I've been cycling for about 5 months now, and currently avg 75 miles per week.
I live in California near the beach. I really enjoy riding up the coast, but as you'd expect there's a ton of traffic in this area in general. I've always been a very alert person, and I've applied this to my cycling as well. Even in cars, I'm generally pretty good at predicting what other drivers are about to do. Frankly, I have a collection of "newbie riding in traffic" questions, and I'm just going to list them each below. Any guidance you offer would be appreciated. When I say "in traffic", I am generally referring to being on a paved road either in lanes with cars directly, OR on the side of the road in a bike lane.
1. Is it pretty normal to have to hit the brakes a lot more when riding in traffic?
I find that I end up hitting my brakes, for example on a hill when I am going over about 20-25mph if I see a driveway coming up with a car approaching, because I do not trust that the driver has seen me and will for sure stop. Another example is say there is a green traffic signal at the bottom of a super steep hill. I will often brake multiple times while going down the hill even if I wouldn't usually need to, because if the signal were to turn red before I got to the bottom, I would then have to try to slam my brakes on going 30-35mph or fly through oncoming traffic. Unfortunately, having to do this constantly when the roads are busy sorta kills the joy of the ride at times.
2. Do combinations of road conditions cause you to make more mistakes?
This one is a bit tricky to explain, but it doesn't usually happen when I am driving in my car; it's unique to cycling for me. So let me give an example:
I generally don't have an issue signalling my turns. However, there are times when I am going very fast down a hill in the drops approaching a turn, or I am approaching a turn and there are a bunch of potholes, so I don't feel comfortable taking my hand off of the bars, and thus skip signalling. Sometimes this confuses drivers and has resulted in close-calls. But I don't really know how I would solve this problem because other times I've tried to slow way down in order to attempt to signal when I feel safe, but then that caused drivers to also be confused, become impatient, try to cut me off at a turn, etc... Basically, the difference here is that in a car, I can just turn on the turn signal, but on a bike, my balance, the road surface, and many other factors come into play and sometimes actually following the law can be unsafe. I notice that this tends to happen more when I am riding on roads I've never ridden on before; sometimes a series of quick surprises will pop up and distract me. For example, a pedestration starts walking out, causing me to move left, but when I move left I forget to check and almost go in front of a car, etc.. Any suggestions for these "combo attack" type of issues?
3. Can being too "nice"/passive be more dangerous?
I've noticed a trend where the times that I try to be too "polite" or "nice" on the road often ends up backfiring, confusing drivers, or leading drivers to try and pull risky stunts on me. For example, we have these "bikes may take up the full lane" signs around here, which is nice. I sometimes see bicyclists still try to stay to the very right side of the road. When I've done this though (in an attempt to be polite), I get cars trying to squeeze past me, sometimes nearly clipping me. But when I ride dead-center in the road, they cannot do this, and if they do choose to do this, they risk their safety rather than mine because it forces them to illegally go in oncoming traffic lane if they are impatient. I've also noticed that when I try to remain in the bike lane on the right side of the road at traffic signals, drivers making a right turn tend to sometimes miss me and they try to make a right and cut me off or make a right directly into me. However, the times that I've left the bike lane maybe 300 feet before the right turn lane and just gone into the middle of the straight lane, it seems much safer for me because nobody can suddenly come over and make a right into me like that; or at least that would be much less common.
4. My next question is about "flow" and in the subject of this thread. I've seen many, many city videos like this:
I would not and frankly have no intention of driving this "aggressively" by any means, but one thing I've learned by watching these "city bike messenger" type videos is that these guys get very good at quickly reacting to movements of cars around them, predicting what cars will be doing, and seemingly having a very strong visual horizon. Do you have any tips for getting better at "flowing" with traffic like this? One thing I notice is that these guys don't "fight" traffic, they dont get angry when someone cuts them off, they just immediately react to it and adjust to get out of the way. I've found myself a few times getting a bit startled when a car comes out quickly, and it can delay my reaction time. Any tips for improving that?
5. (Last question) Any tips on improving judging the speed of cars coming from behind?
In my car, I have multiple seconds to actually look at vehicles approaching me from behind in the mirror. On a bike, I have a split second to glance back and sometimes this is not enough time for me to accurately know how fast a car is coming from behind and if there is realistically enough time for them to see/slow down when I pull in front of them during a lane change. Sometimes this results in me waiting, but then more cars come and then I pass my chance up entirely to even get over at all. Any advice for handling this?
Thank you.