Urban Cycling/Triking Tips

Introduction

This page is a collection of simple, practical tips about triking in an urban (city) environment, generally as a commuter (i.e, not "just for fun").

Others have done longer and better treatments (John Forrester of "Effective Cycling" fame, for example), but perhaps you'll find something useful here as well, especially if you are a triker. Much of this stuff is trike-specific, but quite a bit is probably of general use.

I've divided this treatise into several sections: "The trike" covers characteristics your bike should have if you plan to use it for urban cycling; "Other equipment" covers the extras that you probably should have on your bike or on your person; "The city" deals with the urban environment itself; and "You" covers how you should behave if you want to be a safe and effective rider.

The trike

For a commuting machine, worry less about weight and efficiency than about the hard practicalities of daily use for relatively short trips. This doesn't mean "get an old clunker" it just means that a commuting bike must have certain essentials, and these have to come first. For example, if you can't mount reflectors on your chosen vehicle, you have a sports toy, not a commuting trike.

Unless your commute is particularly long or over particularly difficult terrain, you don't need 87 gears on a commuting bike, they are pointless. Fewer gears make for a robuster and cheaper transmission anyway. In the city, you will tend to be travelling relatively slowly, but will be accelerating often and probably quite hard, so emphasise the lower range.

You don't need suspension on a commuter bike unless your commute is over very nasty roads indeed. In general, a trike doesn't need suspension; it just means more weight, cost and complexity and it's something else to keep clean.

Think about your drive train - it's going to get wet and dirty, and you can't clean your bike every day. Consider getting enclosed systems such as a Mountain Drive front chainwheel or rear hub gears. This is doubly to be recommended if you will be commuting in a cold climate, where there will be salt on the roads. Aluminium-frame bikes are less susceptible to salty conditions, but not many trikes are made of aluminium. Steel frames need to be completely closed or easily washable inside the tubing.

Think about the width and length of the trike. The wider a trike, the harder it will be to get through doors, onto trams, buses, trains and so on. On the other hand, wider trikes are generally more stable and need less body movement on curves. The longer the trike, the harder it will be to fit into a car for transporting. Length and width are not that important in actual use, though a wide trike will not be able to share a lane as effectively as a narrow trike. Depending on your riding style, this may or may not be relevant. What IS relevant is the narrowest point on your commuting route - you either need a way around it or a trike that can fit through it.

The turning circle is not that vital - practically any trike on earth can turn better than a car, and the road systems were designed for cars.

Here are some more issues to think about when you buy your commuting trike. Most of these are no-brainers with ordinary upright bicycles, but for recumbents generally and trikes in particular, make sure you get satisfactory answers before you buy!

does it have places to mount the essential additional equipment? Essential equipment for a recumbent trike in an urban environment is:
- front and rear mudguards
- headlight(s)
- a bell
- rear lights
- front and rear reflectors
- a flagpole and flag

is the chain covered (or positioned) so that your clothes won't get chain oil on them?
does it have robust, firmly mounted, rattle-free and effective mudguards?
can the mudguards be easily attached and removed?
is there room under the mudguards for the tyres you intend to use or that you may need to use (wide tyres, spiked tyres, whatever)?
does it have a rack that takes standard panniers?
can the rack carry the weight you need it to?
can the frame be properly locked using standard cycle locks?
how will you carry the cycle lock?
(optional) can you attach a trailer?
(optional) can you attach a suitable fairing?

If you only ride in dry weather, you don't need mudguards. Otherwise, decent mudguards are a must. It's not the rain so much as the road muck! No rear mudguard means a line of road muck up your back. Cornering in the wet on a trike without front mudguards will paint a line of road muck right up the middle of your chest and face. Even travelling straight ahead gets you wetter and dirtier than you expect, because the wheels throw up a "fantail" that the slightest breeze will dump on you. If you can shower and change at your destination (and have the time to do so when you get there), mudguards are less important.

Other equipment

Get pedals with cleats and suitable cleated shoes. With these, your feet can't fall off the pedals (nasty!) and you can pedal properly (spin). On a trike, you rarely need to remove your feet from the pedals unless you are getting off the trike. Shimano's SPD type is the best known, but is by no means the only one. Get shoes with the cleats inset so that you can walk normally - Shimano even makes sandals with inset cleats nowadays!
If you absolutely must wear normal shoes while riding a recumbent, use firmly fastened old-fashioned clips or a heel strap, but DO NOT ride without in some way making SURE that your foot cannot fall from the pedal. No matter how well-trained you are, an unexpected bump can always dislodge your foot, with very unpleasant results, especially at speed.

You WILL need one or more mirrors - it is nearly impossible on a recumbent to turn your head far enough to see anything useful behind you, and in an urban environment you have to be able to do that. Here is more on mirrors.
Bike-mounted mirrors (kingpin or handlebars) are OK, but nothing beats a head-mounted mirror (mounted on your helmet, eyeglasses or a headband). You can see practically everything behind you. It takes practice, but after about a week you will be able to read licence plates on vehicles behind you, and see everything behind you in a 120-degree sweep. Get the Rhode Gear (sorry, no usable Web address, try a search) or Third Eye mirrors (02 and 05 types) - they are light, short, tough, and cheap enough to replace without pain when they get dropped, sat on, snapped off or whatever.
Bike-mounted mirrors have a fairly wide field, but it's fixed - you can't change what you see without altering the position of the bike in some way. Fixed mirrors tend to have very big blind spots, especially directly behind the rider and they tend to vibrate badly. Bike-mounted mirrors tend to make reflected objects appear very small; the tradeoff is that you see a larger area in them than in a flat mirror. For urban cycling, get a head-mounted mirror! Bike-mounted mirrors then make a good adjunct, or for when you ride without your helmet, glasses or headband.

I highly recommend that you get a LOUD warning device. A bell in urban traffic is generally pretty useless. One very effective device is the Air Zound, a compressed air horn which delivers a 115dB blast and sounds pretty much like a truck air horn. Others have recommended marine fog-warning horns. The Air Zound is designed for mounting on bikes, and can be refilled with a bike pump. Use an air horn very sparingly, and never too close to unprotected ears such as those of pedestrians. It is painfully loud. Be warned that such loud devices are sometimes illegal on bicycles (bureaucratic idiocy - bikes need such things more than cars!).
Old-fashioned bulb horns are pretty good too - and they look cool! However, you can't get a sustained loud noise out of them.

It's important to note that these loud devices are useful only in traffic, to gain the attention of other (usually motorised) road users. Pedestrians do not associate the sound of an air horn or a bulb horn with a bicycle - they associate it with cars, trucks and motorbikes. It might be a puny sound, but at least a bell says "bike!". So an air horn is pretty useless on pedestrians except for shock value in a total balls-out emergency. Besides which, they aren't even a bit friendly. I guess we really need a device that goes "ting" at 115dB :-)

Go for tubes with Schrader valves, so you can inflate your tubes at petrol stations.

Go for wide high-pressure tyres (Marathon, Tioga etc) so that you can handle rough streets without sacrificing performance as much.

Unless your commute is very long indeed (or through a desert), you probably don't need water, water bottles or water bottle holders - dump them and save some weight.

The city

Lock your bike TO something, don't just lock it to itself - otherwise a thief can just carry your bike away, locks and all, and remove the locks at his/her leisure. Whatever you lock your bike to should be immovable, hard to cut, and hard to lift the bike off. Parking meters are useless, because the bike can be lifted off the meter. Trees are useless, they are too easy to cut or snap off. Wire fences are useless, because the wire is too easy to cut. Steel piping fences are good, but not if they are the type that just unscrews. Vehicles are a VERY bad idea, they might get driven away with your bike attached. If you use bike racks, check that it is actually fixed (welded) to something or set in concrete - some city councils just poke a pipe into a hole in the ground, so it's easy to remove later!

Park your bike carefully. Don't park your bike where it blocks people or traffic - firstly, because it's not nice to do so, secondly because someone is likely to simply shove it out of the way, quite possibly damaging it in the process. Be especially careful of blocking public transport, they are likely to unceremoniously cut your bike free with a welding torch if it gets in the way of trams, buses or trains.

Watch out when parking that the space around the bike is not going to be used by parking cars; you risk parking cars hitting your bike as they enter or leave the space.

If you park in the same place often, you can avoid lugging a kilo or two of bike lock around by having two sets of locks - leave one locked up where you normally leave your bike, and have another set for home.

Try not to park in exactly the same place every time. Predictability makes it easier to steal your bike. Also, you run a slight risk of the local authorities thinking it has been abandoned - because they always see it in the exact same spot they don't realise that it is actually going away and coming back again. If you have two locks, alternate randomly between them - that way a thief who sees your bike and comes back prepared to steal it will with a bit of luck (yours, not his) come back with the wrong tools for the job.

Avoid quick-release levers on any bits that you don't lock up! If you can't lock up your wheels, replace the quick-release axles with the ordinary bolt variety. Otherwise you will lose your wheels (or, if you lock the wheels but not the frame, you'll lose the frame). Alternatively, take the quick-releasable wheel(s) with you, leaving the rest of the bike locked up.

There are a few other bits that are often easy to remove - convenient for you certainly, but sadly also for thieves. Take care with your saddle (on an upright), your headlights, your tail lights, your cyclocomputer, your bicycle pump, your toolkit. If you use panniers, either padlock them to your rack or take them with you too. Since the fabric of most panniers is easy to cut, don't leave valuables in your panniers on an unattended bike.

If your bike is expensive, insure it and make sure your insurance covers theft and vandalism away from the home (home contents insurance often doesn't cover theft of objects that are not on the insured premises). Write down and keep safe a detailed description of the bike and its frame number. Keep the purchase receipt.

And a tip for Swiss cyclists: Your insurance sticker is worth stealing, because the insurance covers third party damage - that is, if the bike it is stuck to (or its rider) damages someone, the sticker is proof that the insurance was paid, so the injured third party is covered. But there is nothing linking the sticker to a particular bike other than the fact that it is stuck to one. So, after sticking the sticker to your bike, chop it up by making fine cuts in it with a sharp razor blade (being careful not to scratch your bike in the process). This will make it impossible to remove the sticker in one piece, but will leave it legible. If someone does remove it, at least they won't be able to use it.

You

I find (and other recumbent riders have reported similar things) that other road users see me (really SEE me) because I'm different. They can't pidgeonhole me automatically. They tend to give me a wide berth because they don't know where my edges are, so to speak.

As a trike rider, you need always to be aware that you can't get off the trike that quickly. A bike rider can jump off, a trike rider has to unclip and climb out. So avoid situations where you might have to abandon ship quickly :-)

Cars coming from behind you or coming towards you are generally not a problem. The real problems are vehicles that are changing lanes, entering or leaving the road you are on, or that you are directly behind or beside.

There are three situations where a recumbent generally is at a visibility disadvantage:

When you are directly behind a vehicle and that vehicle decides to reverse. For this situation, I have an Air Zound :-) plus I am very wary of positioning myself that way - I try to position myself so that I can be seen in one or more of the vehicle in front's mirrors and/or so that I can get the hell out of the way.

When you are going through an intersection directly behind another vehicle also going through the intersection, and there are vehicles waiting to turn across your lane. In this situation, you are hidden from the turning vehicles, and if they cut in too hard behind the vehicle you are following, they will hit you. The only cure is to not do it - either leave a gap so that turning vehicles can see you clearly, or cross the intersection beside rather than behind the vehicle in front.

When you are directly beside a vehicle and that vehicle starts changing lanes towards you or "squeezing" you against the kerb, usually because they don't know you are there. This is extremely dangerous, because there is usually nowhere for you to go. The only sure thing is to avoid the situation; if it happens in spite of your best efforts, use a LOUD warning device (like an Air Zound) or thump their door with the side of your fist. Braking hard sometimes lets you "slide out backwards". As a precaution, take the whole lane when approaching intersections, roundabouts and similar situations where cars will tend to overtake dangerously. And use your mirrors so you will be aware of the situation developing.

As to your behaviour generally: As a commuter, you will probably be seeing (and being seen by) pretty much the same people every day. That means you need to make friends with them. In conflict situations, be friendly, forgiving and courteous. Above all, be consistent. Ride as if you were a car - carefully but firmly taking your rightful place on the road, but equally giving others the space they need. As a commuter, you have to be thinking longer term, because the driver you piss off today could be the one that tries to "teach you a lesson" tomorrow.

Don't run red lights, don't weave on and off the pavement, don't weave between cars. Do make hand signals in good time, do give way where you are supposed to give way. You will still get to work faster than by car.

Be aware that you probably travel faster than most drivers believe. A typical cruising speed for a recumbent on flat asphalt is 30kph - many cyclists routinely travel even faster, especially downhill. Unfortunately, many drivers think that bikes are basically stationary objects, and will pull out of side streets, overtake and pull in front of you and so on. It's often not out of aggression, it's just because they don't know and can't judge how fast you are going. Keep this in mind, and anticipate accordingly.

Summary

About the only disadvantage of a trike in the city is the width - and that really just stops you sneaking up alongside stopped columns of cars. The benefits of triking in the city far outweigh this disadvantage. It's almost impossible to fall off a trike, even if you get bumped. You can travel very, very slowly without wobbling. Because you don't have to take your feet off the pedals, you can start quicker at the lights, getting you out in front and visible more quickly. You don't have any "startup wobble". You have a comfy seat while waiting in traffic. Cars tend to give you more room. If you are hit, you have better protection than on an ordinary bike (the recumbent seat protects your back, the chainwheels protect you out front, the front wheels provide some protection at the sides). If you hit something, you will probably do it feet first rather than head first. And trikes brake really well, which is very useful in urban environments.