Where to sit in lane on a motorway?

This is one that’s come up a couple of times recently.

How do you decide where do you sit in the lane, to the left, right or middle and does it vary depending on which lane you’re in ? What’s the best position?

Start by asking some questions:

- does it give you a good view of the road ahead and behind, and of traffic around you, and does it allow you to be seen?
- does it give you good stability in the case of braking, steering or accelerating?
- does it let you dominate the lane?
- does it give you good clearance to nearby vehicles?
- finally does it give you a good escape route?

Decide which particular issue needs priority at any one moment. And that’s the one you prioritise at any one moment – there’s no single position that’s right.. and that should help you decide.

I’m generally a bit right of centre in the left hand lane, usually either just left or just right of centre in the middle lane(s) and left of centre in the right hand lane if there is traffic around. Otherwise on an empty motorway, I just sit in the middle of the lane!

I’ve seen it argued that from the centre of the lane position, you can’t see past vans and trucks ahead of you. If that’s the case, you’re almost certainly too close; a minimum 2 second gap at 70mph is 62 metres!

Go find a parked van and count back 60 or 70 paces from it and see how much you can see. There is a small blind spot but it’s not huge at that distance, and you’ll find that a pace either left or right (the equivalent of moving to the left or right of centre the lane) gives you a view into much of the blind spot.

In any case, at that kind of following distance, even a slight curve of the sort you find on motorways gives you a view past the vehicle ahead.

I know that weight of traffic means that you can’t always leave the gaps that big without someone changing lanes into it, but if you are behind a van or truck you should have enough gap that you can see round it. So an alternative strategy is not to sit behind a truck – I try to avoid that if at all possible. Change lanes, pass it, and pull back in front!

When group riding or running a training course, I usually organise it so the lead rider near the white line, and the second rider on the inside line. There are several reasons; it:

- gives the lead rider a better general view of the road ahead
- puts the lead rider (who is the first to be seen by a car emerging from the left at a junction) further from the left and reduces the risk of a SMIDSY
- gives the lead rider a better view in the mirrors
- easier for the lead rider to set up an overtake
- makes it easier to spot the two bikes from behind IMO

If someone gets a bit close behind which does happen when you are keeping left of centre, it’s relatively safe to move out to the centre of the lane and still avoid the wheeltracks of the bike ahead, but at the same time dominating the lane.

Finally, rather than worry about position to deal with the car’s blind spot to the left or right as you pass in an adjacent lane, simply use the throttle to change your speed! Even a 5mph speed differential is enough to take you through the area you are beside the car (and thus at risk of being side-swiped) in just a couple of seconds – think how long it would take you to jog past a car. Even a fairly low powered bike has enough acceleration to change speed pretty quickly at 60/70mph.

“A wide range of machines can be used for training…”

Here’s one I’d forgotten from a few years back which I found on one of the forums:

“I recently completed a day’s one-to-one training with Kevin Williams, who runs the highly-respected “Survival Skills” training operation.

I found it extremely useful. I would recommend him to any rider. And he wasn’t in the least bit snobby about me turning up on the
SupaFive…”

After arriving in a monsoon, which had me seriously worrying about having to cancel the course, the sun came out for the afternoon and we had an excellent day’s riding down in the South West, along the Devon coast including a cuppa at the castle at Dartmouth, if I remember right.

The trainee was a bit concerned about turning up on the MZ, worrying that I’d say it was “too slow” for advanced training. I soon put him right on that one! You don’t need a GSXR1000 to do 70mph down a narrow country lane or round a bend and discover it’s too fast!

The only real issue with following two strokes is that the fumes do eventually give me a headache!

177 on the 600 Hornet

That’s a number I never want to see on the clocks of the Hornet again!

Not top speed, but the trip meter, aka “the fuel guage” aka “distance to fumes”.

I’ve never managed 177 miles on one fill-up and never want to again!

The wretched French system of shutting all the filling stations on Sunday nearly caught me out on the way back to our overnight stopping place at St Gervais d’Auvergne from Puy Mary, whilst I was having a long weekend riding in France last weekend.

From the point we turned round to head back to the tent, we had 150 miles to go and the Hornet’s miserably small tank can usually JUST manage 150 with the reserve pushed to the limit.

So I was taking it carefully anyway, not expecting to pass any open filling stations – and we didn’t; the one we’d fill up at on the way out was closed.

Then to compound the problems, our main road route back was blocked by a road closure and we were sent on a diversion by the local gendarmes. With a gorge and reservoir between us and the tent!

The GPS was reset to shortest route, which took us down a wonderful selection of tiny twisty lanes in some stunningly beautiful scenery. Not that I was worrying too much about the scenery at this point, with ever more frugal throttle openings up hill, flat on the tank on the level bits and coasting down hills!

In the event we made it back with about 15 miles worth of fuel to spare, although my buddy was already planning how to transfer fuel from his more reasonably sized VFR800!

But that wasn’t the end of the fun.

Next morning, we packed away the tent and rode up to the supermarket filling station half a mile away… to discover it was unmanned and naturally none of our UK cards worked! All of a sudden, that 15 miles of fuel came in handy to do the 12 miles to the next nearest filling station!

The trip came about because I hadn’t had a ride abroad other than for training for a bit – the one planned at the end of last year went down the pan when I had my passport stolen at the Bol d’Or in September.

So having scanned the web, I found a round of the Belgian national superbike championship happening at Dijon, a track I’d never been to, on the edge of the Morvan, a bit of France I fancied exploring. I whizzed through it in the car on the way back from the Bol and it reminded me of the Ardennes – hilly countryside with lots of trees and winding roads.

So my buddy Keith decided to come along. He headed over to Kent on Thursday afternoon just before the weather front forecast for that evening arrived, and for an hour or so we experienced the stunning electric storms that night from the comfort of the pub.

Next morning we set off at 8am, heading for Eurotunnel and dodging the gravel and the broken branches in the road.

Over the other side of the Channel, it was cold. Cold and windy! The ride down towards the Morvan wasn’t the pleasantest 150 miles I’ve done on a motorway as it was into the teeth of a headwind but at least it was largely dry, with the storm front having passed over to soak the Saxonring on Saturday where the MotoGP was taking place.

Off the autoroute at last, we swung south east to the tail end of the Ardennes round Bar le Duc, an area which is rolling rather than hilly. The waterproofs did come out for an hour or so towards the end of the ride, as we approached our planned overnight stop at the campsite at Chatillon-sur-Seine.

Having arrived, we then debated whether to put the tent up or look for a B&B, as the weather was chilly and cold…

…and we plumped for a hotel in the town.

Like the undistinguished town itself, the hotel was a pretty crappy place, but we did find a rather nice home-made pizza in a nice little restaurant tucked away round the back of the town, then apres food we had a slightly surreal beer standing outside a bar listening to two french guys play guitar and sing over backing tracks.

As it turned out, the scuzzy hotel was a smart choice; it was a very cold night with more overnight rain, and when we set off on Saturday morning at 8am it was still wet which would have meant packing a wet tent.

So with the morning’s TV forecast suggesting heading south was likely to bring us into slightly warmer and sunnier weather, we took another policy decision, decided to skip the bike race at Dijon and set off for the Auvergne instead.

As we rode through the grey, damp and cold Morvan – a huge contrast to the trip the other way in September when it was hot and sunny – at just 10C I was regretting not packing a fleece, let alone the heated clothing! At least I had my EDF windstopper.

We picked our way round the loose gravel, tar seams and bits of polished tarmac, and eventually out under clearer skies, as we tracked SW and swung round the north of Clermont Ferrond.

Another smart choice. It wasn’t that warm down in the Auvergne – high teens whereas it had been 30c just a few days earlier – but it was dry (except for some light overnight rain) and mild enough at night in the tent for the two nights we were there.

We popped up the tent mid-afternoon at St Gervais d’Auvergne, then took the short ride over to the Vulcans national park… pretty spectacular! It holds the largest concentration of extinct volcanoes anywhere in the world. They’ve blocked off access to Puy de Dome, the tallest of the cones, so we circled it, stopped for coffee and made it back to the tent about 6:30, shower, meal, beer etc..

Sunday started cloudy again, and I kept the EDF windstopper top on under the ‘Stich for another day as we headed down to the Monts de Cantal, which is an extinct (or it might be dormant – I can’t remember!) stratovolcano. It reaches over 1800m, with the road going virtually to the top of Puy Mary, which was in and out of the clouds. At about 3pm, it was 9C up there!! We didn’t stay long as the coffee shop up there was crowded full – just time enough for some photos.

As we descended, the sun came out and temperatures reached the dizzy heights of 19C! However, a chap in a petrol station said it had been 33C last week!!

Then followed the scenic ride back through the gorges with my eye on the fuel! I knew I should have done a splash and go when we stopped for coffee mid-afternoon next to an open filling station, but putting just 4 or 5 litres in when you filled up less than an hour ago always seems so daft!

Then back on Monday. As we were much further south than originally planned, the ride back was Far Too Much Motorway. At least the wind was behind us! We followed the autoroute as far as Orleans, where I hit my “motorway wall” and then headed across country.

It was relatively scenic but slow going, as I hit some “urban fringe” roads that I wouldn’t have chosen had I been navigating from the map rather than the GPS!

Trying to thread the needle between Rouen and Paris, something the combination of “all roads lead to Paris” and the lack of an M25-equivalent makes necessary if you don’t want see the Eiffel Tower, I ended up going through Chartres instead of taking minor roads round it, then through an interminable series of villages with 20kph limits and vicious speed bumps before hitting fun open roads north of Les Andelys to Neufchatel-en-Bray, where we picked up the autoroute for the final 100 miles back to Sangatte.

On the whole, the Garmin i3 tucked up under the fairing does a pretty good job, but I wasn’t quite careful enough setting waypoints.

Amazingly we beat the schedule at the tunnel and got on one train earlier than planned, and were back in Blighty by 6:30 on Monday evening.

1400 miles or thereabouts in 4 days, with something like 900 done off the autoroutes! Quite a trip!

Another Crash – follow up…

Thanks for the comments on the previous post… my friend is OK but has had a few flashbacks over the last couple of days. She was involved in nasty accident when riding pillion many years ago, and it brought it all back.

I was in two minds as to whether to post it up, bearing in mind I’m speculating somewhat about the causes of the accident.

But having been to the site and seen the evidence, heard what she had to say (which is essentially what she told the police who attended the scene), and drawn my own conclusions I don’t think anything I’ve said is unfair to the riders concerned.

Target fixation is a real problem, and a difficult one to deal with, along with the frozen steering and ineffectual braking.

The only real solution is to know how to get out of trouble when you find yourself in it, and to mentally prepare and rehearse how you will deploy your solution in an emergency, so you go into what some sportsmen call a “shot routine” when the situation develops for real.

There’s a fairly amazing coincidence here as the last post but one of mine challenged the view held by a UK expert that the emphasis on training should be on “collision avoidance” rather than “collision evasion” strategies.

The idea of “zero risk” by avoiding getting into situations that require a rapid escape might seem a wonderful idea; in practice no matter how good your avoidance tactics are, the reality is that the slightest error can lead to a very real and very immediate emergency you need to get out of – and if you don’t have evasion techniques off pat, you’ll end up looking at the front of a car from far too close, just as this rider did.

Collision avoidance techniques are only half of what you need on the street.

Sadly, though I am an eternal optimist and hope to be proved wrong, I expect Ken is right about lessons to be learned. Most of us are good about rationalising a bad decision after the event, and motorcyclists are no better and no worse at it than anyone else.

Another Sunday, another rideout… another crash

I was just finishing up a few hours work on Sunday afternoon when I had a very shaken call from a friend of mine.

A couple of bikes out on a group ride had gone flying past her on the A252 between Challock and Chilham in Kent. She thought they were tanking on a bit, as she wasn’t hanging around in her car on what is a pretty fast bit of road.

One of the bikes in the group overtook her and the car ahead of her going into a left hand bend bend, and when she went round the bend herself a second or so later, it was just in time to ride into a shower of debris and see a rider cartwheeling into the hedge on the far side of the road, whilst two more bikes and riders were in the middle of crashing in the left hand lane.

She managed to stop without hitting anything or anyone although a chunk of flying bike hit the front of her car. No wonder she was a bit hysterical on the phone.

I passed the scene an hour or so later on the way over to see if she was OK.

From what I could deduce from the skidmarks, the bike that started the incident ran over the white line on the exit from a left hander that follows a short straight and hit an oncoming car head-on. The rider appears to have straightened up and locked up the rear when the bike was about 1m the wrong side of the centre line. From that point, he went diagonally across the other lane and hit the car.

The wreckage of the bike then slide back over the centre line and skittled the two bikes that were behind it, whilst bits of debris hit my friend’s car, and also damaged another bike that just happened to be in the mix.

The other two bikes that crashed ended up straddling the barbed wire fence on the inside of the straight with one rider apparently having flown over the fence in the field beyond it.

There are chunks taken out of the road surface by the sliding bike for 30m or so from the original impact point, and bits of the three bikes spread over the best part of 100m. One bike lost its front forks, snapped clean off as well as having its front wheel shattered.

From the car’s tyre marks, the driver was clearly swerving left and braking hard to try to avoid the bike at the time of impact, and was well away from the centre line; the impact happened only about 2m from the left kerb. The impact visibly shoved the car sideways (you can see that from the car’s tyre marks) which gives some idea that the bike was travelling at speed when they collided. The car ran left across the grass verge before ending up in the hedge.

Not surprisingly the driver of the car that was hit was in deep shock.

So what happened?

I know the road well, riding it several times a week, and it’s a fast but wide and innocuous bend with a virtually perfect surface – ironically until it was resurfaced a couple of months ago, it was one of the worst-surfaced bends in Kent! The weather was fine, warm and dry.

My friend apparently saw the rider running wide just before he disappeared from sight, and had interpreted this as an attempt to overtake the rider further ahead. But assuming I’ve read it right from the straight rear wheel skid mark, I would guess he just turned in too early after passing the cars, thus apexed too early which meant he started to run wide and at this point, rather than correct his line by steering he stood the bike up and braked, from which point on he was committed to going straight and inevitably into the collision.

Why did the others crash? They made the mistake of being too close and went down too being unable to avoid the fallen bike.

The woman in the car clearly did all she could to avoid the rider – she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time; likewise my friend who hit the chunk of debris.

Excess speed? Well, given the bike hadn’t gone down mid-turn and was still on its wheels, the chances are had the rider had the knowledge and/or the confidence to steer aggressively, or even trail brake, he’d have got round. Not neatly but he wouldn’t have run wide into the oncoming traffic.

But once committed to braking upright the end result was always going to be bike and rider going tangentially across the centre line.

Cornering errors are a mistake we can all make. Unfortunately, this particular “run wide on a left hander” is the classic killer accident in a bend. It’s an accident that’s been identified in all the motorcycle accident studies from the Hurt report of the early 70s to MAIDS a couple of years back.

30+ years of biking development and better training and yet we STILL make the same mistake.

But more than that, the incident’s an illustration of how fast things go wrong on a bike when we push a bit harder – the margins for error are narrower and go away much faster than people realise. We operate on safety margins of centimetres a lot of time. And when things go wrong, we go from being comfortable at the speed we’re travelling at to unable to cope in a millisecond.

And with ever-faster bikes and ever-faster cars that we overtake at ever-higher speed we forget another thing; with the extra speed, the “point of no return” at which we are committed to a bend gets ever-further back from it too.

With a faster bike we need MORE space to safely complete an overtake, NOT less, because the bend ahead hasn’t changed, and we need to get the speed down again to get round it!!

As far as I know, all three riders have serious but not life-threatening injuries. They are very, very lucky, particularly the guy who hit the car head-on. The woman driving the car was in deep shock and also had minor injuries, and my friend has had flashbacks to an accident on a bike in her past.

Final point. However much we would like to think we can, we don’t ride the road in isolation, as this accident has shown. Group rides are great fun but…

…keep the pace sensible at the front – you might think you’re setting a fun pass at the front, but following riders have to work progressively harder to keep up.

…and if you’re at the back and can’t keep up, don’t feel it a matter of pride to try, ride at your own pace.

Sat 11 July Oxford – course available

Due to a last minute cancellation, I’ve now got Saturday 11 July available for a course, starting from Oxford.

I can do any one day course, including a City Traffic course which would up in c London.

If anyone is interested in a one day course, drop me a line. Details of the courses are on my website survivalskills.co.uk.

Evasion or Avoidance? Successful strategies for any rider!!

Following a Google (as you do), I came across a statement where the write identified a fundamental difference in mind-set between police training in the UK and the United States. He said:

“Over there they teach evasion techniques; that is what to do when you meet an accidient (or more correctly, crash) situation. Over here if you have gone that far you have got it seriously wrong in the first place.”

I have to comment on that! Keeping out of trouble is a great idea but from day one when we first let ourselves loose on the roads, we’re trying to avoid situations where we put ourselves at risk of a crash or a collision. That’s not an “advanced” concept, it’s basic survival!

All advanced training in hazard “avoidance” does is make us better at seeing those situations and stying out of them; it’s not in itself a concept unique to advanced drivers and riders!

But if we’re honest, however “advanced” we get at reading the road ahead, sooner or later we’ll still make a mistake, and at that point evasion tactics are our key to escaping from the situation that’s developing badly.

In the course of my researches, I’ve had quite a lot of dealing with MSF instructors and the coursework that they teach, and have been favourably impressed by the evasion tactics in their work and as explained by US writers like David Hough.

Many accident reports highlight the fact that the bike could have escaped IF the rider had used the right inputs at the right time, yet the very latest UK Driving Standards Agency advice on bends crashes in the UK simply repeats the sage advice “don’t go into a bend too fast”.

Aside from the obvious question about how do you know it’s too fast, it’s not much practical help to the rider who’s already committed the error is it?

The inescapable conclusion has to be that neither the “don’t get into trouble” nor the “let’s learn to get out of trouble” approaches are in themselves wrong; but that each, if practiced to the exclusion of the other, is inadequate alone.

Latest Availability for training – July and August

Just a quick reminder that as the long summer evenings are here (or as my buddy Keith puts it; “that’s it, longest day, summer’s over, winter is on the way”), for the next 6 weeks or so I’m available for evening training.

Although I’m heavily booked up for the next two weeks, due to a couple of last minute cancellations some days have freed up in July. So here’s the latest availability in Maidstone and Oxford for the month ahead:

Sun 5 July
Mon 6 (day only)
Tue 7 (day only)

Thu 9 (day only)
Fri 10

Sun 12
Mon 13
Tue 14
Wed 15

Tue 21
Wed 22
Thu 23
Fri 24
Sat 25
Sun 26
Mon 27
Tue 28
Wed 29
Thu 30

Next available dates

Mon 17 Aug

There’s a couple of highly desirable weekends in there – so grab ‘em whilst you can! If you’ve been dithering, now’s the time to do a course and enjoy the rest of the summer with your enhanced skills!

Summer heatwave and evening training

It looks like the heatwave is about to come to a end, with cooler and fresher showery weather pushing in from the Atlantic across the whole country by the weekend, but here in Kent we’re set for at least one more “phew, wotta scorcher” day with temperatures up into the 30s!

(Tip: make sure you hydrate properly in any warm weather! Getting dehydrated takes no time at all on a bike, where you’re relying on the wind evaporating sweat to stay cool. By the time you start feeling thirsty, it’s too late – you are already dehydrated! Dehydration affects your concentration levels and your ability to make decisions; don’t underestimate the risk! It was interesting to hear Martin Hopp make this very point in his pre-ride briefing at the training at Castle Combe back in May!)

The spell of very warm weather happened to coincide with my busiest spell of the year, and as various trainees melted in front of me from the heat I wondered again why so few people take up my option of evening training.

With the long evenings, there’s a window of 8-10 weeks where it’s perfectly light enough to train to around 8:30 or so before finishing up with a debrief, and as we skip the lunchbreak a normal one day course can be done in two nights!

If the weather gets spectacularly hot during the day, as has been for the last seven days, the 6:30 start means we miss the heat of the day, and often if there have been storms they also have tended to fizzle out in the evening.

Yes, there’s a problem with low sun late on, but the same is true of training any time from November to February, and careful attention to routes can usually minimise the amount of time we spend peering into the glare. We just have to remember that if we have the sun lighting the road ahead of us, it’s the guy coming the other way who is peering into the sun!

And of course, you don’t have to take a day off work either!!

Karen has been this summer exception to the rule, and has booked me up for the “Bends” and “Double Bends” courses so we’re doing two nights this week, and two nights next. We were out last night, and had a terrific run on nearly empty roads, in glorious evening sun, and had our final chat of the evening over a cold drink sitting at a table in the garden of my local – very nice.

I’ve still got a few evening dates in the diary for anyone who wishes to book a course and take advantage of the long evenings ahead.

From Sarah

From Sarah Gray (Confidence Builder / Survival Skills courses, June 09)

“Thank you too for the training it is so good to have a course that is so flexible and at a pace that a beginner like me felt comfortable with at all times. I have plently to work on now and looking forward to a much safer and enjoyable time on my bike.”