Safe Cycling Skills - A statistical investigation
By Jennae
Question: Are Karoro School senior students safe cyclists on the roads?
Recently Room One students participated in a safe cycling skills programme facilitated by the New Zealand Police.
Students learned about the correct way to wear their bicycle helmet. Helmets need to be tightened…
Room 1 learnt that we always need to wear helmets. We also went through the two finger rule. The two finger rule is when you have a helmet on your head and you put two fingers on your forehead and make sure you can only fit two fingers on your head. Then we had to make sure our helmet was tight enough so if we did fall off our bike we wouldn’t hurt our heads. Then we went through the road rules and looked at different signs on the road and different hand signals. We checked a bike and looked at what we need to have its called a N check. A N check is you have to go through your bike and check what’s wrong with your bike or if you have everything you need on your bike. It’s called the N check because the bars on the bike look like an N. We also talked about being at least 1 metre away from the curve so you’re the right distance away from parked cars and cars on the road.
The second session involved a skills based session on the court. Students had to bike around the court using their hand signals on each corner. We also had to look back when we were riding our bikes between cones and had to go in and out of cones without hitting any. Ms Kemp our teacher was holding pictures up and we had to look over our right shoulder and tell her the picture while we were still biking. We had to make sure we didn’t hit any cones we were biking in the middle of. We went through the court again but at the first cone we looked back, the second cone we put our right arm out, the third cone we looked back again we kept our arm up 3 seconds before we turned, then we turned and put our arm back on the bar. We did that with our left arm too. We did that same thing but instead of our right or left arm we put our stop hand up and stopped, looked and carried on. Then we all started on one line and biked straight we turned right and we went straight over a seesaw to see how good our balance was and then we turned around again and went over another one that was wider. Then we kept going straight, then turned right and then right again and kept going straight over a wooden ladder we did that twice around the whole circuit.
Following the court session students participated in a road circuit skills session. There were people placed around the circuit and marks were given for using the following skills: We went on a road circuit to see if we knew the road rules he told us and practised putting our left and right arms on the road and looking back and using stop hands. Our class had a police officer teaching and helping us to. The police officer, constable Jos had a stop sign. So we put our right arm up practising stopping. Then our teacher Ms Kemp was sitting in a car and she opened a door just before we went past the car and we had to be the right distance away from the car so the door wouldn’t hit us. We did that twice around the circuit and I improved
My marks were:
Approx 1 metre from kerb
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Scanning for hazards
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Checking parked cars
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Look behind before hand signals
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Correct hand signal
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Look behind after hand signals
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% Average Across Skills
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5/5
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1/2
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2/4
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4/6
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6/6
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1/6
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65.5%
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-This graph shows that I need to improve looking behind after hand signals and scanning for hazards.
- This graph shows that my strongest skills were correct hand signals and cycling approx one metre from the kerb. My recommendation is that we should do the safe cycling every year so we can recap all our road rules. Some new people might come to our school that might not know the road rules or didn’t do it the year before it will be good for them to learn.
