For Adult Learners, Bike Riding Isn’t as Easy as It Looks
[Note info on our adult classes can be found here: <a href="http://www.baltimorespokes.org/article.php?story=2008041713505581">http://www.baltimorespokes.org/article.php?story=2008041713505581</a>;]
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I was 16, a senior at a public high school in Manhattan, and I had never learned to ride a bike. So my friend and classmate Josh had walked with me to Riverside Park, taking along a bicycle from his family’s apartment on the Upper West Side. We adjusted the seat low, so my feet could easily touch the ground, and Josh tried to explain the key concept behind bike riding: namely, balance. (Training wheels were not an option, at my advanced age.) I got on, and started to pedal.
It did not go well.
I could not manage to travel four to six feet before the bike — and I — swerved wildly off course. My attempts to compensate for the bike’s tilt in one direction by leaning in the other ended with my falling, repeatedly. Josh gamely tried to hold onto the back of the seat and run behind me, but it did not help. Our bike-riding lesson ended in failure when I fell onto (or was it over?) a park bench, scraped my arm and damaged the bike’s front rim.
As New York City goes through something of a bicycling renaissance — with the construction of new bike routes, improved bike parking, and even the closing of parts of Broadway to vehicular traffic — one issue has received little attention: there are some New Yorkers — and I’m not talking about 5-year-olds — who do not know how to ride. Until I was 18, I was one of them.
My embarrassment was heightened by the fact that I was part of a tiny minority. The National Survey of Bicyclist and Pedestrian Attitudes and Behavior [pdf], released last year by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, found that only 3 percent of adults surveyed said that not knowing how to ride was the primary reason they did not. Lack of access was the most common reason cited — by 28 percent — when respondents were asked why they have not been on a bike in the last 30 days or never ride during the summer.
The League of American Bicyclists, a national advocacy group based in Washington, has been “getting more calls from the lost generation of 30- to 50-year-old adults who were less likely than their parents to ride,” according to Meghan Cahill, a spokeswoman for the organization.
Ms. Cahill said that “balance and fear of ridicule are the two biggest factors to overcome” in learning how to ride.
There have been anecdotal reports that demand for adult bike lessons is rising.