle forums, and YouTube videos, some of which just seemed bizarre to me.

Finally, one day I stumbled upon a link to a website called BicycleSafe.com. It didn’t take much reading to convince me that this was the page I was looking for:

This page shows you real ways you can get hit and real ways to avoid them. This is a far cry from normal bicycle safety guides, which usually tell you little more than to wear your helmet and to follow the law. But consider this for a moment: Wearing a helmet will do absolutely nothing to prevent you from getting hit by a car! Sure, helmets might help you if you get hit, and it’s a good idea to wear one, but your #1 goal should be to avoid getting hit in the first place. Plenty of cyclists are killed by cars even though they were wearing helmets. Ironically, if they had ridden without helmets, yet followed the guidelines listed below, they might still be alive today. Don’t confuse wearing a helmet with biking safely. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It’s better to not get hit. That’s what real bicycle safety is about.

At the time I read this, I didn’t really know about ‘the great helmet debate’, so the words here about helmets didn’t trigger any kind of “oh, this is one of those anti-helmet guys” feelings - it just made a whole lot of sense to me. Not getting hit in the first place? Yeah. Makes sense. [Incidentally, I believe the author, Michael Bluejay, is a helmet-wearer, and he suggests wearing one explicitly on the site.]

What follows is ten very down-to-earth rules of real bike safety - it’s not stuffy, it’s not pompous, it’s not anything but useful. The ten rules, or ‘collision types’, are named as follows:

1. The Right Cross
2. The Door Prize
3. Red Light of Death
4. The Right Hook
5. The Right Hook, Pt. 2
6. The Left Cross
7. The Rear End
8. The Rear End, Pt. 2
9. The Crosswalk Slam
10. The Wrong-Way Wallop

The illustrations are simple to understand, and I could tell after riding a couple of weeks that the advice was solid - here’s a full reprinting of the Collision Type 1, which in my opinion, is spot on:

Collision Type #1:

The Right Cross

This is one of the most common ways to get hit (or almost get hit). A car is pulling out of a side street, parking lot, or driveway on the right. Notice that there are actually two possible kinds of collisions here: Either you’re in front of the car and the car hits you, or the car pulls out in front of you and you slam into it.

How to avoid this collision:

1. Get a headlight. If you’re riding at night, you should absolutely use a front headlight. It’s required by law, anyway. Even for daytime riding, a bright white light that has a flashing mode can make you more visible to motorists who might otherwise Right Cross you. Look for the new LED headlights which last ten times as long on a set of batteries as old-style lights. And helmet- or head-mounted lights are the best, because then you can look directly at the driver to make sure they see your light.

2. Honk. Get a loud horn and USE IT whenever you see a car approaching (or waiting) ahead of you and to the right. If you don’t have a horn, then yell “Hey!” You may feel awkward honking or yelling, but it’s better to be embarrassed than to get hit. Incidentally, the UK requires bells on bicycles.

3. Slow down. If you can’t make eye contact with the driver (especially at night), slow down so much that you’re able to completely stop if you have to. Sure, it’s inconvenient, but it beats getting hit. Doing this has saved my life on too many occasions to count.

4. Ride further left. Notice the two blue lines “A” and “B” in the diagram. You’re probably used to riding in “A”, very close to the curb, because you’re worried about being hit from behind. But take a look at the car. When that motorist is looking down the road for traffic, he’s not looking in the bike lane or the area closest to the curb; he’s looking in the MIDDLE of the lane, for other cars. The farther left you are (such as in “B”), the more likely the driver will see you. There’s an added bonus here: if the motorist doesn’t see you and starts pulling out, you may be able to go even FARTHER left, or may be able to speed up and get out of the way before impact, or roll onto their hood as they slam on their brakes. In short, it gives you some options. Because if you stay all the way to the right and they pull out, your only “option” may be to run right into the driver’s side door. Using this method has saved me on three occasions in which a motorist ran into me and I wasn’t hurt, and in which I definitely would have slammed into the driver’s side door had I not moved left.

Of course, there’s a tradeoff. Riding to the far right makes you invisible to the motorists ahead of you at intersections, but riding to the left makes you more vulnerable to the cars behind you. Your actual lane position may vary depending on how wide the street is, how many cars there are, how fast and how close they pass you, and how far you are from the next intersection. On fast roadways with few cross streets, you’ll ride farther to the right, and on slow roads with many cross streets, you’ll ride farther left.

I can’t say I agree with every last detail in this rules list, but it’s just an awesome resource. I thought so highly of it that I wanted to try and have it reprinted in small booklet form so that we could get it to new riders. That didn’t happen yet, but maybe in the future.

The site has been translated into French, Spanish, Catalan, Hungarian.

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