What Keeps A Bike Upright?
Clever maths and physics seems to be the answer:
For practical purposes, this is how I explain it to adults I’m teaching to ride:
- Steering is what keeps a bike upright
- If you’re falling to the right, you need to steer to the right
- This is completely counterintuitive
- But if you make a turn that’s slightly tighter than the extent to which you’re falling, the centrifugal force you generate will pull the bike upright
- It’s just a matter of learning to sense very slight deviations from upright, and apply very slight steer-in corrections to these
It seems to work - I can get most people riding within about 15-20 minutes.
Oh, hadn’t thought of the adult learner. Like (I hope) lots of my generation, I just learned to ride a bike when I was too young to remember now. So all the steering stuff is just natural and intuitive…
But then I compare that to learning to kayak on white water, like I did in my thirties. This also isn’t intuitive (if the side-undercurrent is making you lean over to the right, you lean even further to the right etc) and I can imagine exactly how bewildering it is.
Good - but it isn’t centrifugal force. It’s re-positioning the bottom of the wheels directly under the centre of gravity.
I think that’s what happens when track-standing. When you add forward momentum into the mix I think there’s other stuff at work too.