I'm not sure if there's a way to avoid problems learning toeclips. I cycled since childhood but was terrified by stories of "death clips", and decided not to ge

I'm not sure if there's a way to avoid problems learning toeclips. I cycled since childhood but was terrified by stories of "death clips", and decided not to get them. But at a race prep meetup for a long triathlon I was the only one without them, and got mollycoddled by the organisers. They gave strong advice to get them. So I got them and took it easy - riding around a park, slow rides. I still had several bad falls when I got onto the roads though. And I need to go through busy roads to get to the country (no car). I found that you need to be very deliberately transactional in the way you cycling when you have clips. For example - as you approach lights, once you get a certain distance out of it's still read then that's it - you just start start unclipping. You don't want to play the game of edging up to the lights, because a car might do something confusing and then you're screwed. You need to position yourself in traffic much more carefully, and hold off on some situations you wouldn't have thought twice about when you had pedals.