KarmaCycle: wipe out

Thursday, 11 March 2010

I had an accident this morning - and it's on helmet cam. I'm OK, by the way

I had a miserable commute in this morning. I was told by a van driver that I needed to learn how to ride a bike within 3 minutes of leaving home. Then this happened. I was riding along the very busy Bayswater Road quite happily. Suddenly, as I tried to accelerate after a light, my chain completely slipped and I was peddling on air. I completely lost my balance and knew I would crash. By some miracle, I managed to fall right on to the pavement and not the road (there was a taxi very close behind me) and I got away with a few grazes. It was shocking more than anything else and seems to prove to me that you should always have a well-maintained bike if you're messing around on the big roads. I suspect my chain is getting old and it's certainly making a lot of creaking.

Anyway - see what you think as I had my helmet camera on at the time.

The Cycle of Karma

When you're cycling around 100 miles a week through London, you develop some strange notions. The one I can't get out of my head is that you build up karma - good and bad - depending on how you cycle. So - if you stop at red lights, wait politely for pedestrians, smile at cars, you get rewarded - the next light turns green for you straight away, someone smiles back at you - you get the picture. Of course this doesn't always work, but it works often enough for me to try to cycle by those rules. Most of the time.