Why You Should Know How to Ride a Bike

For many college campuses, the predominant way to travel is by biking. Therefore, knowing how to ride a bike before your freshmen year is pretty important. However, at the beginning of every year, it becomes clear that most first-year students either just learned how to ride a bike or have not practiced in a while, which can be disastrous on a college campus bike path.

Here are a few of the problems that occur when people do not know how to use the bike paths properly:

Swerving. One of the most tell-tale signs that a person either does not know what he or she is doing or is not a confident biker is seeing that person swerve. Not only may this cause accidents, since it is hard to avoid someone who is swerving, but this also causes a lot of traffic on the bike paths. Because the best way to avoid is bike crash with a swerver is to stay behind them, traffic eventually builds up behind this biker and causes a bike jam. This can be especially irritating if the bike jam causes you to be late to a class.

Stopping, Many people who are new to biking tend to stop at inopportune moments. For example, new bikers tend to be uncertain about how to treat a roundabout. A lot of times they either slow down or stop altogether, which can surprise the person biking behind them and cause an accident. This can also cause a mass of bikers to have to stop completely, which defeats the purpose of a roundabout.

Cell phones. The new trend seems to be talking while biking. However, in California, due to the new laws to make it illegal to talk on the phone while driving, it is also illegal to talk on the phone while on a moving vehicle-this includes bikes. This would be a great law if it were enforced. There are noticeable differences between people biking while on the phone versus people just biking. For example, people who talk on the phone tend not to care as much about traffic, and they don't bother to check for oncoming cars when crossing the street. They also don't pay attention to other bikers around them, which causes people to swerve more often.

Consequences. In addition to causing traffic and making biking accidents more likely to occur, freshman not knowing how to bike properly tend to anger the more experienced bikers. For example, I have some friends who are planning on using a long cable to lock together a group of freshmen bikes to prevent them from biking to class one day in hopes of making the bike path on campus safer. So, before you go off to college, make sure you know how to ride a bike!