Excitement, Anxiety, Fragility...

[wildeabandon]

I bought a bike! This is quite exciting, and I'm looking forward both to having more options for getting around and to doing some leisure riding at the weekends. I don't think I'm very likely to follow themidnightgirl into getting serious about cycling as a sport, but stranger things have happened.

Unfortunately as well as being exciting it's also quite anxiety-provoking because cars are scary and I don't really understand how roads work. I had an appointment in Hampstead this morning and cycled there and back, which was particularly stressful because I didn't really know where I was going so had to keep stopping to check Google Maps. I'm still feeling a bit overwhelmed a couple of hours after getting home.

I've booked an "Urban Cycling" lesson in a couple of weeks, which I hope will help. In the meantime I think I should probably only cycle to places where I know the route extremely well, and see if that lets me build confidence without too much anxiety.

I think I'm feeling rather more fragile than usual at the moment for various reasons, partly around having too much on my plate, which is probably making me both more prone to feeling anxious and less able to bounce back from those feelings, so I should take this slowly, but I am looking forward to getting past it.

Comments

[atreic]

Yay, bike!

A lot of the London cycle ways are surprisingly nice and well signed and are bikes-separate-from-cars, you might find riding some of them a nice way to warm up to more on road cycling. Z is probably more up to date for suggestions than me, but let me know if you’d like me to try and think of some!

[wildeabandon]

Thanks - I'll try picking Z's brains, but may come back to you :)

[cosmolinguist]

Hello from a fellow new-bike-rider! It is anxiety-inducing cycling on roads, I find the adrenaline afterwards is something I have to budget in time to manage.

I'm interested in what you get from your Urban Cycling lesson, if you feel like sharing.

[wildeabandon]

I'll try to remember to post about it - it's not for a couple of weeks yet.

[emperor]

Yay, bike :)

[wildeabandon]

Yay indeed :)

[doseybat]

I received my driving license, learned to cycle, and acquired a bicycle in my mid-30s. Since then I have gradually arrived at the decision that I will not be a London driver or a London cyclist. My anxiety levels and feelings of fear did not settle, adrenalin-soaked near misses kept happening, and over time I concluded that actually my concentration and vehicle handling were overall making myself a risk to myself and also to others. It took a while to understand and forgive myself, and to realise that actually this is a valid option: I have chosen to not be a driver or a cyclist and this is OK. I still cycle for leisure away from big roads. Hopefully my example illustrates that that pushing through the road fear and trauma in this city is not something every Londoner obliged to continue putting ourselves through.

Would it have been different if I lived elsewhere? Don't know.

[wildeabandon]

Thanks for this datapoint. I'm hopeful that I will get to a point of feeling a lot more comfortable than I do now, but I will keep in mind the possibility that I won't, and remember that I am allowed to give up if it doesn't work for me.

[ludy]

Yay! Bike.
Hope the Urban Cycling course is useful and that you can get through the extreme fragile-feelings combined with empathy about London traffic often being objectively concerning....

[wildeabandon]

Thank you.

[sfred]

Ooh! I hope you feel more confident soon and find it rewarding.

[barakta]

Hope your confidence improves, an urban cycling session sounds very wise, cos it's effectively advice from someone who knows all the tips and tricks.

[juliet]

Yay bike!

I used to teach the urban cycling stuff (though it was part of Bikeability when I was delivering it, the 'being safe, comfortable, & confident on the road' end of it). I hope it is confidence-building for you; that was always a major goal when I was teaching.

Your plan of sticking for now to routes you know well sounds v sensible -- IME adding navigation worries on top of traffic-management makes everything much more stressful. At least a nice thing about cycling is that if you get stuck it's very easy to hop off the bike onto the pavement, check the map, and recenter yourself a bit (unlike in a car where pulling over can be far more complicated). And as per your other bike post, you're right, it is always absolutely fine to jump off the bike and become a pedestrian to navigate an awkward bit!

TfL's cycle map is useful for some of the bigger (signposted, intermittently segregated) London cycle routes (but annoyingly doesn't seem to include all the 'Quietway' links). Over time one also acquires a mental collection of useful backstreet routes that are more pleasant than the main roads :) Do feel free to hit me up if there's any particular routes you'd like suggestions for -- I've been cycling in London for over 20 years now so have a reasonable set of mental maps, although I admit I'm slightly more reliable on central-and-south than north.

[ewt]

Yay, bike!

I have used Cyclestreets for navigation a few times and liked it well enough, though I don't always entirely agree with the routes it chooses.

I find cycling routes I know far less stressful, because even with unpredictable traffic there's a lot that I can remember from previous journeys -- a bumpy road surface or awkward corner or whatever. I give myself loads of extra time for any new-to-me route. And I absolutely get off and walk if I'm feeling nervy or the car traffic is too fast. (Heavy but slow-moving traffic bothers me less, these days.)

[lovingboth]

Around the centre, cycling is very noticeably nicer than it was ten years ago in terms of the infrastructure - I used to go to protests about the problems with Blackfriars Bridge, but now it's lovely.

If you tell Google Maps you are cycling, it will give you a good route, in my experience. One alternative is Beeline, which gives a choice of faster and quieter routes but is less flexible in other ways.

Either way, having something you can attach your phone to the handlebars is very useful.

I recommend a read of City Cycling by the sadly no longer with us Richard Ballentine - he had been doing excellent work since the 70s at least.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1905005601/

One basic tip is not to go too close to kerb / parked vehicles. As well as giving you fewer options if something happens, it forces other traffic - cycles are traffic! - to overtake you, rather than go past you, and that's much better for your visibility and thus safety.