4 ms·

You can always gain efficiency by giving up safety. Just look up peloton crashes. Or imagine cars driving like that.

Unearned5161 4y ago
I'd say it depends on the group, if you have a group of riders that know each other and have ridden in packs before then the risk of issues are slim. Essentially just stuff that probably would have given you trouble riding alone anyway. The risk starts when you either have a race going on or you have riders that are inexperienced and don't know the customs/procedures.
- Lio 4y ago
  Yep. It’s definitely something you want to train for. It’s one of the main reasons to join a bike club. A good group will call out obstacles in the road and say when the are going to slow down. They’ll have set procedures to move the group round when the riders at the front get tired. The experience of being pulled along faster than you could ride on your own is a truely joyous experience! :D
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    > The experience of being pulled along faster than you could ride on your own is a truely joyous experience! It truly is! As a kid we used to hide behind the double decker busses on our mountain bikes at the stop and accelerate with it when it got going again. We’d be riding only a few feet from the rear of the bus and it’d pull us up the big hill home so fast. The bus driver used to get really annoyed and eventually snitched to the school so we had an assembly about it ! boys are stupid! I’d never have the balls to do that now!
    - username223 4y ago
      Haha! I remember latching onto school buses and other large vehicles at stoplights when I was younger. Stay close enough, and you could get sucked along at incredible speeds. It was interesting how some drivers would get super-pissed, while others would think "hey, that's awesome!" and help you stay attached. Riding in a pack is a whole different experience, though. You have to be hyper-aware and -predictable in your lines, but the feeling of cruising along at over 20 MPH on a flat, aided only by your fellow cyclists, is something special.
ruined 4y ago
there are automated peloton machines that do synchronized braking, cooperative load and force distribution, etc. and when on a specialized roadway there is very little risk of disruption or crash. i think they're called trains
- NoToP 4y ago
  I get that this is sarcasm, but one of my idle day dreams is a safe, simple, mostly analog system that does exactly this between a set of moving train cars and the last car on the rear (as a transitional state, the rear car eventually catches up and mechanically couples). I call it the reverse slip carriage. If it can be done, it would keep all the advantages of trains while also totally revolutionising possible service patterns. You could (for example) have a train where every carriage slips-off to make its own subset of limited stops and then slip-joins the next train to pass by. Passengers pick where to wait on the platform based on their destination, and there's always an express carriage to where you want to go. Another neat service trick this system could do is to have an 8 car subway which runs every 5 min that splits itself into 4 different 2-car light rail services every 5 min (rather than 4 subway branches with an 8 car train every 20 min (looking at Rockaway beach A train)). The ability to split and rejoin trains on the fly without stopping or spending time on coupling procedures is simple yet it would be profoundly game changing. My current vision for the system basically amounts to electrically coupling the motors of the carriages such that any attempt to accelerate / decelerate one carriage transfers energy via induced voltage which accelerates / decelerates the other carriages by exactly the right amount. It's like an electrical version of how all the cable cars are holding on to the same rope. No computer, no glitches, entirely dumb components.
  - cyclingfarther 4y ago
    What about the train drivers? They seem to still be necessary.
    - duskwuff 4y ago
      Barely. In principle, railways would not be difficult to automate. But it hasn't happened at scale yet because industry regulations require that trains be manned, and railroad unions would strenuously object to any suggestion that this be changed (since it would likely put a lot of conductors out of their jobs).
bitwize 4y ago
When motor vehicles do that, it's called a convoy.
- dizzant 4y ago
  When motor vehicles do that, it’s called Talladega.

I'd say it depends on the group, if you have a group of riders that know each other and have ridden in packs before then the risk of issues are slim. Essentially just stuff that probably would have given you trouble riding alone anyway. The risk starts when you either have a race going on or you have riders that are inexperienced and don't know the customs/procedures.

Lio 4y ago
Yep. It’s definitely something you want to train for. It’s one of the main reasons to join a bike club. A good group will call out obstacles in the road and say when the are going to slow down. They’ll have set procedures to move the group round when the riders at the front get tired. The experience of being pulled along faster than you could ride on your own is a truely joyous experience! :D
- jamiek88 4y ago
  > The experience of being pulled along faster than you could ride on your own is a truely joyous experience! It truly is! As a kid we used to hide behind the double decker busses on our mountain bikes at the stop and accelerate with it when it got going again. We’d be riding only a few feet from the rear of the bus and it’d pull us up the big hill home so fast. The bus driver used to get really annoyed and eventually snitched to the school so we had an assembly about it ! boys are stupid! I’d never have the balls to do that now!
  - username223 4y ago
    Haha! I remember latching onto school buses and other large vehicles at stoplights when I was younger. Stay close enough, and you could get sucked along at incredible speeds. It was interesting how some drivers would get super-pissed, while others would think "hey, that's awesome!" and help you stay attached. Riding in a pack is a whole different experience, though. You have to be hyper-aware and -predictable in your lines, but the feeling of cruising along at over 20 MPH on a flat, aided only by your fellow cyclists, is something special.

ruined 4y ago

there are automated peloton machines that do synchronized braking, cooperative load and force distribution, etc. and when on a specialized roadway there is very little risk of disruption or crash. i think they're called trains

NoToP 4y ago
I get that this is sarcasm, but one of my idle day dreams is a safe, simple, mostly analog system that does exactly this between a set of moving train cars and the last car on the rear (as a transitional state, the rear car eventually catches up and mechanically couples). I call it the reverse slip carriage. If it can be done, it would keep all the advantages of trains while also totally revolutionising possible service patterns. You could (for example) have a train where every carriage slips-off to make its own subset of limited stops and then slip-joins the next train to pass by. Passengers pick where to wait on the platform based on their destination, and there's always an express carriage to where you want to go. Another neat service trick this system could do is to have an 8 car subway which runs every 5 min that splits itself into 4 different 2-car light rail services every 5 min (rather than 4 subway branches with an 8 car train every 20 min (looking at Rockaway beach A train)). The ability to split and rejoin trains on the fly without stopping or spending time on coupling procedures is simple yet it would be profoundly game changing. My current vision for the system basically amounts to electrically coupling the motors of the carriages such that any attempt to accelerate / decelerate one carriage transfers energy via induced voltage which accelerates / decelerates the other carriages by exactly the right amount. It's like an electrical version of how all the cable cars are holding on to the same rope. No computer, no glitches, entirely dumb components.
- cyclingfarther 4y ago
  What about the train drivers? They seem to still be necessary.
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    Barely. In principle, railways would not be difficult to automate. But it hasn't happened at scale yet because industry regulations require that trains be manned, and railroad unions would strenuously object to any suggestion that this be changed (since it would likely put a lot of conductors out of their jobs).

bitwize 4y ago

When motor vehicles do that, it's called a convoy.

dizzant 4y ago
When motor vehicles do that, it’s called Talladega.