Bicycles riding contraflow

This is a common occurrence here (In Japan). It frustrates me as a “with the traffic cyclist”.
My main bone of contention is that if I wish to pass another cyclist going the same way as me I can saunter along behind them, until a safe opportunity arises to pass. With an contraflow rider the ability to time the passing is essentially taken away from me.
This is very dangerous and frustrating.

Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards!

Although it’s easy to infer by context, it’s customary to include a link to the column you’re commenting on. Something I wish the board could do automatically when you click the “Comment on this answer” link, but alas, it doesn’t.

Link to column: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3255/wouldnt-it-be-safer-to-ride-your-bicycle-against-traffic

Riding contraflow is incredibly dangerous. If people pulling out of driveways or into intersections expect traffic to come from the left (or, in Japan, the right), they will not see bicycles approaching from the wrong direction at high speed. WHACK!

There’s also the matter of relative speeds. Suppose, for instance, that the bicyclist is riding at half the speed of the cars. A bicycle going with the flow, then, will have a relative speed of half car-speed, while a bicycle going against the flow will have a relative speed of one and a half car-speed, or three times as great as the law-abiding bicyclist. This means that the law-breaking cyclist will encounter three times as many cars on his route. Each of those cars will only have a third the time to see him and react to him, and if there is a collision, the energies involved will be nine times as great.

I’m actually surprised that the accident rate is only three times greater, from Cecil’s article. Just the greater number of cars encountered alone would account for that, even before the other factors are considered.

Another reason why riding into traffic is dangerous:

Let’s say a bike is traveling at 10mph and a car is traveling at around 25mph. If the bike and car are traveling in the same direction, the car is approaching the cyclist at 15mph. If the car and the bike are traveling towards each other, the car is approaching the bike at 35mph – more than double the speed. The car’s driver’s time to react is cut by 1/2.

If the bike is heading towards a car, the driver of the car needs a minimum of 33 feet of distance in order to simply move their foot from the accelerator to the brake and start pressing on the brake. The car might need approximately another 65 feet of distance in order to stop before hitting the cyclist. In other words, the car and the bike need to be at least 100 feet apart if the car must stop before hitting the bicyclist.

However, if the bike and the car are traveling the same direction, the driver only needs about 15 feet before beginning to slowdown, and only ten feet to come to a complete halt – which really isn’t necessary since the car only has to slow down to 10mph to avoid hitting the bicyclist.

The most dangerous are cyclists heading into traffic while weaving in and out of parked cars. The cyclist is completely hidden until they emerge from around the car – surprising the driver. If the cyclist rode with traffic, they are less likely to be hidden behind a parked car, and even if they are, the driver simply has more time to react.

I had a friend who who was driving and was surprised by a cyclist that suddenly popped around a parked car while heading into traffic. There was nothing my friend could do. He had no time to react. He didn’t even have time to step on his brake. He hit the cyclist going at around 20mph. The cyclist fell on his hood, hit and cracked the windshield, fell off to the side, and was run over by the rear tire.

The cyclist died and my friend was initially charged with reckless endangerment and man slaughter. Both charges were quickly dropped when the circumstances revealed that my friend did nothing wrong. However, my friend still had to live with the guilt, the anger of the man’s relatives who are convinced he murdered their kinsman, and the image burned into his brain of that young man, flying over the hood of his car and hitting his head against the windshield.

Near my house is a one way road that leads into an intersection with a light. There’s a bike lane on that road, going the opposite direction because that’s the only obvious path for bikers to get around a particular area. It’s very confusing to bikers and drivers, especially since the bike lane goes next to on street parking with cars headed in the opposite direction. You need to look back for cars behind you and ahead for bikes riding towards you.

" When I was a kid"… bicycles had been invented but I think the earth was still cooling…in elementary school we had these weekly “Safety Tips!” posters that were supposed to educate and entertain.

One year they were all for riding one way, then the next they reversed it. I frankly don’t remember which way won, but it left me with the impression it was kind of arbitrary.

I, too, felt it was a bit arbitrary, especially when Cecil mainly focused on stuff like, it’s how everyone does it, “it’s the law”, people are expecting you to ride on the right, etc. None of those things would be true if the convention was otherwise.

I recall being taught to ride against the flow when I was younger, which is a bit scary, but at least you see the traffic coming. I’m not sure I accept that the collision velocity difference is very helpful- bike is still a big loser no matter what.

Qazwart’s analysis is more appreciated. Putting it in terms of reaction times makes a lot of sense.

In Japan, cyclists normally cycle on the footpath and at quite low speed. 99% of bikes in use are single-speed mama-chari that can’t easily exceed 20 km/h.

Vehicle traffic in cities and suburbs (where the vast majority of cyclists are) is also generally moving slowly. The situation is not at all comparable to western countries, where hobby cyclists and commuters travel on the roads at speeds of 30 or 40 km/h.

The Japanese situation (with hundreds of cyclists travelling in both directions on the same sidewalk and sharing space with pedestrians) may seem dangerous, but in a year living there I never once saw a collision between cyclists, or a cyclist hitting a pedestrian.

I consider it more likely that your memory is playing tricks on you than that the safety recommendations actually changed. This might be due to conflation with the safety tips for walking on the road (if necessary): When walking, you should indeed face traffic.

The difference is because of the speeds involved. A walker’s speed is negligible compared with that of a car, so going with or against traffic will make only a small difference in relative speed, and so being able to see the cars is the only consideration. A bicycle’s speed, however, is not negligible compared to a car’s, and the relative speed difference is quite significant.

Yes, and it gets worse from there.

I’ll use higher number which I think are more realistic. Let’s say the bike is going 12mph and the cars are going 36. When riding the same direction, closing speed is 24. When riding in opposite directions, closing speed is 48. Exactly double. So the drivers’ reaction time is cut in half.

Now suppose the trip is 3 miles long and the cars are 110 yards apart. The bike will take 15 minutes to complete the trip. If it’s traveling in the same direction as the cars, 96 cars will pass the bike. But if the bike is riding against traffic, 192 cars will pass it going the other way. So the number of encounters has also doubled.

And if there does happen to be a collision between the bike and a car, it will happen at double the closing speed, increasing the level of damage and/or injury plus risk of death. And kinetic energy increases by the square of the velocity, so the energy transfer is higher by a factor of 4.

So riding against the traffic…
cuts the drivers’ reaction times in half
AND doubles the number of passes
AND quadruples the damage of any impacts.

It seems to me this shows that riding against traffic is SIXTEEN TIMES more dangerous than riding with traffic.

That was beautiful, I saved it to print out.

gnoitall. Thank you for posting the link and the clarification.

hibernicus: I understand the image you describe very well, but that doesn’t cover the situation fully. In the city, it is true that most people ride on the pavment relatively slowly. Once you start riding between high population areas, popular with commuters, along roads with no pavement etc the situation changes a little. Although you are correct that the majority of Japanese riders are rather slow, there are many many bad riding habits displayed here. The aspect of contraflow riding that particularly annoys me as described in my original post, is unaffected by relative speed. What I didn’t mention before (because I didn’t want to make my post overly long) is that people tend to assume that you, the “with traffic” rider should pull out for them, the contraflow rider. I never understood this mentality as for me to pull out means I have to check over my shoulder to make sure it is safe to pass where as they have a clear view ahead (probably why the original submitter suggested it seemed safer). I have even been shouted at for refusing the budge over.

Just for clarification I live in Fukuoka, which due to its size and flat topography, has many, many cyclists.

There are many other bad cycling habits here, but I don’t want to be one of those ranting expats so I shall finish my Typhoo tea (because Japanese English tea is rubbish) and go to bed.

gnoitall. Thank you for posting the link and the clarification.

hibernicus: I understand the image you describe very well, but that doesn’t cover the situation fully. In the city, it is true that most people ride on the pavment relatively slowly. Once you start riding between high population areas, popular with commuters, along roads with no pavement etc the situation changes a little. Although you are correct that the majority of Japanese riders are rather slow, there are many many bad riding habits displayed here. The aspect of contraflow riding that particularly annoys me as described in my original post, is unaffected by relative speed. What I didn’t mention before (because I didn’t want to make my post overly long) is that people tend to assume that you, the “with traffic” rider should pull out for them, the contraflow rider. I never understood this mentality as for me to pull out means I have to check over my shoulder to make sure it is safe to pass where as they have a clear view ahead (probably why the original submitter suggested it seemed safer). I have even been shouted at for refusing the budge over.

Just for clarification I live in Fukuoka, which due to its size and flat topography, has many, many cyclists.

There are many other bad cycling habits here, but I don’t want to be one of those ranting expats so I shall finish my Typhoo tea (because Japanese English tea is rubbish) and go to bed.

The issue I see not infrequently with bicycle-car collisions is a driver making a right turn on red who pulls out to make his turn and is hit by a cyclist on the wrong side of the road. The driver’s attention is to vehicles approaching from the left, and a cyclist is moving fast enough that he doesn’t enter into the driver’s view as a conflict.

Another point that I don’t see discussed is traffic signals. If a cyclist is on the wrong side of the road the he’s opposite all the traffic signals for that direction, making them not only harder for him to see, but also harder to know what the safe maneuver is. For a cyclist on the wrong side of the road going through an intersection on a green, how are they going to react to a driver going the correct way who makes a left? They aren’t going to see the car making the left across their path, and the car isn’t going to see the cyclist.

In my experience, most of the cyclists who ride against traffic address this issue by completely ignoring the traffic signals.

A pedestrian facing oncoming traffic can quickly step sideways if need be to get out of the road. That’s often not possible for a cyclist, especially if there’s a curb or parked cars. The cyclist can, however, enjoy an enhanced view of his impending doom.

Yes the advice in the UK has always been to walk facing oncoming traffic. I lived out of town for a few years and had to walk home along a windy Cornish country lane. My technique was to always cross over before the bends so I could walk along the wider side, regardless of oncoming or with traffic of them giving me more time to see and be seen. Impractical on a bike of course.

Wow, that’s a mess. A two lane, one - way road with left side parking and a bike lane coming down between the lane and the parking strip that is counterflow. Ouch!

Yes, add to that you are required to give three feet clearance to the cyclist. I know many driver’s don’t, but it’s the law here anyway. So you have a bike closing on you and oncoming traffic, you have to come to a complete stop in the road because you can’t move over to give proper clearance. Right.

Whereas you can slow and follow a bike until traffic gives you clearance to get around.

As a cyclist, I’m not really comfortable in traffic. I ride on back neighborhood streets with low traffic, and the roads are extra wide. I did try it back in college a couple times, riding on busier thoroughfares, and it was too unnerving to me having cars coming that close to me from behind and passing right next to me. Even three feet was too close for comfort. I’m not a big rider anyway.

It’s actually a one lane road, there’s parking on both sides. It would be safer if there was parking only on the opposite side of the road from the bike path, but no way would they give up that many parking spaces around here.