Motorcycle Road Ride 1

Today's weather: High = 23 Low = 15
Cloudy

At first I was merely impressed with Pro Ride Motorcycle Training, but now I give them a solid recommendation and totally encourage anyone interested to sign up for a week long course. The price is steep at $850 for the course, but I must say it is WELL WORTH THE CASH. Just save money ruthlessly on other stuff and make sacrifices so you can put down this large payment, as it will be worth it.

Due to how good this company is and the popularity of the courses, you should also book at least a month in advance. They limit class sizes to 10 students each.

http://www.proride.net

Having built up our slow-speed skills over the weekend, the next phase of the training was road riding.

Our instructor took us on a very technical run on back roads for the first 30 minutes in order to review our clutch/throttle work, emergency braking, curves, hill starts, U-turns, stop signs, shoulder checks, remembering to cancel the turn signals (ARGH!!!!!) and other consolidation skills, thus leading into road riding. He recommended we do this every time in trying out a new bike or at the beginning of the riding season, in order to get warmed up.

Once on the major part of the road ride, we practice motorcycle formation riding with 6 in a group. It is too complicated to explain how this works in a blog, you really have to take the course and try it for yourself.

The road ride itself was super easy compared to what I'm used to in Shanghai. Maybe it was because we were riding on Monday evening with light traffic around the North Vancouver area, but I kept wondering where all the cars and pedestrians were to avoid. We did a run to Deep Cove on a beautiful forested road by the ocean, then back the other way to Horseshoe Bay area to practice our cornering skills.

Even though the ride was easy, the technicality factor was 10 times more involved than anyting I'm used to in Shanghai. That is to say, we had to remember to do so many things at the same time: keep the proper distance between bikes, keep the proper lane formation, obey speed limits and stop for pedestrians, always cancel the turn signals midway through the turn, keep the head and eyes up, and master the art of U-turns and parking.

While we were doing the Deep Cove run it reminded me of the freedom of riding around Koh Chang in Thailand without any consideration for these technicalities. In Asia, you just get on the bike and ride. Here, you simply cannot do that, given that passing the road test is the ultimate goal where technicalities and following rules of the road matter to the extreme. So because of that, unfortunately, I couldnt' enjoy the ride too much.

I'm taking this to the extreme because I am brainwashing myself to get rid of all the bad habits learned in Asia over years of illegal riding. These bad habits could cost me the ICBC road test, and so it's crucial I unlearn them in a hurry.

The self-brainwashing technique basically relies on repetition. I am focusing on the top 3 things to reprogram my brain in a hurry: shoulder checks, cancel the turn signals, and keep the head and eyes up. By constantly repeating this to myself during the training, I can effectively reprogram the bad habits and I am already seeing some results.

There are other things as well. Stopping for pedestrians is a major challenge for me because in China nobody does that. Pedestrians are at the bottom of the traffic totem pole over there and moving vehicles have the right of way. The laws of physics dictate traffic behavior in China, not the laws of traffic courtesy.

So if there's a crosswalk and someone standing there, my first instinct is to blow right by, thinking that the person is just one of another 1.3 billion and he is nobody special.

In Vancouver, on the other hand, I'll have to get used to slowing down and stopping for pedestrians.

It goes without saying that my riding in Asia consisted of not shoulder checking, having turn signals going after the turn, and looking down at the bike repeatedly. Some of these habits denote an automatic fail on the ICBC road test so you can see how impotant it is to unlean them.

The long-term effect of this reprogramming is unknown. For now, I will have to rely on short-term effects given the timing of the road test. In all likelihood, I'm going to fall back on the bad habits again once returning to Asia but there are some skills that I would definitely want to keep and modify for Shanghai

1. Head and eyes up is crucial, maybe not looking so far ahead in Shanghai, but the principle itself is good

2. Emergency braking in a straight line or a curve is totally worth applying there.

Besides that, the existing habits of survival riding in Shanghai can be retained, especially the tactic of slowing down at intersections. Even so, I need to work on increasing the acceleration at intersections off a green light, as my starts have been too slow for Vancouver.

It goes without saying this, but the traffic lights are to be obeyed over here. Frankly it's no big deal because the red lights are very short, and the traffic control is efficient.

People run red lights in Shanghai all the time, and I admit to doing it. The reason is that when the light stays red for 2-3 minutes at a time, then so much time is wasted, and the people get impatient.