Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
I was pondering a phenomenon on the way in to work today. When I swerve around an obstacle on my bicycle (or motorcycle), I've noticed that I never perform a nice sine-wave curve, with the obstacle at the peak of the wave. Instead I end up making a kind of stretched wave, with the obstacle at the front shoulder of the wave.
In thinking about it, I realized that of course this makes sense: turning a cycle is a multi-step process, which is one of the reasons they're harder to pilot than a car.
Step one: decide to turn. This isn't the meaningless distinction it may initially seem. You need to choose to turn before you can start the turn, and there is necessarily some delay between deciding to take the action, and actually taking it. In particular, when swerving around an obstacle, you have to decide it's safe before you're willing to turn back into your original path of travel.
Step two: initiate the turn. This includes a bunch of sub-steps, which you may or may not take, but which I do. The first is to turn my head and look at where I want to go. If you're not already doing this, it's a simple but astoundingly effective way of guiding a cycle with confidence. The next step is to actually lean the bike over, a step I've actually spent hours and hours considering, filming, talking about, and writing about, using a method called countersteering. Finally, once the bike is leaned over, you're actually in the turn.
Step three: roll through the turn. This is the simplest part: you've set yourself on a path, and you continue along it. Interestingly, there's a kind of inertia to turning a cycle, so that deviating from a curved path takes more energy and thought than just staying on it. Newton might not be happy with it, but it's true.
Step four through whatever: recover to your original path. This is essentially the reverse of the curve you just took, but without the decision-making step about whether or not the obstacle is a further factor.
The key thing in all of this is that in order to describe a nice curving path around an object, and place it at the peak of the curve, you have to decide to turn back, and actually be in a turn, before you can pass the obstacle. As I've just outlined, it takes time to follow through with those actions, and particularly with obstacles (and double-particularly with live obstacles like animals or humans, who are prone to doing stupid things like move toward you), you don't really want to decide to swerve back until after you're past the obstruction. Thus, the too-long curve back to your original path.
This all actually plays heavily into racing. If you're running as fast as possible, and you decide you want to turn, you have to have made the decision and gone through all the steps to actually get you into the turn well before you reach the turn. It's kind of counter-intuitive, and is one of the reasons that inexperienced racers end up running wide through turns, or having to dramatically slow down: you've got to be looking at the next turn, not the one you're in. I'm still working on that, myself, mostly through turns 3 and 4 at Pacific Raceways, but that's a discussion for a different time.
Posted at 11:31 permanent link category: /bicycle
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater