Institute of Advanced Motorists – How to be a Better Cyclist
Advanced Cycling – How to be a Better Cyclist, John Franklin, 2010. A Review.
I think that this is a very useful book for cyclists who want to feel more confident cycling on the road and will be a useful recommendation in our training work. John Franklin offers all the good sense, tips and advice distilled from his years cycling and working as a professional cycle consultant and also from the experience of all the other expert cyclists that he has observed and talked to.
When I saw the book mentioned on the net, I was intrigued. I had recently visited the Institute of Advanced Motorists’ site and was struck by their honesty and breadth of interest. Try this to check. I can’t vouch for the membership but the website at least does not promote a Clarkson petrol head ethos; of course, there is always something a little sad about these mutual admiration societies, celebrating their self declared expertise, something of a Mensa with walnut trim, in this case. How expert is this: “Effective steering is an essential skill for the advanced rider” (from Advanced Motorcycling).
This book has an attractive design with high production values. It uses photos and diagrams really well in the main, which is an improvement on Cyclecraft. The text is also snappier and less dense, clearly designed to give readers memorable ways to absorb the key procedures.
So where does Advanced Cycling fit in with the Institute of Advanced Motorists’ worldview?
John Franklin slots his own ideas from CC into the Institute of Advanced Motorists’ framework of planned riding/driving which is summarised by the not terribly attractive acronym IPSGA: Information: Absorbing, Processing and Giving Position: John Franklin talks about the familiar duo primary position and secondary postion:
Speed: adjust your speed up or down to best maintain safe progress, bearing in mind the need to conserve momentum
Gears: correctly emphasises the correct use of appropriate gear ratios but ignores the fact that a lot of cycling is perfectly possible on a single speed.
Acceleration: resume comfortable riding speed after manoeuvres
This process covers much valuable ground, particularly in Information – hazard perception as a key to assured riding – but is perhaps a little forced for cyclists. It assumes vehicular cycling and a noticeably vigorous style at that – braking distances are quoted for 15, 20 and 25mph! Many cyclists and would be cyclists don’t want to go fast and do battle with the motorists; they just want to get where they are going directly and conveniently. They also want useful, well planned cycle routes with priority at junctions and side turnings and are often very happy to be completely segregated from the motors.
As chance would have it, the Institute of Advanced Motorists first sent me Advanced Motorcycling by mistake; it’s spooky to see the same layout and pictures in both books with the same advice using the IPSGA model but I was very struck with the advice on Motorcycling road position:
“The Safety position (where you should ride almost all the time) simply means the most secure place on the road for the rider to occupy, relative to all that is going on around them … There is no single ‘default’ safe road position, it varies depending on the situation”
“Position yourself for the best view only when it is genuinely advantageous. If you are going slowly, you gain little advantage, but can confuse other road users”
“When turning at junctions position yourself to reduce your vulnerability from following traffic, generally left when turning left and right when turning right”
Sound. Flexible and sensible. I like these guys.
John Franklin, on the other hand, only talks about two positions – primary position and secondary position. Primary position when you can keep up, when you want to emphasise your presence and when it is ‘not safe’ for others to overtake. He reckons that this will be usual practice at most junctions both in and out. Take secondary position “when it is safe to allow drivers to pass you … about one metre to the left of the moving traffic lane and never closer than 0.5 m to the road edge.
John Franklin conveys a great fear of being overtaken – something that you can control by the primary position and opt out of by taking the secondary position. This fear, of rear end shunts or worse and wing mirror clips, is often behind the demand for bike lanes at any price but this type of collision is not the most frequent as John Franklin himself recognises.
John Franklin is utterly curmudgeonly about bike lanes, insisting that ‘expert cyclists’ will most often avoid them. This is a curious contradiction at the heart of Cyclecraft, I think – vehicular cycling and disdain for cycle lanes versus a great fear of being overtaken. John Franklin resolves this conceptually with his two road positions, and these are at the core of the National standards and Bikeability, but do they work or even exist in reality?
It is clear that the primary position, ‘taking the lane’, exists as a possible position as defined but does the secondary position? It requires 1.5 m plus rider width from the road edge to the edge of the moving traffic lane, so roughly 2 m. You very rarely find 2 m of space between road edge and the edge of the moving traffic lane on UK roads. Check as you are cycling along next time. It doesn’t matter how wide the lanes are over a certain minimum; look to see where the nearside wheels have worn the road down.
This should be no surprise – drivers are trained to drive about 1 m from the road edge, just like we are. In other words, we are always in the traffic flow, or moving traffic lane, and, crucially, we are always being overtaken. Cycling in the road will always entail following drivers making speed and direction adjustments to pass us – we can influence this sometimes but we can rarely opt out of it.
This calls into question the advice to take the primary position at junctions, to my mind. Being overtaken is normal; it’s no big deal or scary thing – it happens all the time. Our standard or normal riding position (secondary position) is in the traffic flow and drivers by and large don’t overtake at junctions. The primary position won’t stop the ones who are determined to do so and it should certainly not be taught as unthinking dogma to 10 – 11 year olds.
One way that John Franklin, or possibly the graphic design team behind the series, attempts to establish the possibility of the secondary position is to have diagrams which show the moving traffic lane as a strip somewhat narrower than a car’s wheel span. Clearly this is nonsense – the moving traffic lane must be at least as wide as the whole car/bus/lorry width and is usually thought to be wider depending on the prevailing speed in the moving traffic lane.
The other distinguishing feature that John Franklin brings to his analysis of cycling is his stress on the need to conserve momentum. Slow down as gradually as possible, minimise dead stops and consequent accelerations. A good rider conserves momentum by looking and planning ahead. Curiously the most obvious example of this principle at work is the current mania for rolling through red lights by a large proportion of urban cyclists. This is often justified as a safety measure and it’s not necessarily about getting there quicker but it is about keeping going. Advanced cycling but probably not as John Franklin intends.
In conclusion, I think that this book, with its clear illustrations and reasoned steps, will be genuinely useful to those wishing to cycle more confidently on the road. It is however based on a contradictory and unnecessarily limited taxonomy of road positions and does not address the clear unpopularity of vehicular cycling in those countries (UK and USA) where its advocates are most active. It is unintentionally fitting perhaps that this guide for cyclists is published by the Institute of Advanced Motorists.
Andrew Dade
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