...careful folks, we're heading into the period where sunrise coincide with peak hour traffic (well, this is the situation in Cape Town anyway).
If you are commuting by bike in the mornings & lane-split (like most of us do), please notice your bike's shadow on the road - If your shadow is in the arc 11 o'clock to 12 o'clock and 3 times or more your bike's length, cage drivers will find it very difficult to see you in their rear view & side mirrors as they are blinded by the rising sun. Also, your headlight is lost against the background of a long line of cars that still has their headlights on - even if you have an orange head-light cover!
If you haven't already noticed this, you'll be surprised - I join the N1 in Cape Town at Plattekloof turnoff. From there to N1 City, the sun is directly behind you. The long stretch past Ratanga junction is fine, the sun's about 45 degrees behind your left shoulder, so you're well visible, but hitting the Paarden island stretch, sun's right behind you again, whoops, no can see um...
I'm taking the cage into town again for the first time in over a year - I am surprised to re-discover how little I can see in the side-view mirror when travelling in bumper-to-bumper traffic; in reality only about 4 cars in the next lane; and on those long gradual curves this cuts down to 3 cars. It's no wonder cagers claim not to have seen the biker whenever there's an accident in peak traffic - in slow moving traffic, cars in all lanes are moving at more or less the same speed relative to each other. Drivers wishing to change lanes are forever observing gaps slowly opening & closing on either side of them, as a cager you can literally watch the space stretching out in your side-view mirror, making it easy to judge & predict when the gap will appear next to you when you want to change lanes. With no bikes coming by as a constant reminder, it's no wonder so many drivers are lulled into complacency, indicate and change lanes in one motion - blissfully unaware that a bike is coming along lane-splitting at twice the speed... Certainly a sober reminder for me not to travel more than 20km/h faster than whatever the cage crawl speed happen to be at the time.
Umm, also the following two GENERAL observations (broad brush-strokes folks, broad brush-strokes) - the more cc's the superbike, the faster it will be travelling (I suspect this is because riders on large bikes have more years of riding experience, and may have little or no experience commuting by cage, therefor have no idea how limited the cagers view is), secondly, the amount of ATGATT worn is usually in invert relation to speed, the faster the rider, the less the ATGATT :eek7:
Wishing you all a safe commute... :thumleft: :ricky: :thumleft:
If you are commuting by bike in the mornings & lane-split (like most of us do), please notice your bike's shadow on the road - If your shadow is in the arc 11 o'clock to 12 o'clock and 3 times or more your bike's length, cage drivers will find it very difficult to see you in their rear view & side mirrors as they are blinded by the rising sun. Also, your headlight is lost against the background of a long line of cars that still has their headlights on - even if you have an orange head-light cover!
If you haven't already noticed this, you'll be surprised - I join the N1 in Cape Town at Plattekloof turnoff. From there to N1 City, the sun is directly behind you. The long stretch past Ratanga junction is fine, the sun's about 45 degrees behind your left shoulder, so you're well visible, but hitting the Paarden island stretch, sun's right behind you again, whoops, no can see um...
I'm taking the cage into town again for the first time in over a year - I am surprised to re-discover how little I can see in the side-view mirror when travelling in bumper-to-bumper traffic; in reality only about 4 cars in the next lane; and on those long gradual curves this cuts down to 3 cars. It's no wonder cagers claim not to have seen the biker whenever there's an accident in peak traffic - in slow moving traffic, cars in all lanes are moving at more or less the same speed relative to each other. Drivers wishing to change lanes are forever observing gaps slowly opening & closing on either side of them, as a cager you can literally watch the space stretching out in your side-view mirror, making it easy to judge & predict when the gap will appear next to you when you want to change lanes. With no bikes coming by as a constant reminder, it's no wonder so many drivers are lulled into complacency, indicate and change lanes in one motion - blissfully unaware that a bike is coming along lane-splitting at twice the speed... Certainly a sober reminder for me not to travel more than 20km/h faster than whatever the cage crawl speed happen to be at the time.
Umm, also the following two GENERAL observations (broad brush-strokes folks, broad brush-strokes) - the more cc's the superbike, the faster it will be travelling (I suspect this is because riders on large bikes have more years of riding experience, and may have little or no experience commuting by cage, therefor have no idea how limited the cagers view is), secondly, the amount of ATGATT worn is usually in invert relation to speed, the faster the rider, the less the ATGATT :eek7:
Wishing you all a safe commute... :thumleft: :ricky: :thumleft:
