Yesterday i finally whip up the courage to try commuting with bike, i planned the 40km round trip to visit my mom and go grocery shopping on the way back, planned the route with as much residential street as possible, and that was a fun experience! While there’s a lot of “woah, ebike”(where i live a proper ebike is rare, even though mine is converted) and “you travel from that small town? That’s insane!” from stranger, what’s not fun is the ride on some stretch of the road.
I live in a small town outside the city, a lot of the road going out of the town is pretty much 1 lane each way, no cycling facility for the whole country(Malaysia), the road shoulder is narrow to non-existent(the line is basically bordering between road and grass/dirt) if not filled with potholes/cracks/sketchy road maintenance/bump made by tree root, and motorist often driving very fast even on narrow road. Luckily more often than not they does give me a lot of space when they’re passing(thanks to motorcycle culture), but those who don’t is very discouraging for the whole experience, mostly it’s the one riding moped that pass me too close for comfort with 30/50kmph faster than me(no thanks to motorcycle culture).
I planned to do it often, first by doing a no-car sunday, then slowly switch to commuting to work(also 40km round trip), and eventually cut down car use to only just a day or two a week or only on long distance travel, but this experience kinda made me second guess the whole plan. It’s also quite tiring, i can still feel the fatigue today.
So how did you guys that do the commute able to keep going? Any advice on that end?
On the fatigue part. (Jokingly) It will not get better, you just get faster. With that out of my system, it will get easier and soon you will find yourself more energetic. Because extra training.
When it comes to safety you are going at it the right way. You look for back roads, slower roads, residental roads etc when there aren’t cycling infrastructure. But uf it is unsafe I would think twice/thrice if it is worth the risk. Luckily it sounds motorists are already used to safely overtaking slower two-wheeled vehicles.
Depending on your cycling community you can have great use of cycling/outdoor apps with heatmaps. Then you can see where others are travelling. Strava, Ride with GPS and Komoot are useful for me locally. Especially strava with the large community.
Motorcycle culture is kinda huge in Malaysia, there’s like 47% of car vs 46% of motorcycle/moped on the road at the end of last year, so majority of people tend to know how to overtake, and police tend to side with smaller transport whenever road accident happened. There’s a good and bad in that but that’s for another time lol.
I ride my ebike to work and I worry about getting hit by a car a lot. The more miles ridden, the more the probability that an accident will happen. I try to take steps to reduce the risk: stick to back-roads with less traffic as much as possible, use trails and protected bike lanes when available and ride defensively. I am lucky that I have a route that keeps me off the main roads and on trails/protected bike lanes for almost all of my trip. It was hard to come up with this route and it makes what should be a 10 mi ride into a 14 mi ride. That said, I can do it in an hour on my ebike. If the ride was much longer or I had to ride on busy main roads, I would not do it.
Be safe!
All of what the other two commenter’s said + the following:
- wear a helmet (kind of obvious, but depending on the culture people frown on road safety for cyclists)
- wear a high vis shirt
- put a back mirror on your handle that sticks 20cm or so.
The last one makes the difference in Munich between riding my normal bike and my ebike. With the mirror you see them coming, making it less uncomfortable when they pass + they automatically keep some more distance as they don’t want to hit the mirror.
Finally, depending on how fast your bike goes, look into tuning it to higher speeds? Mine is an s-pedelec and goes 45km/h, that means in city traffic I am able to swim with the traffic and not get passed often (this will probably trigger some debate and is a suggestion you should think about carefully, as it has other implications)
In the US, many states have a law specifying a minimum passing distance when passing a bike and it is normally 3 ft (about 1M). I have seen some cyclists cut a very bright piece of foam (usually a pool noodle) and attach it to the back of their bike sticking out into traffic. This creates a visual barrier to encourage people to give more room when passing. I don’t know how the laws or culture are in Malaysia, but maybe something like that would help.
Here’s an example (from Canada): https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/cyclists-in-toronto-riding-with-pool-noodles-to-protect-themselves-from-drivers-1.4082620
40 km is quite a lot of you’re not used to cycling such distances, even with an e-bike. I’d suggest taking it easy and starting with shorter distances. As for traffic, there’s not much you can do about that other than choose your routes carefully. If you can’t ride safely to some destination, it’s better to take a car than to risk your life. That’s unfortunate but safety should always be the number one priority.
