Make Room for Your Bike on the Road With Billiard Noodles
If your city does not have bike lanes, every car that passes by you on a bike decides how much space to give you. They often suck on it. But you can free up space – particularly safe driving distance – by tying pool noodles to your bike.
The noodles, as you can see above, stick out a couple of feet away from the bike to give riders a visual indicator of how far to ride. Most states require 3 feet of headroom when the vehicle passes the bike. Pool noodles can visually highlight this area , making it less likely that a car will fly past you on the road, missing it by a few inches.
The main disadvantage is that the pool noodles are not designed for this. In Europe, reflective spacers , circular flags that stick out to the side of a bike, are common and cheap. So the real safety issue is that the noodles can fly off in traffic if you don’t secure them securely. It can potentially snag on other objects or cyclists if you use bike lanes frequently. You have to judge for yourself if this suits your cycling habits.
And yes, it looks silly. However, as we learned earlier, being stupid does not mean that you are useful . Toronto cyclist Warren Huska put it , “I am carefree about finding good … I am concerned about my majority safety.” If you are concerned about any of the above issues, you can always try ordering a suitable reflective pad (possibly from overseas), but if you go the pool noodle path, it is still probably safer than trusting everyone’s visual judgment. driver on the road. Road.
This story was originally published on 10/19/2016 and updated on 5/20/2019 with some updated information and links.