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If you ride around a lot of pedestrians sometimes getting their attention is of the utmost importance. Everyone should ride with a bell, but a cute little “ping, ping” is sometimes not enough. Groups of pedestrians can be particularly dangerous when the “lemming effect” takes hold on a city street. If one person starts walking and the rest do not bother looking and follow along, it can be trouble.
There are also those pedestrians or runners that practice the ever so safe art of cranking up their ipods with headphones in both ears and are completely oblivious to the world around them.
On a day when I know I’m going to encounter heavy pedestrian traffic I have carried a whistle. It’s not a cute as a bell, but it sure is effective. The problem of course is that for the whistle to be effective, you either have to ride with the whistle in your mouth or find a way to make it quickly accessible. A solution to this dilemma came to me one day while watching a hockey game. The refs use these whistles that wrap around the hand:
Having the whistle on your hand makes it quickly accessible in times of need. It beats the whistle hanging from a string around your neck for sure. Just don’t expect lots of warm looks from pedestrians when you put it to use. For product information you can visit this site.
If you have your own method of alerting pedestrians, feel free to “sound off” in comments.
3 comments for this entry ↓
1 Ryan // Feb 11, 2008 at 8:13 am
Although I’ve never tried using a whistle, I have found a bell to be very effective at politely letting people know I’m coming up behind them on the greenway trails that I frequent. When I started riding on the greenway a lot I just yelled “On your left” as I approached pedestrians. I quickly learned that this was dreadfully ineffective and acutally caused some people to jump into my path of travel. I got a bell and now I feel like Moses parting the Red Sea. The bell is pretty loud so usually it gets the attention of even the most stuborn iPod junkie. The bell also seems friendlier, like a “Hey, I’m going to pass you” rather than a “Get the $%*# out of my way!”
If I give the bell a couple rings and the person or people won’t get out of my way, I’ll usually just buzz right by them if I have space. Once I was repremanded by 2 older ladies (late 40’s maybe?) who I rode by after multiple bell rings did not get their attention. I got stopped by a redlight and the ladies caught up to me about a quarter mile up the trail. They told me that “I don’t own the trail and I need to watch for other people”. I informed them that I rang my bell several times to warn them of my approach and then rode in the grass to get around them because they were taking up the whole trail. Now tell me again who wasn’t watching for other trail users? Needless to say they did not have a reply.
Maybe in an urban environment a whistle would be more effective, but it just doesn’t seem as friendly.
2 Joshua // Feb 11, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Don’t forget that if you’re using a metal whistle and it’s cold out, you might want to use a plastic/rubber guard for the whistle’s mouthpiece. I don’t know that it would freeze to your lip, but the cold metal at least wouldn’t feel too nice.
I don’t encounter a lot of pedestrians, but this makes me want to get a bell.
3 Treadly and Me // Feb 17, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Yeah, I had thought of using a whistle but I never got around to trying it. I think it might have been partly the problem of how to have it in your mouth at the critical moment–a problem that it looks like you’ve solved.
For me it’s a bell for trails and an AirZound horn for the road. My thinking is that people should be expecting to hear a bell while walking on a trail but wouldn’t necessarily be expecting (and could be startled into unpredictable reactions) by a horn. So bells only when mixing with pedestrians.
However, on the road drivers and pedestrians should not be surprised to hear horns–and in any case you need something louder than a bell to be heard. So I blast away with the AirZound as required.
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