So I took the classroom and road components CyclingSavvy this weekend in St. Louis. I’ll post some video of our Tour of St. Louis ride soon. But for now I want to talk a little about the program features I found most compelling :
A theory that works: I’m trying very hard not to type the words “vehicular cycling” because that concept carries so much troubling baggage (largely associated with a single, troubling personality and his army of internet flamers). So let’s call it something else, or, rather, let’s use an apt metaphor: a dance called traffic that bicyclists must lead. I’ve highlighted the following video before. It’s worth watching again because it is the theory upon which CyclingSavvy is built.
Smart use of technology: The classroom experience of CyclingSavvy has been well crafted and standardized so that all instructors deliver the same content in dynamic form. The content is displayed as a multimedia, interactive experience in which the instructor presents flash animations, videos, and photos of various on-road situations and encourages the class to comment and discuss. The presentation can also be adapted to the unique traffic/bicycling laws of a particular state. The St. Louis class incorporated Missouri law. This dynamic experience is the result of much excellent work by Keri Caffrey, of Commute Orlando. Carbon Trace readers have seen many of her animations and videos because I use them often (and will continue to do so as long as she keeps publishing them).
Kicking the chicks out of the nest: So riding in a pack of bicyclists takes the edge off negotiating difficult and busy major situations, e.g. where an interstate highway meets a busy 6-lane arterial — and just for fun throw in a bridge, appearing/disappearing right-hand lanes, exiting highway traffic, and a 2-lane left turn. Here’s what you do in CyclingSavvy: The group stops before particular traffic features. The instructor chalks out instructions for driving safely through it. One instructor demonstrates. Then the second instructor sends students through one at a time by themselves. No group to call attention to itself. Just you, the road, and other road users. And do you know what happened? Nothing. Everything. We all were able to complete each task individually with confidence and without mishap. I was already comfortable with all the individual tasks until the one described above — a situation I normally try to avoid. Well, it just wasn’t a problem. And while I may continue to avoid such situations in the future, I’ll never allow them to stop me from going somewhere I want to go. (Note: Students are encouraged to opt out of any situation that makes them uncomfortable. No one opted out yesterday.)
OK, I have video to edit. Check back soon.
A gang of savvy cyclists in St. Louis -- from left: Andy Cline, Kit Jenkins, Martin Pion, Gary Cziko, Karen Karabell, Melissa Brown, Matthew Brown, Gerry Noll, Mary Ruth Casey & Kris Schell
Comments 15
Sounds excellent. I’ve always been impressed by Keri’s animations and other visual media.
The LAB’s course has always had problems with consistency but it is a course that has evolved over several decades and without any mandatory continuing education.
The real trick is going to be getting people to take this course. We’ve taught the LAB’s TS101 course to maybe about 500 people in Columbia over the past few years. That’s actually a VERY high number for a City of 100,000 and that’s the problem. That’s actually an incredibly low number if you’re trying to change how 1000′s of people transport themselves.
I hope that Keri can find a way to begin training hundreds of people per week. Was this an instructor course? I notice that every one of those people are already pretty hard core vehicular bicyclist.
Posted 01 May 2011 at 11:18 am ¶Robert… All these folks are potential instructors. This was the basic course prior to the instructor course in June.
And, yes, the problem has always been: How do you get people to take such a class? — especially bicyclists who may already think they know it all. I know a lot, but I’ve learned something new (or gained some new insight or confidence) each time I’ve taken a class (LAB and now CS).
Posted 01 May 2011 at 11:42 am ¶I would be particularly interested in the perspective of Gary Cziko since he was in my LCI class. I would also be interested in your own “compare & contrast” between the two programs. I can’t imagine there are many differences in how they tell a cyclist he/she should ride in a given situation.
Posted 01 May 2011 at 12:16 pm ¶Steve… I do intend to discuss the differences as I see them. The differences are mostly curricular. A couple of the participants this weekend are LCIs.
Posted 01 May 2011 at 3:11 pm ¶Thanks!
Posted 01 May 2011 at 3:55 pm ¶I’m flattered someone thinks we’re all hardcore bikers that took the Cycling savvy course the past two days. I’m not, but I believed all the statistics in the course, and the videos, and dove into all the singular exercises. If I can do it, anyone can!
Posted 01 May 2011 at 4:27 pm ¶It was fun and demanding.
Steve A.,
It’s been a couple of years since I took LAB’s Traffic Skills 101 in Urbana (IL), but I remember enough to compare it with CS.
One main difference is that CS focuses on knowledge, skills and practice in vehicular cycling (there, I said it!) while TS 101 includes many other topics, including bike selection, bike parts, bike repair, food and hydration, etc. By focusing almost exclusively on vehicular cycling, CS has more time devote to this. The graphics, animations and videos used in CS are very sophisticated and quite effective.
Also, while there was lots overlap on the parking lot skills between TS 101 and CS, the road ride for CS was far more educational and challenging than what we did in TS 101 (just a group ride to and from lunch). This may be at least partly due to having done TS 101 in little Urbana and CS in big St. Louis. Also, the CS participants were mostly skilled bicyclists with many LCIs among us.
But I got the impression that the CS instructors go for the biggest and baddest intersections and segments available for the “Tour of ___” part of the course. They allow people to opt out or pair up with another student or instructor if they wish. But they want to show that the baddest conditions can be cycled safety by being predictable, visible and controlling your space, which is very liberating.
From my experiences, TS 101 provides a much broader base of many aspects of bicycling while CS focuses almost exclusively on cycling knowledge, skills and practice, and does it a more assertive way.
Also keep in mind that LAB has TS 101 and TS 201 while CS has only CS (plus the instructor’s course). So CS packs it all into three, three-hour modules.
TS101 now has an online version of the classroom part of the course (bikeed.org). CS does not have an online option.
They are both good bike education. Get as much of it as you can and tell others to take advantage of whatever is available in their communities.
– Gary
Posted 01 May 2011 at 8:36 pm ¶Andy,
I would have loved to of known about this before it happened. Our Education Coordinator, Gina overshiner, ( at bike day ) could have attended.
We have something like 10-14 (cannot remember) paid instructors on staff that she manages. Id love for her to take it. Are there any other courses in Missouri?
Posted 01 May 2011 at 9:02 pm ¶Robert… I’m not sure what the plans are for other courses. I think the best plan it to contact Karen Karabell. Perhaps she can run another basic class before the instructor training in June.
Posted 01 May 2011 at 9:54 pm ¶I talked to her about that yesterday. She can’t fit another class in before June. It’s difficult for students to go from a CS class to a CSI training in less than 3 weeks. The prep for CSI training includes a lot of reading (topics ranging from adult learning to cycling and roadway design) and some problem-solving exercises. Plus you receive teaching assignments to prepare a week ahead. The CSI training itself is almost entirely hands-on teaching and evaluation. I’m going to be sending your St. Louis CSI registration info as soon as I receive the list from Karen. Hopefully today.
I’m going to try to get to Dallas for a CS class soon. We have one instructor there. Then we will have a CSI course in Orlando in October (maybe 2, since we have a lot of candidates in Florida).
Posted 02 May 2011 at 9:03 am ¶Andy, thank you very much for this write-up! I’m looking forward to your video.
To answer a few questions, I’m going to offer a few key differences from a developer’s perspective:
1) CS recognizes that the problem with bicycling in America is not a knowledge gap, but a knowledge inversion. With a simple knowledge gap (as you have with motorcycling), you can deliver information. Of course delivering information to adult learners has its own challenges, but that’s a whole other topic. With cycling, the knowledge inversion — caused by a dysfunctional, car-centric culture and a lifetime of its baggage — must be reversed in order for the information to stick in a meaningful way.
You must change beliefs to change behavior.
Everything in our course was deliberately designed to systematically change these beliefs (it’s the Red Pill). Andy, you will be receiving an instructor manual soon. In it, each section has an objectives table of old beliefs which will be replaced by new ones. To accomplish this, you have to attract and activate the right brain. Mighk and I studied this quite a bit and incorporated a number of techniques to do this.
This strategy is why we have seen profound behavior change (an increase in confidence and bicycle use for transportation) in in novice riders and former sidewalk/trail only riders.
http://commuteorlando.com/wordpress/2010/12/05/problem-solving-a-massive-high-speed-car-centric-interchange/
I was motivated to create a new model in response to seeing Road 1 graduates continuing to ride in the same dysfunctional ways they did before the course. Road 1 was not designed to change beliefs. In fact, Road 1 (repackaged as TS101) wasn’t a deliberately-designed curriculum, it was a hack-up of Effective Cycling. For it to be effective at all relies on the talents and motivation of individual instructors, and yet it has a tendency to hamstring them as well. I first attempted to create a presentation out of Road 1 information to use as an LCI and found it unworkable within a 9 hour timeframe.
2) As Gary recognized, we go for the most intimidating features for our road tour and give the students the opportunity and encouragement to ride them solo. Bicycling education is not a part of popular culture, as we know. Most people don’t think they need it. You get one shot at a student to take a 9 hour class. Very few people will take more than one bicycle class.
By eliminating all the bike fit, mechanics, nutrition (workshops that bike shops already provide for free — and make for great partnerships with our program), we have made time for a much higher level of problem-solving and strategy education. We’ve gone beyond the fixation with lane position into an understanding of how road features affect traffic flow and how understanding traffic flow can allow you to transition a busy and intimidating intersection/interchange with ease.
This is critical because it removes barriers. When you can handle an intimidating intersection, you can link together longer sections of quiet road networks. That is how I ride and plan my own routes! So while a student leaves with the tools to ride safely on a high-speed arterial when necessary, they don’t leave with the mindset that that is what VC (ugh, I hate that term, too) is about.
3) We do not test. Tests are for children. Adults do not want to take a test and there is no reason to make them do so. We are giving people tools they will use which is far more meaningful than a certificate which will get shuffled into some file (probably the circular one). The process of enactment (in particular, social enactment) ensures their learning. A test offers nothing to that process but negative baggage.
Also, a test is class time wasted learning nothing. If people are giving you 9-10 hours of their time, you better make it all worthwhile. The time is worth more to them than the money they pay. Another motivator for me was having a fellow Road 1 student tell anyone who would listen that the class was boring and not worth the time. She is a very influential person in our community, this was not helpful. But I couldn’t argue with her, 2/3 of the class was boring and remedial. It offered a few nuggets, but not 10 hours worth. I had a higher level of interest only because I was taking it as a step to becoming an LCI.
We consider our students to be customers. We place a high value on their time and on the experience they have. How they feel about their experience has everything to do with how they internalize the learning.
_
We went way beyond facts and information in the development of this course. We spent a year developing, pilot-testing and revising it. We have continued to update it throughout the first year of public offerings. And will continue to do so as we discover new and better ways off communicating concepts and better technology. And that’s another key difference. Our instructors are not only paid, they are supported with state-of-the art, continually-updated teaching materials and help with customization (to add their own local videos and photos).
We believe we have upped the ante on cycling education. And yes, it is still challenging to communicate the value of bicycling education to the greater community. It will take time. But it is immensely helpful when your students become enthusiastic sales-people. Ours do. We intentionally tried to create an experience which would produce this, but it has amazed us still. They not only ride places they never thought possible, they want to share the joy and empowerment with everyone they know. They’re not only sales people, they’re advocates for bicycling. They show up to meetings. They participate in community events. They invite us to speak at their churches. We were even invited by a student to speak to a restaurant trainers conference about the methodology behind our curriculum. As a bonus, we delivered the key concepts of safe cycling to a room full of motorists who were so won over they wanted to see us get it into driver’s ed training.
Andy, I’m looking forward to seeing you in June!
Posted 02 May 2011 at 9:16 am ¶Keri… You bet! It’ll be fun
Posted 02 May 2011 at 10:15 am ¶Keri,
If you have any interest, our Education Coordinator’s email address is gina@pednet.org
I’m not sure how you rank them but we’ve probably taught as many TS101 courses as anyone over the past few years and are big believers in bicycle education.
I agree with almost all of your critics of the LAB’s courses. We developed a PPT complete wtih our own videos and photographs years ago and have updated it since. We also send our students through the most challenging areas in Columbia. We survey our students after graduating and I think we’ve had one student who left a negative comment (out of hundreds) and on average our students replace 24% of their automobile trips with bicycling trips after taking the course. Our average student is a woman in her late 40′s who has never cycled on the road, so I’d say that’s pretty amazing.
It may be that our program just wouldn’t be a good fit for you, or vice versa, but I think it’s certainly an avenue worth exploring if you choose.
-Robert
Posted 02 May 2011 at 11:35 am ¶Robert, that is a credit to the work you and your colleagues did to customize and enhance your delivery, improving upon what you were given by LAB. Which is what I meant by it being up to individual instructors to make it effective.
I know a number of LCIs who have created good Smart Cycling programs. All of them created materials and strategies over and above LAB’s basic curriculum.
Posted 02 May 2011 at 1:32 pm ¶Having now completed both Cycling Savvy and PedNet’s version of TS101 (with Robert as the instructor), I believe PedNet’s course addresses many of the issues that it seems people have with the basic TS101 curriculum.
After Saturday’s class, the main change I would make to the TS101 course I took from Robert would be to make the road ride more challenging, though in my case, I was the one who planned the rode ride route, since the course was held in Jefferson County, MO, not PedNet’s stomping grounds in Columbia.
I did like the CS approach of sending participants out on their own to navigate a particular road feature, and, though I am pretty comfortable cycling around St. Louis, they did manage to include one bit that gave me pause — riding Kingshighway from Manchester to Shaw!
Posted 02 May 2011 at 4:17 pm ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
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