Thursday 11 September 2008

Roundabouts revisited

A couple of weeks ago Just Williams drew our attention to Cyclecraft by John Franklin. Yesterday I was in town to sort out some stuff, dropped into the bookshop and bought myself a copy, along with a book of local cycle routes.

Cyclecraft has no less than 16 clear and informative pages on how to negotiate a roundabout on a bike. The book describes the problems, and recommends plausible solutions. It nicely considers the issues from the perspective of both the cyclist and the car driver. I have already picked up on a couple of things that I could be doing better, and will no doubt discover more on further reading. 

The rest of the book looks to be of the same high standard, and my first impression is that Just Williams was spot on when he said that Cyclecraft "deserves to be read slowly and thoughtfully".

Yesterday evening I also explored one of the routes from my other new book (or at least a large part of it). It took me onto some unfamiliar roads, but the nights are starting to draw in, so a lot of it was in the dark. That rather detracted from the point of exploring new ground. However, it was a very satisfying stretch of 25 miles, including a number of roundabouts, all of which I negotiated safely and confidently (thanks, I admit on this occassion, to very light traffic rather than my study of Cyclecraft).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So, what is the answer to the multilane roundabout? Enquiring minds want to know...

gom1 said...

A very good question, but there is a lot to summarise, so I will post separately.