Hi, just thought I'd post in here on an effect I noticed this morning - the bike bow wave.
This occurs when lane filtering. Think of "polite" car drivers as the sea. When a bike filters up to a car a polite car driver will attempt to make room so the biker can filter past easily, they move to the side of their lane away from the biker. In effect it creates a bow wave like a boat does.
All good and well when this is 1 biker filtering between two lanes.
But, where there are three lanes, or more, going in the same direction, a biker splitting in between the first two lanes will create a bow wave for any other riders filtering between the second and third lane.
In a scenario where the first biker is slightly ahead filtering between lanes 1 and 2 and the second biker is filtering between lanes 2 and 3. The effect of the first biker will reduce the filtering gap of the second rider due to polite cars moving out of the way of the first rider.
I don't often think about this but had to this morning when suddenly my filtering space was effectively closed down, due to the bow wave.
How to handle it? Simple, just create a distance between yourself and the other filtering rider (even though he is filtering between other lanes).
This will allow cars to have time to be aware of your presence (they are focusing on the first rider and usually miss the second filtering rider, who is filtering past on their other side).
And more importantly - never filter past a car at the same time as another rider on the other side of the car. This is just plain rude to the car driver, and may spook them into reacting to one rider and hitting the other.
Hopefully this all makes noob sense. Just posting as it nearly caught me out this morning.
Cheers
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