Commuting by Velomobile

I've been feeling pretty anxious about taking the VM into Glasgow at rush hour and have been collecting reasons why it might not be wise, but decided last night to bite the bullet and ride in to work...
Didn't feel too good about it this morning, but fronted up (with a short panic when I couldn't find my suit carrier) & hell I'm glad I did...
Whilst VM's have many uses, dense urban environments are probably not at the top of the list, especially at rush hour!  But this is prob the best commuting bike I've used:  huge luggage capacity (I've never been able to take a suit carrier on a bike before and was also carrying my Timbuk2 bag, 2 pairs of shoes (don't ask), a huge d-lock with cable addition and a waterproof.  I prob could have taken more, but would have had to pack carefully.  Certainly better than the 7 litres of space I have on the Fujin!  The other thing is that you worry less about weight when the bike weighs nearly 30kg: what's another 5-10kg?  I bought a mini d-lock for the Fujin to reduce weight 'cos I worry about these things on a light bike.  I bought an extra big one for the VM.  Add in the amazing being-visible-ness and this is pretty close to perfect....  Oh & the speed, can't forget the speed...

I have commuted this route a fair amount on both the trike and the Fujin.  The route is rolling for the first half, then a big hill (down hill on the way in, up on the way home), then some dense traffic and big lumps.  Going in today was the fastest I've ever done it, despite being the least fit I've been on this commute.  Home was a different ball park: the hill slowed me somewhat.  I was still faster than the trike's fastest time & not too far from the Fujin's.  This is compared to being fitter on the other machines and filtering on them (I refused to today: I didn't want to get into advanced manoeuvres whilst still familiarising myself with the machine), so there was a time penalty in both.

Traffic behaves differently around the VM compared to both upright and 'bent bikes.  Not worryingly so, but worth noting.  Dual mirrors are great though.  Cyclists were odd though.  The road cyclist who decided to race me was a pain since he sat in a blind spot (I have three for a bike: behind and to the left, directly behind and behind and to the right; each are very small, but big enough to accommodate a road bike).  I had no idea which of these he was in until he decided to overtake.  (If you decide to race a VM, you can feel terribly proud of yourself if you overtake a very out of shape rider going uphill by paralysing them in a dangerous position since they can't see you and don't want to move in or out in case they hit you and can't accelerate 'cos they are checking mirrors and windows to try to see where you are.  Good thing neither of us got injured, but you got past me for 30m, so it was prob worth it, right?  & can you overtake on the right next time?  You know, like in the Highway Code?)  When the road went down, the VM came into its own though...

I wanted the Milan as a distance bike, but it's a really good commuter too.
*best commute ever*

Milan internal pics

 Bokeh view of DD gear changer

 Milan Mk 2 #43 & the (hopefully) not-explodey idler

 Left control stick with DD gear changer

 Indicator switch

Internal view with much carbon loveliness

Milan First Ride Report

I picked up my Milan on Sunday & rode it home on what should have been a fairly straight, flat 75km route, but managed to take a different route and did closer to 100km through some very hilly country.  This was a really stupid mistake, but a good way of testing limits (although, I got far closer to mine than to those of the Milan).
First, some details:

It is a carbon Milan Mk2.  Specced with a twin chainring up front, a 9 speed 11-32t cassette and a Dual Drive hub.  It has the race wheels, hub brakes and the indicator/brakelight kit.  There are two B&M Cyo lights up front.  Internally, it has "Panzer steering" since I couldn't get on with tiller steering when I test rode a few VMs.  Gear changing is handled by two grip shifts with the DD controlled by a three speed box on the left control stick.  Left and right brakes are controlled by independent lever on the corresponding control stick and the lights and indicators are on two and three way rocker switches at the top of the sticks.  So everything is immediately at hand.  I had phone working as sat nav/bike computer mounted on a sticky pad on the RHS wheel arch.  This is only partially visible, so will need moved at some point when I work out where to put it.
There are two Conti GP4 tyres with slimed inners up front and a Schwalbe Marathon Supreme (my favourite ever tyre) at the rear.  Marathon Supremes don't fit up front, so had limited choice.
I started out in a huge down pour, so got to try it's wet weather performance first.  Given that it lives in Glasgow, this will be its natural environment, so it was prob fitting that this was the start of the ride.   My first surprise was how water-proof it isn't.  I guess I was expecting car levels of weather protection, rather than hugely-improved-on-bike levels, which is what I got.  So this was down to poor assumptions rather than a design flaw, but is worth noting.  It is very impressive how good the visibility is in heavy rain: I was a little anxious about this, but it was fine when moving.  Roundabouts in a downpour would be tougher, but you can always pop the flap forward for an unobstructed view.  I got Makrolon coated plastic, but have no idea how much impact this had since I have no comparison.
Ride-wise, it is a completely different animal at speed compared with less than 20kph.  Moving slowly, it is a pig to accelerate (which is to be expected with high mechanical resistance (from the chain routing) and the weight) and has heavy steering with almost no lock.  It isn't a lot of fun (I know this well, my route included a couple of 10% climbs with no run up, and several more 7+%ers).  At speed, however, it is a completely different experience.  Easy to maintain pace, climbs well and (scarily) responsive steering.  As would be expected, it descends fantastically.  The plan appears to be to maintain speed.  I could outclimb a stronger rider that me who was on a Nazca Fuego when I got a run up on the c2-3% slopes when I was riding accompanied, so the weight is offset by improved aerodynamics and momentum on the easier stuff.  The steeper stuff needs a bigger run up or avoided.  But you don't get one of these for climbing cols.  Well, I didn't....
This is going to be properly warm during the summer months.  It was 13°C outside when riding & I got very warm.  This'll be very much appreciated in winter, but I may drop the hood in summer!
I have 150km planned over the weekend, including some night-time stuff, so can report a bit more fully after that.  I'll get some pics up tomorrow too.

Perceived safety, risk compensation and funny bikes

As a follow up from my previous post, I wanted to write something about the psychology of riding funny bikes and how it impacts on risk.  It was pointed out to me that there was a difference in approach and that this could impact on safety too, so I thought I'd spend a few hundred words fleshing this out.

First, a concept that came out of road safety research: risk compensation.  Wikipedia has a reasonable introduction on this concept.  In essence, our behaviour changes when we feel safe and we compensate for this with riskier behaviour.  There are plenty of examples on the linked to page above, but it has an impact on any safety oriented change.  If this change has a small impact on how safe we feel, but a major one on the risks we face, outcomes should improve & if the converse is true, then outcomes will remain constant or get worse.
Should there be an intervention that has no real impact on safety, but which makes us feel considerably safer, then this is very much a bad thing since outcomes should get worse: the perfect anti-safety intervention.
Conversely, something that makes us feel less safe and reduces risk is the perfect intervention; it's just not very saleable.

I personally dislike the concept of "safety" when it comes to impacting on risks & would prefer things to be laid out carefully in terms of costs and in terms of the risks that they impact on, but I'm strange like that.  See, the first thing I make sure of on a hot, sunny days ride that involves any speed at all is a pair of sunglasses (as long as they're appropriately made not to shatter), since I can reduce the risk of getting something in my eye and losing visibility on a fast turn and reduce the likelihood of not seeing things through glare.  Wearing sunglasses doesn't make me objectively "safer", but it does help me control and minimise a real risk.

This comes out of the way in which humans are terrible at assessing risk.  We genuinely are terrible.  This is too big an issue to even start pulling apart, but it's pretty well established.  Oddly, safety theory and behavioural economics (prospect theory) are two of the places where this is most explored; but either would make good places to read more.  If we're terrible at assessing risk, promoting safety equipment as making you safer or focusing on the risk and not the numbers and reasons is doomed to fail.  Not that my approach would work well; it'd just fail less badly.  And allow appropriate re-adjustment after incidents.

An inability to assess risk efficiently and risk compensation (which are functions of system 1 taking charge of things when it really isn't in the interests of the person) are one of the major reasons for the incidents occurring to returning cyclists, who are one of the major at-risk groups on the road.  (Interestingly, dissonance theory predicts that a returning cyclist who has been injured is more likely to form the belief/have the belief reinforced that cycling is dangerous, as well to share this belief, which is one of the reasons that we really need to be promoting good road craft rather than plastic lids and yellow jackets, but that's another subject).

This leads me on to the point of this post: how belief affects behaviour and how this affects risk.
Let's consider a typical recumbent cyclist, relatively to a typical upright cyclist.  You are unlikely to feel safer than a typical cyclist either does or by internal comparison thereto.  There are a few main reasons for this:

• Social factors - everyone keeps telling you how dangerous they are.  Facts be damned, they have little impact on our beliefs and perceptions of risk when compared to the views of our peers.  OK, this is true for uprights too, but there is a significant difference in scale.  Furthermore, other cyclists will tell you how dangerous they are, which will have far more impact than a non-cyclist telling you this.
• Size - being lower down/feeling shorter makes you feel vulnerable.  You can't help it.  ("Across diverse species, physical size and, relatedly, strength, are elementary determinants of formidability, and this is also true of humans" from here (which is worth a read on this subject) referencing this).  Size is fundamental to our assessment of threat.  Reducing experienced size, makes other things seem bigger & therefore more threatening.
• Difference - being unusual makes you feel at risk.  There is not always safety in crowds, but you normally feel safer if it is a crowd you feel you fit into.

There are a few bits and bobs around this, but this covers a bunch of it.  Now, my previous post suggested that the actual risk is lower when riding recumbent, however, it must also be that the perceived risk is actually higher.  That looks to me like the perfect safety intervention I mentioned above, but is probably the reason that folk stay on those weird, stick-bike things.

Recumbent safety: reflections on Kahneman's 2 mind system

If you ride recumbents, you're probably bored of the "Is it safe?" question & if you don't, you're probably thinking, "That looks dangerous."  If you ride recumbents, you've probably experienced the way drivers give you far more space, if you haven't, you've probably asked how drivers even see them....
I've discussed this briefly here, but getting a congruent answer has always intrigued me.  I've been reading loads of Daniel Kahneman's work recently & have finally got to an evidence-based model where theory predicts experience and practice: where the apparent dichotomy is explained.
Let's start from the top: are recumbents less likely to be hit by drivers?  YES!
Now let's get into the why...
Kahneman writes about a 2 mind system, which is described elsewhere as a dual process account of reasoning.  There's a fairly decent introduction here.  The basics that you need to understand are the characteristics of the two systems.  I'll use the terms that Stanovich and West coined that are used by Kahneman: system 1 & system 2.  For more detail, there's plenty of research out there, but a basic overview would be that system 1 is the implicit, autonomic function (the stuff you do without thinking (like balancing a bike)) and system 2 is the explicit, effortful system.  A simple example would be to ask you to complete the following sums:

• 1+1=?
• 17*24=?

The first you knew the answer to without thought, right?  The second probably took a very different process.  You had to think.  That's the difference....
(the answer to the second one is 408, in case you weren't sure (and the first one is 2, but you probably knew that)).
The other thing that's relevant here is how long it took you to solve the 2 equations.  Even if you solved 2 using a calculator, it took seconds longer, right?  Those seconds will mean a lot further down this piece.  In addition, you probably considered different ways to solve the problem before jumping into one.  You may even have evaluated it as you went through if you chose to do it in your head.  This consideration is also quite critical further on.
OK, so far, so obvious: nothing shocking here is there?  & it's all quite evidence-based and uncontroversial, but how does it relate to bikes....

Well, before we answer that, let's think about how driving works in this model.  Well, just a thought before this:the brain has been around some 7 million years; how much of this has been spent at >30mph?  Or more specifically: primates have been around for a few hundred thousand years; how much of this has been spent at >30mph?  & finally: homo sapiens have been around for about 150,000 years; you know the question..... 
There can have been no evolutionary advantage to being able to cope with these speeds & no reason to suggest that we might be able to deal with them competently.  If we can add that dense urban environments are also very new, so 30mph in these environments is new condition in new environment & doubly (or doubly^2) odd....
(As a very limited biological aside, to my knowledge, animals who can manage these speeds get complete tunnel vision & fail to recognise all sorts of risks.  I say "to my knowledge" deliberately since I know very little biology, so am happy to be corrected).

So since the brain is in an utterly alien environment, what does it do?  What it always does when it can't answer questions: substitute and take shortcuts.  So if I'm driving at 30 mph in a dense urban environment, what am I looking at?  If you think you pick all of the relevant things, I have met you before.  We pick things that are perceived as risks or threats and respond to them.  There are those of you who have trained system 1 to look for more things and are more likely to pick important stuff, but you're unusual (remember), most of us don't.
So, if I'm riding a bike, can I rely on being seen?  No.  Brutal but simple.  Even in primary position, you have no guarantees (in primary, you have an advantage in that all contact is seen as threat (socially or to insurance premiums or to delay in journey etc), but you're smaller, so less threatening.  If you're not in primary, or, worse still, if you're in a weak secondary, don't expect anyone to see you.  But you wear hi-viz, right, so it must be more visible, so I must be easier to see, right?  (Ask yourself, how common is hi-viz?  Can you expect something so common to crowd into the huge amount of potential things to be noticed by system 1?).  Well, sorry, no.  Hi-viz, is more visible in certain conditions, but visible and being seen are not equal.  Being seen is all.  Which means being seen as a threat or a risk, which means that system 1 will ask system 2 what to do.  So, if you're on an upright, primary, looking like a Police officer or looking like an unconfident, blonde woman (thanks, Dr Ian Walker) is all that'll work.

So where do recumbents fit in all of this?  What's the first reaction to a bent from most folk?  WTF seems to summarise almost all of it for me.  WTF is a fantastic reaction for a cyclist (or pedestrian) since it means that system 2 will be engaged.  The first thing that will happen is slowing down whilst system 2 works out what to do.  Slowly.  Whilst accessing moral systems too.

We saw above that when system 2 is engaged then the outcomes tend to be more considered.  Slowness, does not imply slow reactions, however; system 1 will be taking care of the basics whilst system 2 works out how to resolve this issue appropriately.
This model would predict then that under normal circumstances, system 1 will handle overtaking cyclists and will do this however it has been trained to undertake that manoeuvre.  Where, however, something, threatening or unrecognised is seen, then system 2 will handle the manoeuvre.  System 2 is more likely to undertake the manoeuvre with more care.
Furthermore, as familiarity increases and reduces the likelihood of system 2 engagement, system 1 will be being trained to pass 'bent cyclists with space.

As a caveat, there is no substitute for good road craft in staying safe on the road.  If I have decent road craft (there is no substitute for good road craft: anyone cycling without a strong appreciation of this is daft; find a tutor if unsure, there's a bunch of them/us around), I'm prob fine.  Especially if my road craft enables me to be aware of where I can and can't be seen & helps me to adjust for this...  This model is looking more a relative probabilities in like for like situations.  So I am certainly not implying that recumbent riders are safe by definition, but that they are less likely to be subject to ill-considered manoeuvres by drivers than if they were in the same position on an upright bike.

Which is something worth having.

Following feedback from a friend, I'll put another post up about the relative psychology of riders and how this impacts on safety; watch this space.


(I know there's a lot that's over simplified & under-explained, I was trying to make it readable: please ask if you want clarification.  I'm confident in the theory & stake my life on it most days, so feel free to ask for explanation/clarification)

*Edit, there is a follow up post here*

Velomobile pics

Ok, I've neglected this for a while.  There's an interesting post in process, but in the interim, here's some pics of my Milan that's being picked up next weekend....

Why ride a recumbent?

This is a question that is asked an awful lot and, in common with many other simple questions, doesn’t have a simple answer, but a complex and multifactorial one. Most of us who ride recumbents have a quick answer since (IME) you get asked the question so frequently that answering it fully becomes tiresome. I wanted to take the time to answer more fully and in a more detailed manner. Then I don’t need to ever do this again…..

How did it start?

 

I had had a fairly nasty crash on losing the back wheel of my upright in a 20mph corner. I was in a stookie for 6 weeks and starting to go a little stir-crazy at the enforced not-cycling-ness. Me being me, I started moaning about this on an online forum and someone suggested trying out a recumbent. I tried, bought, loved and bought more recumbents. It should be added that I was left with a little osteo-arthritis in my left wrist after the break, so for a few years, riding an upright was impossible. It is now possible, but becomes very painful on rough roads. The re-training of muscles takes a decent amount of time when transferring to ‘bents: the first 3 months have marked improvements and decent progress is easily made; but, as with many other things, it is the last 10% that is hardest. The second three months on a recumbent, I found very hard: I was on a far heavier bike with reduced power and am a bad climber anyway so hills caused me headaches. Getting that last little bit that changed hills from painful to alright was a drawn out process. It is worth being aware of this in advance if you are planning to completely switch over. I would find the switch a lot easier now since I am cycling a lot less, so have less power to transfer and am less-used to being able to climb, but I was cycling around 200 miles a week at the time of some lumpy roads, so was fairly fit and strong.

Why do I continue?

So that’s the ups and downs of starting with its reasons contained. I now do over 90% of my mileage on recumbents and only really use my road bike if I have to. My preference is for recumbents without question. Let me break down the reasons that, for me, constitute the basis of the preference.

Comfort. Upright cycling distributes weight across three different areas: feet, wrists and sit bones. It also requires maintaining a fairly difficult position if you want to reduce drag. I completed my first 100 miles in a day ride on an upright & it is fair to say that almost everything hurt afterwards. I had sore feet, extremely sore wrists, tired arms, an uncomfortable back and my neck was in agony. This was all in addition to the very tired legs that I had. When I have managed similar distances on a recumbent, I have finished with only sore legs. On occasion, my neck has been a little sore too. To be fair, some people find that the neck position is very sore to maintain, so they buy neck rests. I find that unnecessary, but can understand the reasons. The neck-soreness is far less on my Fujin (with a very reclined position and, therefore, a sharp angle to keep the head in the correct position) than it is on my road bike, but is an issue worth being open about. The reasons for this reduced soreness are that the weight is far more widely distributed and the position doesn’t need muscle tension to hold. Furthermore, rear suspension is frequently built into the frames, which can be achieved fairly easily without robbing power from the pedal stroke. In addition to this, the seats are normally padded in some way. There is a huge spectrum of comfort from a full suspension, wide-tyred, soft-seated touring machines through to the full-on race bikes, but if you compare the least comfortable recumbent to the most comfortable upright, the ‘bent wins hands down. Comparing like with like is not a task worth engaging in, the difference is night and day.

Aerodynamics. Anyone who has seen adverts in the cycling press for road bikes will be aware that this is a big issue. Fewer people understand why and how. I’m going to go through some approximated and simplified bicycle mathematics to explain this a little further. On the flat, speed is roughly the product of power versus drag. Drag rises as a cubic of speed relative to wind direction. What that means in practice is a doubling of speed requires eight times more power to overcome the resultant drag. In cars, what has happened is that the focus has been largely on more powerful engines to overcome drag. With human powered vehicles, there is a biological limit to maximum power and the engine is stuck at something around half a horsepower. This means to make a significant difference to maximum speed, you have to change the amount of drag (or, more accurately, the CdA): you have to make it more aerodynamic. Recumbents are typically 25-33% more aerodynamic than their upright cousins and velomobiles save far more again. You can see from the earlier formulations that this saving will quickly become huge at speed. In practical terms, this means I can go a lot faster for the same power, or the same speed for a lot further. Until the road heads up and the physics become power versus weight and drag becomes less significant. In a flat, windy country like the Netherlands, the advantage of recumbents is huge. I stay in a hilly and windy area so this advantage is certainly reduced, but I still find that there is a significant advantage: I’m quicker over a given route. As another simple comparison, the land speed record for a recumbent is 83.66mph and the fastest speed ever recorded in the TdF is 72mph. The former speed was recorded by a part-time athlete on the flat. The latter was recorded by an elite athlete descending a mountain. That is to say that with every conceivable advantage (a far better engine and a several mile long downhill), the upright still cannot get close to a recumbent. Comparing like-for like….

Once again, the difference on the flat and downhill is night and day.

It is worth mentioning weight, however, when discussing the relative speed of different machines. Recumbents tend to weigh more than upright bikes when compared like for like. There are two main reasons for this: the manufacturing runs are shorter and the chains are longer. Being a small market means that the budget for R&D is going to be significantly smaller than for uprights. Some of these budgets could be spent on things like novel use of exotic materials, but the money is unavailable. Consequently, there is something of a block in making very lightweight bikes. The other issue is the chain. On a RWD bent, the chain will be roughly 3* as long & therefore weigh 3* as much. That really starts to add up in what is a fairly heavy component. That all said, there are some fairly lightweight bikes available just now & almost certainly more to follow. 6-7kg is certainly achievable if you have the budget!

Safety. I am being serious here! Most people tend to ask if it’s dangerous to ride when they see me on a ‘bent and for the life of me I can’t work out why they would think it is. I have a theory around height and power and perceived safety, but the question is irrational and absurd. The first part is that you get given space when on a ‘bent that you don’t when on an upright. For the most part, Glasgow’s drivers are fairly good with cyclists (this is a relatively term, so perhaps should read less awful than many others), but on an upright, I am normally within touching distance of about half the cars that pass me in urban areas. This figure drops to well below 10% on a ‘bent bike and virtually 0% on a trike. In fact, on the trike, very few things get within 2 metres of me when passing. There are reasons for this, but all the same, the risk of accidental impact is hugely reduced. My other huge bugbear when riding an upright in traffic is that many drivers simply assume speed based on type of vehicle and don’t check. Many drivers see me on a bike and manoeuvre in such a way that indicates they think I’m doing about 10mph: which gets quite scary if you’re doing 25-30mph down a hill. I can only think of 2-3 occasions where a driver has pulled out on me in this way in many thousand miles of ‘bent bike riding and it happened twice on my 8 miles commute home last time I rode an upright. People worry about visibility too, but I find that visibility is a function of behaviour not size. Good road craft makes you visible, not being big. The only time it is an issue is approaching a t-junction where it is heavily parked, but leaning forward and inching forward until you can see you are clear tends to work.

The second aspect to the safety issue is the nature of the design and there are again two component parts to this. The first is the feet-first rather than head-first position. Whilst my advice would always be to avoid impacts in the first place, if you are going to have one, I’m guessing you’d prefer to hit feet first than head first. When I’ve not ridden an upright for a while & get on one, this aspect becomes terrifying clear when heading down a hill. Head-first with a centre of gravity above the wheels makes braking behaviour difficult and scares the hell out of me. Feet first with the centre of gravity behind the front wheel means that I can pull on the brake as hard as I like without risking of flipping & inspires a lot more confidence.

The other aspect is that I’m closer to the ground if I crash. This might not sound too great, but think it through. I’ve had two 30mph+ crashes from a recumbent (the first was down to my incompetence (trying to take a corner too fast) and the second due to a front tyre blow out whilst cornering) and I walked away from both with merely road rash and bruising. Don’t get me wrong, it hurts (a lot), but it heals fairly quickly and rarely requires medical intervention. I’ve only managed one crash at decent speed from an upright and broke my wrist (even though I was going a lot slower). So far this is a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, but the key lies in the mechanism. If you go down on a ‘bent, you’re on the ground before you can react, you slide (removing skin, normally from the buttocks), then you stop. There is no significant impact. From an upright, you tend to get an arm down. Which tends to break. There is a significant impact. IME, you get the road rash too, but that tends to hurt less from an upright crash, but that might be the broken bones distracting you.

In summary then: comfier, faster/more efficient and safer. The question, it appears, is not “why do you ride a ‘bent?” but “why on earth would you not ride a ‘bent?”