I recently posted a short piece on safety and rollerskiing. A reader, Dean Woodbeck, replied with his observation about rolling on the right side of the road. This is Dean’s post:br /br /”Many of the blogs and websites have repeated these roller ski rules, including to ski in the same direction as traffic. I don’t understand this. If you are skiing against traffic, as when you are walking on a roadway, you are able to see what is coming and have the opportunity to react. If a car is approaching from behind, you have no such opportunity. I can’t figure out why skiing with traffic is safer.”br /br /First, thanks Dean for reading and responding. I am happy someone is reading.br /br /Here are my observations about rollerskiing on the right. I believe that much of the reason is motorist expectations. Motorists expect slow walking pedestrians to be on the left. They expect bicycles and things that are moving faster to be on the right. The two times I have had close calls with cars were both when I was rolling on the left side moving against the flow of traffic. In both cases it is my assumption that the drivers saw me and they thought I was a walking pedestrian. In one case the driver drifted to his right directly into my path. I was going downhill fairly fast and there was also a car following me in his own lane. I was forced to the gravel and brush to my left, took about 2.5 giant steps on my rollerskis before “supermanning” into the weeds. The other time my friend and I had come onto a state highway from a side road. Since there was quite a bit of traffic and we could see my truck parked maybe 400 meters down the road, we decided to just cruise down the “breakdown lane” on our left, stop at the bottom of the hill and then cross to the parking area. It was a pretty good hill and we were going pretty fast. The problem was that there was a yard sale on the lawn of a house on our left. A car was approaching us and the driver pulled into the breakdown lane. If they saw us at all they must not have known how fast we were going. Anyway, both people in the car were looking to their right at the stuff on the yard for sale, not at us. We both moved slightly to our right and whizzed past the car which was coming to a stop. They still never looked at us as we went by. Prior to that I had been waving my arms and poles and they didn’t see this either. br /br /Motorists expect to see things moving in the right lane. Motroist closing speed is much greater if you are on the left. For the pedestrian it is easy to move off the pavement. Much harder for the rollerskier. br /br /50 states require bicycles to ride on the right. This is what the motorist will expect, things moving fast are on the right. br /br /I would welcome more discussion here. Please share your observations. It would probably be good to have us all doing the same and safest practice.br /br /Have a good one,br /br /Bertdiv class=”blogger-post-footer”img width=’1′ height=’1′ src=’https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6589659500745667109-1622031615839224693?l=www.webskis.com%2Fwebskisblog.html’ alt=” //div
