I don’t buy this. How would inertia help you balance? If anything, it will make the bike harder to turn.
Balancing a bike involves a very specific set of learned reflexes. You need to correct for almost imperceptible tilt by turning the handlebar in the direction of the tilt. You need to nitiate a turn by allowing the bike to lose balance and lean towards the direction you want to turn, or forcibly lean the bike by counter-steering. This isn’t instinctive, it’s a learned response. bughunter explained the process.
Bikes do have a certain amount of “automatic” balance in the form of trail. See the staff report Early Out linked to. But it’s not enough to balance a bike with a rider. And turning a bike involves a lot more than just turning the handlebar in the direction you want to go.
By the way I don’t think it’s correct to say that gyroscopic force is “irrelevant.” It’s definitely unnecessary for balancing, but I think it still makes a noticeable change in the handling characteristics.
In 1995 I got a traumatic brain injury in an automobile accident. It took me about 3 months to learn to walk, among other things. About 2 years later I had an opportunity to try a bicycle and could not do it and at one time bicycling had been my only means of transportation. I can ride a bicyclce no and most other things, too.
Read his column more carefully. You will learn that bikes do have self correcting system built in, called trail. A bike with no rider will sail along by itself remarkably well, compared to something without a self correcting balancing mechanism built in.
I agree with scr4 for the most part, but I think you are underestimating trail. I have an absolutely hopeless sense of balance. I have never managed to cope with any balancing pastime. But cycling is no problem and never has been from the day I learned to let the bike find its own way.
A couple of points that occurred to me subsequently. When I was a kid and used to muck about with riding no hands and so on, on a regular basis, on a motley assortment of bikes it was clear that it was those with very smooth turning forks that were easiest to ride no hands. Which tends to support the theory that letter trail do its own thing freely gives significant assistance with remaining upright.
Also, trail on a bike without a rider is probably less effective, because for trail to work, you need the wait of a rider to cause the bike to “sag” around the front tyre contact patch, invoking a counter turn to bring the bike upright.
And bughunter unless you have a cite to show that riding a bike is no more an easily remembered activity than any other, and that your cerebellum theory is actually proven correct, you are no less speculating and theorizing than any of the rest of us.
If you are going to argue that riding a bike is difficult and requires great sense of balancing, then you are going to need to demonstrate that it can be forgotten or refute what others are claiming about bikes balancing themselves * when set in motion *.
Inertia has plenty to do with it, because once you set something in motion it tends to stay in motion until something acts against it. Take something and spin it around and create the imaginary centripul force which is more accuratelly known as inertia. Inertia allows you to create perfect circles as you twirl it around.
If you can provide the motion - a la an adult who can generatre it easily- you can keep the bike going forward and balanced (and don’t skim over other’s points about bikes going on their own until frictio slows them.0
The most difficult thing for a kid to do is provide enough muscle to keep the wheels turning. Obviously motion must do something because it’s a lot easier to balance a moving bike than a stationary one. Once set in motion, most of the problem is solved. Kids lack coordination as well. Adult coordination means that there isnt a whole re-learning process involved. Maybe just fine tuning when you jump on a bike years later, but that is it.
And if you see adults riding who haven’t rode in a while, they suck at steering and at finding the brakes. They ride effectively though. I vacaation at the Jersey shore where you’ll find people biking that haven’t biked for years on the boardwalks. They get going quickly, but have trouble stopping and they tend to get nervous turning. They are 90% good because they can easily turn the pedals cand create some forward progress.
You might be right. I do know the amount of trail makes a big difference in handling.
Nevertheless, I have a couple of bikes which I can’t ride hands-off at all. One is a foldign bike, the others are recumbents. But with my hands on the handlebar they are as easy to ride as any other bike. This leads me to believe that the rider’s reflex plays a major part in balancing a bike.
stormhauke, that is not the issue. I don’t doubt that what bughunter says about the cerebellum is true, I just doubt that it is an answer to the question (or the whole of it).
I don’t understand what you mean then. The cerebellum is involved in coordinating motor functions, and riding a bike is certainly a motor function. It’s not the same function as walking, but I don’t see how it’s fundamentally different.
Well, at the flying school where I teach, we once had a student (16 or 17 years old) who was really good with the bookwork, but having a really hard time learning to fly the plane. He got passed to a senior instructor, who discovered by chance that the student had spent most of his childhood with his nose in a book, and thus never learned to ride a bike.
So the instructor taught him, with some difficulty, to ride one. Then he taught him to fly. The motor skills and simple multitasking from the bike helped a great deal, it seems, with flying.
I don’t know, however, if the student is still flying or still riding bicycles. (It’s been about three years).
Sturmhauke, the point is that cycling is something that has a reputation for being something that is particularly noteworthy in terms of how surprisingly easy it is to remember how to do it when you haven’t done it for a long time. And that is what the OP was asking about.
I don’t doubt that what bughunter says is generally true, but it doesn’t explain why cycling would have the particular reputation that it does.
bughunter did not so much answer the question as dismiss the question. Further, he did not provide any cite or other hard reasoning upon which to base doing so. Which ironically leaves him doing exactly what he criticised others for doing.