If you’re well and truly stopped, your feet are on the ground, and so instead of countersteering, you can establish the direction/magnitude of lean using your feet before you ever start rolling.
If turning the handlebars right causes the bike to lean left, then how is the bike stable? Stability on bikes is based on the trail of the contact patch, which means that a lean in one direction causes the fork to turn in the other direction, which corrects the lean.
I’ve never seen any actual evidence for countersteering. The only attempt I’ve seen was a modified bike which had the fork constrained to not turn at all, which unsurprisingly was unsteerable… but that just proves that the handlebars are necessary, not that you need to turn them the wrong way.
Please see video linked in post #4, where the only handlebar input is a push forward on one side of the handlebar and it causes the bike to steer to that side (i.e., push *forward *on the left grip, nudges wheel to point the right, bike steers left).
Also I rode motorcycles for 15 years and did my own experiments and became convinced this was true.
One tangential point; there are some who have argued that countersteering is a result of precession when the wheel is turned, initiating the lean. There are various demonstrations showing it’s a result of the steering geometry, not precession. Nobody is making that point here (mostly because it’s beside the point of the OP, but that never stopped anyone on SDMB;) ) so I haven’t rooted out a cite.
If you have a bike or a motorcycle, go for a ride. Get it up to speed, and take your hands off of the grips. Now, with the palm of your left hand push forward on the left grip, which will turn the handlebars to the right; the bike will lean to the left. You have just countersteered your way into a left turn.
Once you have established the lean with that countersteer, then you turn the bars to the left to begin following a leftward ground track.
If you’re on a heavy motorcycle at 80MPH, it will take a substantial and sustained forward push on that left grip to establish a significant lean angle.
Go forth and try this, and you will have your first-hand evidence.
Except you don’t, your unconscious brain has just learned to countersteer without you consciously thinking of it. I like this backwards explanation: You need to turn the wheel to turn. But to turn the wheel you first have to be leaning that direction. And to get to be leaning that direction, you have to first countersteer.
I’m with Machine Elf here - you can’t lean without first countersteering, you just may not realize it.
I rode bicycles for a long time before I ever heard of countersteering, then after I became aware of the concept, I started thinking of it when cornering on a road bike and I started being able to corner much better.
Either you’re lying, or you don’t remember. The truth is that it was motherfucking hard to learn. That’s why kids have training wheels for so damn long.
If you reverse the steering mechanism, it’s just as easy/hard to learn - and once you’ve learned, it’s just as easy to ride as a regular bike. In this fascinating video, Justin has a custom-made bicycle with a reversed steering system, and he doggedly learns to ride it. Once he’s internalized the automatic balance/steering responses, he rides it as gracefully as you or I would ride a conventional bike - and he finds that it is now impossible for him to ride a conventional bicycle, until his brain suddenly “flips” again and dredges up the old set of automatic balance/steering responses.
I just watched the video in post #4, am I the only one that felt he was changing lanes without sufficiently knowing what was behind or beside him? When I am riding in traffic and changing lanes, I always look in the mirrors and then turn my head to look beside me to ensure there is no one in my blindspot.
His riding made me nervous, I was expecting him to crash the entire time.
Anyway I can see where fixed forks would not work just because it would not move the wheel and would not engage the different gyroscopic effect.
As for the starting from a stop, yes, you sort of naturally lean the bike while on your feet before you start.
Basically the bike has to lean for you to turn. It is not like when you are on 4 wheels, you have to lean to turn. It is just how you lean to make that turn differs based on the speed, the experience and the terrain.
Dang it, now I wish I had ridden the bike to work today. I am jonesing for some wind in the face.
I rode mine in today (it’s a Honda Nighthawk 750). We’ve had a week of good weather here in southern PA. I’m going to take advantage of any good riding days I can get this time of year.
That’s part of the reason for my skepticism. I do regularly ride a bicycle, and I have done that experiment. When I rotate the handlebars to the right, I turn to the right.
In my defense, I had errands to run today and that would have been difficult on the bike.
When you say rotate the handlebars to the right, what do you mean by that?
I’ll wager you were slowly, gently turning the bars to the right at a rate that coincided with your developing lean angle (the countersteer was a subtle thing that happened just before that). Try this instead:
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ride in a straight line at a steady, brisk speed.
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now rapidly snap the bars 30 degrees to the right. Here, “rapidly” means “complete the handlebar movement as fast as you can.”
Do not gradually turn the bars to the right, and do not lean or deviate from straight-line travel before snap-turning the bars.
Depending on your forward speed, this should rapidly establish a leftward lean (at which point you will need to turn the bars to the left to avoid falling). I recommend wearing a helmet, and starting with small steering snap angles before you work your way up to 30 degrees.
This means that the left handlebar moves toward the front of the bike, and the right handlebar moves toward the rear of the bike. Viewed from above, the handlebars move in a clockwise fashion; the result will be that the front wheel is angled toward the right.
I’ve also tested counter steering on a bicycle but come to a different conclusion to you. Do absolutely nothing but turn the bars right and you will fall to the left. I had long wondered why, when riding very close to the edge of the pavement, I couldn’t turn away from the edge. I finally realized it was because there was no room for the brief countersteering required to initiate the lean.
This is mentioned on the Wikipedia page:
No citation is given there, but anyone who rides a bicycle long enough will certainly encounter this situation - either at the edge of pavement, or against a raised curb, or when drafting another rider a little too closely (the “overlapping wheels” mentioned above). You can’t simply lean your way out of such a situation, you must countersteer - but you can’t, because of the obstacle. Either you ride off of the pavement, or you bunnyhop the curb, or you hit the brakes to get some distance between you and the bike in front of you so you can countersteer.
Sure, the curb will prevent countersteering, but it’ll also prevent direct steering.
Chronos, are you sure about the direct steering part? Even a very small direct steering angle would allow one to edge away from the curb. Somehow, edging away from the curb becomes very difficult in this situation.
I’m going to preëmptively invoke Jobst Brandt. He passed away recently, and those of us who have studied the applied science of bicycle dynamics know two things about Jobst:
- He was a very cranky guy, and
- he was almost always right.
This isn’t an appeal to authority, exactly. But Jobst’s Ambrose Bierce-like take on the subject also turns out to be physically accurate:
[QUOTE=Jobst Brandt]
Countersteer
Countersteer is a popular subject for people who belatedly discover or rediscover how to balance. What is not apparent is that two-wheeled vehicles can be controlled ONLY by countersteer, there is no other way. Unlike a car, a bicycle cannot be diverted from a straight path by steering the wheel to one side. The bicycle must first be leaned in that direction by steering it ever so slightly the other way. This is the means by which a broomstick is balanced on the palm of the hand or a bicycle on the road. The point of support is moved beneath the mass, in line with the combined forces of gravity and cornering, and it requires steering, counter and otherwise. It is so obvious that runners never mention it, although football, basketball, and ice hockey players conspicuously do it.
[/quote]
I look at it like steering a boat with a tiller (either a sailboat, or motorboat that has an outboard motor with tiller steering). Once you become accomplished at handling the boat, you are not thinking “turn to starboard by moving the tiller to port”, you just think “turn to starboard by moving the tiller as necessary to accomplish the turn”. If you think about it, you are going to have trouble.
It’s the same with a bike (either motor or human-powered). If you’re going more than about 10 mph, you will counter-steer to accomplish your turn. It is so natural, you don’t notice what you are doing. If you think about it, you can confuse yourself to the point that you can no longer control where you are going (I’m not kidding).
I’ve owned and ridden a motorcycle for many years and still have a motorcycle endorsement on my license, and this stuff about leaning and countersteering is all news to me. I must do it, I suppose, but all I can say is that whatever it is I do seems completely intuitive – I’ve never thought about the mechanics of it, just like I’ve never thought about the actual mechanics of riding a bicycle. So whether it’s the “same” or not, ISTM that it’s equally intuitive.
The descriptions make riding a motorcycle seem much more complicated than it really is. The basic thing that has to be learned, besides how to shift gears, is just getting used to handling a heavy machine that weighs many hundreds of pounds and can go very fast, and that just takes experience. Beyond that, the important knowledge to have is all about safety.
ETA:
Exactly this.
It’s not just curbs though. Ride on a pavement that edges nicely on to dirt. There’s no physical barrier stopping the rear of the wheel from hanging over the edge in the process of “direct steering” as you call it, but you have to get the contact patch of the wheel on to the dirt in order to turn away from the dirt, i.e., counter steering, not direct steering. If you are scared of running on to the dirt then you kind of find yourself frozen, you can’t turn away from the dirt because that means getting the wheel on the dirt briefly, and you don’t want to turn towards the dirt, you end up just riding straight and invariably running on to the dirt anyway.