Momentum Reigns Supreme

It is the most important concept to understand. Because even though there are official rules to the road, all that goes to shit when you have a 30 Ton truck coming at you at 35 miles per hour. Momentum is the product of mass and speed. The more you have of it, whether it’s either in speed or mass, the more respect you command on the road. This applies to all traffic, not just cycling. This explains why people respect Trucks and treat cyclist like shit. We cyclist have very little momentum in the game of traffic, we will never get the respect we want from drivers, that’s why we have to ride 10 times more defensively and aggressive than car drivers.

Momentum also determines how you ride, the more speed you have the less you want to stop. Well this also applies to car drivers. At intersections even though cars are supposed to give the right of way, they don’t because they carry this momentum they don’t want to give up. For us Cyclists this affects us even more, because the momentum we have when we ride is not easy to build up, it takes effort to get up to 20 miles per hour, a car driver just has to press a lever with his foot, we have to push down on our pedals with our own muscles.

If you can learn to read the momentum of cars you will be able to predict whether a driver will run a red light, make a quick reckless lane-change, will make a right turn without looking, etc. Its psychological, a car who wants to make a left turn and is going at a fast speed is not going to stop for a cyclist who is in the right, simply because he knows he has more momentum than you have and you should yield to him even though by the rules of the road he should yield to you. So even though you know all the traffic rules in your area, know that momentum reigns supreme.

In the scheme of traffic we cyclist are flies, we are invisible for the most part. We have to ride very aggressive and “loud” in order to get out due notice.