Day 3 Photos
It was blue skies, but cold and windy today. In addition to lots of riding around town, the class worked on bike cop skills today — using the bike to its fullest advantage (and learning how to make it an asset rather than a liability).
Here are some photos from today:
The day always starts with some ramps at the Citrus Bowl.
After lunch we headed to Blue Jacket Park for drills. Above is the crossover cone weave.
Dismount while engaging the kickstand, so you don’t have to futz with the bike while you’re dealing with a perp.
Quick stop.
Rolling dismount, drop and run. (I have video of these drills, too.)
Using the bike for self-defense.
Power slide.
Tomorrow is a night ride, so we start at noon. I’ll be grateful for the ability to sleep in. But I may not be posting anything tomorrow night since I have to get up early again on Friday.
I’ve always totally stunk at graceful, rolling dismounts. No wonder I’m not a cop.
These are so cool! thanks for sharing pics.
This is neat, but so far it only looks like they’re going over bike handling skills in closed courses (not that that’s not important). Are they going to work on riding in traffic on the night ride tomorrow? I’ve seen far too many bike cops riding in the door zone, on sidewalks, etc.
I recall one story of a friend of mine who was ticketed by a couple of bike cops near Union Square in SF for running a stop sign. After they ticketed him, they hopped on their bikes and proceeded to ride up the sidewalk through heavy tourist foot traffic. Really?
A bicyclist has the rights and duties as a pedestrian to ride in the sidewalk but it depends on your local city ordinance. There are places where it’s illegal to ride in sidewalk.
It’s illegal in most of California, definitely in San Francisco.
Sidewalk cycling regulation in California is left to the cities and counties. It’s most likely not allowed in downtown San Francisco, but the rules vary widely in the handful of cities I know about, which requires looking up the municipal codes for every city. Or the county codes for unincorporated areas.
Some places ban sidewalk cycling outright, some ban it for adults, some ban it only in front of schools and businesses, some encourage it with “bikes may use sidewalk” signs. Bans seem to be rarely enforced.
Pants,
They’re doing lots of road riding. But since I’m riding with them, I’m running video rather than stills. That’s coming, I just haven’t had time to edit video… the days are long and the nights are short.
“Door zone” is called as a reminder every time we pass on-street parking. The first day they needed to be reminded to stay out of it, now they call it out themselves. Make’s me smile 🙂
Orlando’s sidewalk ordinance has a specific exception for OPD officers. They need to ride on the sidewalk to do their job. I’ll write more about that.
I’ll be writing more about this, too, but Bill has constructed one of the best programs in the country for teaching these guys about driving bicycles on the road. They go out of the way to ride on John Young Parkway and HWY 441, both are 55mph arterials. Tonight we rode across town in rush hour traffic.
It would be a riot to get a repeat of the horn-blowing-motorist during one of these training rides, and to have an entire platoon/squad of officers stop and confront the driver.
That honk only happened because Keri was obscuring Bill’s back, and the motorist couldn’t see the big POLICE on his shirt. We were in a number of other situations that day that would have likely generated honks, but Bill’s presence kept everybody quiet. For a driver to honk at a platoon of bike cops would be hysterically funny, but sadly(?) quite unlikely.
A guy in a truck yelled “get off the road” at us on 441 yesterday.
Damn! When will I learn? Never underestimate the stoopidity of Florida motorists.
I’m curious about the power slide photo – how is that a useful maneuver?
The explained use for it was to confront a suspect. Officer rides up behind a suspect, passes and powerslides to turn 180° facing him. 2 officers can surround someone quickly – one rides directly up to the suspect, the other rides past and whips around. At the very end of the Flickr set is a video of the maneuver. It’s hard to capture in a photo.
Thanks – found your Flickr vid and it makes more sense now.
The powerslide can also be used to stop very quickly. One of our officers was ride down Pine St to an emergency call. He was NOT paying close attention to the traffic light (shame on him) at Orange Ave. Then at the last second noticed it was RED. Did a emergency stop, the front brake cable broke, had a little pucker factor but was able to keep the rear brake engaged and transitioned to the powerslide avoiding a crash with a motor vehicle. The call ended up being bogus.