Cycling in Sydney: how to test your mettle on the pedal

Let’s face it, some drivers don’t just dislike cyclists, they hate them with a deep, irrational and abiding passion.

A cyclist riding her bike in Sydney Park, St Peters, Sydney. Photo: AAP

It’s now about 10 months that I’ve been riding my bicycle to and from my place of employment, not to mention pedalling the length and breadth of Sydney on any given day off.

As I’m now about to take an enforced break from my late-blooming avocation as a MAMIL (middle-aged man in Lycra) due to a hip operation, I figured it was as good a time as any to pause and reflect upon some of my hits and misses out there on the mean streets and less-than-mellow brick roads of the Emerald City.

I’ve written about my greatest hit before — of how on my very first two-wheeled trip home from work, I got on the wrong side of the tracks and landed head-first on the concrete on the alleged “shared pedestrian-bike path” known as the Goods Line in inner-city Ultimo.

That was a salutary lesson, and in some ways I’m glad I got my bad prang out of the way early, for I’m sure it slowed me down and I’m damned certain it taught me to avoid any kind of train or tram tracks (they are a perfect, bike-wheel-sized trap, converting forward motion into a sideways-downwards trajectory in the blink of an eye.).

The other lesson that little episode taught me was the value and necessity of helmets, and anyone who laments the fact that they are compulsory is a bloody idiot.

Riding a bike around a congested, hilly city is equal parts effort and exhilaration, leavened by moments of sheer terror. Let’s face it, some drivers don’t just dislike cyclists, they hate them with a deep, irrational and abiding passion. Those of faint heart who have watched the notorious New Zealand road-rage woman would probably leave their two-wheeled steed in the stable for good after witnessing her dashboard-cam expletive-laced, hyperventilating extended rant against a group of riders on a winding mountain road.

Some drivers interpret the 1.5m passing rule rather stingily, especially the bus driver who brushed past me on a narrow section of Glebe Point Road, whizzing by so close that I felt the sucking surge of its slipstream and the hot fetid breath of its exhaust.

One must also be especially vigilant for potholes, especially ones that appear overnight, thanks to the wonders of the roadworks along my regular commute.

For night riding, a decently illuminated headlight in addition to the red-and-white rear and front flashing lights, is a useful accessory — but please, my fellow cyclists, for Merckx’s sake angle the damn things downwards.

In my limited experience, most cyclists ride defensively, responsibly and with due deference to the four- and more-wheeled dealers of death we share the roads with. There are always some exceptions. Most annoying are those cyclists who sail through red lights while you patiently await their change, who thumb their nose at stop signs and treat pedestrians as witches’ hats on some human slalom course. And then there are the salmoners (trying to swim upstream against the flow) and the shoalers (cycling queue-jumpers who blithely roll past stopped cyclists in the hopes of gaining some advantage).

At some point in your cycling career, you will probably decide to make the hyperspace jump to clipless shoes (actually clip-in shoes that keep your feet attached to your pedals). This affords a more efficient cycling stroke, pulling up as well as pushing down. However, you will also have three (count ’em) comedy falls, at least one in front of bemused motorists and fellow cyclists before you learn when and how to unclip properly. This is one of cycling’s immutable laws.

Of all the menaces to fear, I have found, the most insidious are those that get around on two legs. That’s correct — pedestrians; more specifically, pedestrians wearing headphones, who transform the instant they insert their earbuds into oblivious imbeciles enveloped in their own blithe bubbles of pure, unadulterated stupidity.

I have lost count of the number of near misses as the headphone set commit irrational and unpredictably moronic acts. I now approach all of them with the assumption they have my demise in mind. I give them the widest of possible berths, silently cursing the cult of the Walkman, scourge of those who ride.