How to Use Bicycle Hand Signals

Video Transcript

" This is Jim Toledano for Expert Village. We’re going to talk about starting, stopping, and hand signals. Okay, you want to ride you bike. Obviously, you’ve got to start. You get on your bike, clip in, raise the pedal so you can get a little bit of a burst and go forward. Okay, you’re riding a little ways and you need to stop. If you’re on clips, you want to unclip and get ready to put your foot down. You also grab your breaks. Bikes have a front brake and a rear brake. They’re designed to be used together. If you simply stop your front break, your bike will have a tendency to go up. If you’re going down a hill and you use your front break, your bike may have a tendency to go up high enough that you’re going to lose control, but it’s a very efficient brake. The rear break, which is on the right hand side, is somewhat less efficient because your weight on the seat is pushing down. But with the front brake, the two of them will cause your bike to stop. You never know what’s going to pop out at you off the street. It could be a dog; it could be a car; it could be an obstacle that you hadn’t seen. You want to be prepared to stop. Ride in such a way as you can get to your breaks when you need them. Squeeze them together and come to a stop. While you’re on a ride, you want to let people know what you’re doing, so there are series of hand signals. That’s a left turn. Right turn. Again, just like car hand signals for cars that people used to have to do before they had blinkers. This means stop. What you do wan to do is make a nice sharp curve with your elbow so people can tell you’re stopping, and not scratching your back or doing something else like that. The purpose of the signals is to alert people as to what you’re doing. If you’re going to do something that you need for people to know, signal it. If you’re going to move over but you’re not turning, wave your hand. It’ll catch people’s attention and they’ll take it into account the fact that you’re trying to do something that they need to take account of. "