SHE SAYS . . .

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32802, 30 December 1971, Page 7

SHE SAYS . . .

Most parents regard their children’s desire to own and ride motor-cycles or powercycles with something akin to horror, and when one considers the chances of being badly hurt if one is in an accident when on a twowheeler, this is hardly surprising. I’d feel nervous if one of my children, if they were old enough, wanted to own one of these machines, and use it in today’s traffic; in fact even the faithful push-cycle seems a dubious proposition these days. But if there is one thing riding two-wheelers does teach you, as I know from experience, it is a healthy respect for changes of surface on the road. When you’re encased in a car, metal hatch-covers in the road, slippery white lines, patches of gravel, patches of mud, and the usual semi-finished trenches across the road seem barely an inconvenience, but on a power-cycle you soon learn they can. easily bring you down. The fact of the matter is that changes in the road surface can indeed be very important when you’re driving a car, but it’s usually only very experienced drivers, or those who started their careers on two wheels, who realise this. The result is that quite a few drivers come to grief, and hundreds more have

“nasty moments,” because they didn’t realise a change of surface means a change in the amount of grip between the tyres and the road. How often have you heard people say they had a bad scare when their car “hit a patch of gravel on the road?” How often, for that matter, have you had a scare yourself for the same reason? Even bad bumps in the road can throw a car off course when it is going around a corner or braking. But most of us take little notice of the road surface . . . some of us don’t even take much notice of what is driving or walking on it! Not far from our place, road-works of some sort have left a sunken trench running on a very shallow angle right across an already rather deceptive curve. Driving around the curve, one strikes several changes of surface as the car crosses in and out of the trench you’ve got to run along it for a while, then cross it twice, if you’re to corner on your own side of the road. It’s surprising how many drivers come into the curve a bit too fast anyway, then have all sorts of little adventures trying to cope with the changes in surface and grip. If they “read the road” as they went, they would be warned in advance.