With the finer weather approaching and the Kappara project set to send traffic congestion to new highs, the Bicycle Advocacy Group have the following advice for those who opt to switch to a bicycle to beat the traffic. Even if your trip is just a short distance, and most trips are, the following tips will help keep you safe.
Be visible. It’s not just about bright colours and lights or reflective clothing at night. It’s also about positioning yourself on the road for maximum visibility.
Help drivers by putting yourself where you can be seen. Riding in the gutter at the extreme left is not always the best way to achieve visibility and the law even allows you to come to the centre of the lane at a junction.
Look for eye contact with drivers, especially at junctions, and use that legal right to take the lane to position yourself so the driver’s blind spots don’t mask you. It does mean you need to be more on the ball than when driving a car and being seen includes making big, wide decisive hand signals to help drivers know what you are going to do.
This should be done well before turning or changing lanes, just in case you need to cover the brakes and cannot signal through the turn. In both cases, just as in a car you need to check behind first.
It’s not just about bright colours and lights or reflective clothing at night. It’s also about positioning yourself on the road for maximum visibility
Checking over your right shoulder can help warn you if someone is attempting to overtake and turn left across your path just before a left turn or if a driver is trying to squeeze past in streets that are too narrow to do so safely. When either of these situations are likely ‘take the lane’.
In doing so you protect both yourself and the other driver.
Protecting yourself also means riding sensibly, like not riding through red lights or undertaking long vehicles at junctions because they may be turning – these are big no-nos.
Avoid the dreaded ‘door zone’.
Car drivers do this too if you watch their road positioning. School children in the UK are taught this with the saying you need ‘more than a door’. Observe movement in car windows and mirrors which might indicate if someone is about to open a door, and be particularly careful of cars with darkened windows, especially at night.
Double parking and where it is dangerous to do so is very common in Malta. The owners of such vehicles often leave the ‘shopping lights’ on and this is a clear indication that they are not thinking about you. Few will consider that you have to move a long way out to miss them and their own ‘door zone’, so extra care is needed here.
Finally, if you are a visitor and many of our commuters are, do remember that, unlike 23 other EU member states, Malta has no presumed liability and this changes how drivers treat people on bicycles or pedestrians, so you need to ride far more cautiously.
Malta also lacks cycle route networks seen elsewhere so it is almost impossible to avoid main roads and while back roads are a good idea, these are often one-way to help double car parking in residential areas. While that’s not helpful to cyclists it means that some advanced planning of your route is almost essential.
The good news is that we know from past roadworks projects that ridership goes up as drivers get snarled in traffic. This also means that while there may be far more cars they are largely slow moving. So using the skills above can make taking the bike, quicker and much safer.
Jim Wightman is PRO of the Bicycling Advocacy Group Malta.