YankeeTarheel wrote: Wed Jun 30, 2021 10:07 pm
New toy for my e-bike! Garmin Varia RVR315 from Amazon's Prime days--$105.
It's a rear-looking radar that talks to both my watch and phone, telling me when a car's coming up behind me. It even puts a graphic of how far the car is behind me...and if there's more than one! Got a nice phone holder to go with it as the app is easier to see than the watch which is on my wrist. Talk about saving yer ass!
For years, I thought of such electronic doo-dads as overkill, and not particularly useful. I've been using eyeglass- or helmet-mounted mirrors for forty years, though.
As a cycling instructor, once certified in both the major national programs (League of American Bicyclists League Cycling Instructor and, better still, CyclingSavvy instructor, more on that in a moment), I tend away from what I think of as hardware solutions to software problems.
One of the things we teach in CyclingSavvy
https://cyclingsavvy.org/ is that lane position does a LOT to communicate to other road users (including, but not limited to, those driving cars). My default lane position is in the left tire track of the travel lane I'm using, which informs road users coming up behind me that they are not going to be able to pass in my lane far earlier than they would realize if I'm in the right tire track (or worse, right against the edge line). That alone gets me better passing distance than just about anything else I do, including flashy lights.
I earned my LCI (League Cycling Instructor) certificate in October of 2007. By 2011, I was hearing of a newer program called CyclingSavvy, that did much more with regard to real world cycling issues faced by people who didn't necessarily want to know how to fine-tune their shifting mechanisms or ride organized centuries. In 2012, I got to take the CS workshop, along with a number of other League Cycling Instructors, and saw for myself how it focuses on interacting with traffic (an LCI Coach that taught another LCI Seminar chided candidates for being too interactive with other road users). In 2013, I became a CyclingSavvy instructor.
One of my students, herself also an LCI, commented that she liked CyclingSavvy better because it "treats us all like adults." The typical LCI presentation comes off as stentorian, in my experience, where the CyclingSavvy workshop is designed to be more of a conversation guided by the instructor.
And CyclingSavvy has a lot of online resources. I highly recommend the program.
Eventually I'll figure out this signature thing and decide what I want to put here.