Motorcycle Road Test Practice #1

Today's weather:  High = 24 Low = 12
Partly cloudy

 

While the company I do motorcycle training with does offer a service of bike rentals for road test self-practice, they only offer this on the weekend.  Since my weekend was booked off, that was not an option.  However, they recommended another company in Vancouver which I'll in turn recommend.

 

Cycle BC
http://cyclebc.ca/
 
Obviously they are expensive, but they offer a good selection of bikes and yes, they will rent out to people who are still on their motorcycle learners license.

The best thing to do is go for the all-day rentals which cost around $120 and you can ride from 9am to 7pm straight.  That's certainly what I'll be doing tomorrow with those guys, and it's not much more than a 3-hour rental which I did today.

 

I went for a Kawasaki 250cc, a small bike, but great for acceleration, cornering, and above all:  road test practice. 

 

The gameplan was to head directly to the road testing site, which is a combination of streets and freeways in a pre-determined radius.  That I did, and the practice was extremely beneficial despite the high costs of rental.

 

For those living in Vancouver and thinking of doing the road test, the epicenter is the corner of Boundary & Lougheed, and they take you on a series of roads between the McGill and Sprott exits of the main freeway. 

 

The basic idea was at first to cruise the freeway a few times back and forth and get familiar with merging, as they will certainly be testing that.  It wasn't as difficult as I thought, but the acceleration and matching speeds were vital to get the hang of.  So was remembering to cancel the damn signal.  Forgetting to cancel is a terrible habit picked up from Shanghai that I still haven't gotten rid of, but it's getting better and better these days.

 

It is vital to cancel the signal as not doing so is an automatic fail on the test.

 

There is a ton of construction happening on the freeway now, and in surrounding areas.  It actually benefits the test as the traffic congestion keeps the vehicle speeds down and makes it easier to merge with a smaller capacity bike.  I'll be doing the test at 2:30pm on a Friday which will certainly be a congested time, and I'm actually glad for that variable.

 

It also helps to memorize which exits are closed due to the construction and other details that may come in handy for the test.

 

Once the freeway practice was done with, I then headed for the steep hills of North Burnaby and practiced hill starts and turns at various intersections.  Hill starts will be tested also, and it's a bit of an art form.  One thing to watch out for is don't stop too close to cars as they roll back a lot more when they are doing hill starts.

 

Next was 4-way stop practice.  I soon discovered two nasty streets with oblique 4-way stops with tons of traffic.  I can guarantee they will be using that for the test as it's the most challenging kind of situation.  If there is any way they can make people fail, that is a good place to do it.  So that was the most valuable practice and I must have done at least 50 renditions of various 4-way stop procedure.

 

This is vital because in Shanghai, nobody does a 4-way stop and it's hard to remember all the rules for how to do this in Vancouver.   All intersections in Shanghai have traffic lights, simply because a 4-way stop would be chaos over there with everybody jamming in first and not lining up.  Here, there are a zillion rules for the 4-way stop procedure and I had to practice my ass off to get the hang of it, lest I fail the test.

 

Once that was done, I then did U-turns in residential streets and parking lot practice.  There were a few streets that had school zones and it wasn't clear if you should slow down or not during summer, so I'll have to keep brushing up on this one.  Speeding in a school zone would be another fail for the test.

 

The idea is to keep doing more of this self-practice tomorrow, then do an official mock road test on Wednesday with a different bike provided by the training center, valuable feedback from an instructor, and simulations where I sit in a car and watch somebody else do the test.