Bicycle Friendly America Winter 2018 - Cover3

BICYCLE FRIENDLY BUSINESS

swing the corner much tighter than expected. My natural impulse is to sit up
when I get scared, because I know that
will slow us down. But this time I have
to override that impulse, and with Peter
yelling "Lean! Lean! Lean!" we make it
through the corner.
Once we get through the corner, I ask
Peter to stop so I can quit shaking and
yell at him to never do that again. He
apologizes and promises he will not try a
fifteen-mile-per-hour hairpin turn at thirty miles per hour again. He'd better not.

Peter

In my defense, I have only crashed us
out once in approximately 25,000 miles
of riding this tandem. Several years ago,
we were riding home at the end of a
twenty-mile day ride. As we transitioned

from the country to the city, the road
widened from two lanes to four, and then
narrowed back to two lanes again. When
the road widened, I kept us near the curb
until a parked car forced me to move left
into the main travel lane. I had ridden
this particular stretch of road hundreds
of times before and knew there is a wide
joint line which runs parallel to the curb
between the parking lane and the travel
lane. To avoid getting the front wheel
trapped in the joint, which would almost certainly cause us to crash, I cut left
sharply across the joint and we were fine.
Then, for some reason, I decided to
move back to the curb lane even though
the road was going back to two lanes
in about 200 yards. This time the front
wheel caught in the joint. We went down
so quickly I didn't realize we were going

to crash until our right side was about
a foot off the ground. I didn't even have
time to let go of the handle bars. We hit
hard and slid about twenty yards. We
were both dazed and had road rash on
our right sides from head to toe, but were
otherwise unhurt.
Within three long weeks, all of our
road rash healed. I learned a valuable lesson that day: It is really bad form to crash
out the mother of your children. Actually,
Tracy was really good about the crash. It
was one hundred percent my fault, but
she never blamed me. She knows I am a
very careful cyclist and accepts that fact
that no one is perfect. She loves riding
the tandem and accepts the risks that go
along with bicycling.

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36 BICYCLE
FRIENDLY
AMERICA
League
of American
Bicyclists Magazine 7" x 4.4375".indd 1

12/12/17 12:37 PM
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Bicycle Friendly America Winter 2018
