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John Forester’s Instant Turn Maneuver

Jim’s Tech Talk

By Jim Langley

In last week’s Tech Talk, I asked for help identifying a helmet I saw on a passing cyclist. I’d like to thank everyone for all the comments and links to helmets. None are the same as the one I saw and I am still looking for it, but I appreciate you trying.

Also, I’d like to answer those of you who said you wouldn’t wear a helmet unless it met all safety standards. I completely agree but I have no way of knowing whether or not the helmet I saw meets them as I need to find one first.

Being prepared for drivers “right-turning” or “right-hooking” you

Today, I was thinking more about the accident I described in the story. I called it the “right turn,” and reader Steve Weeks reminded me that it’s also known as the “right hook.” What happens is a driver overtakes you, passing you on the left and then turns right across your path. This can happen at an intersection where you’re traveling straight and a driver cuts you off to turn right. It can also happen where there are parking spots on the right of you and the driver cuts across your path to get one.

It might seem like you’d only suffer a minor injury from an accident like this. But if it’s an oversized vehicle it could be much worse. Here in Santa Cruz, California where I live and ride is a route to be avoided at all costs called Mission Street (if you come here to ride used King Street instead, or if you absolutely have to ride on Mission Street, ride on the sidewalk, which is legal if the street is not safe). 

About 15 years ago, where Mission meets Bay Street, a big-rig truck right hooked a college professor cycling to work and killed him. Investigators discovered that the driver had done the same thing to another rider a few years ago in another location.

John Forester

Remembering that awful crash reminded me that the late cycling guru John Forester, in his book Effective Cycling, Safe, Fast Bike Travel https://amzn.to/40oDXYb taught a maneuver called the “instant turn.” Forester was the lifelong cyclist and cycling engineer who created the Effective Cycling program which was the national education program of the League of American Bicyclists.

cycling book

In his book, under the section Emergency Maneuvers, he talks about Instant Turns. He points out that some of the most common crashes are when oncoming drivers turn left across your path (a left hook). And he mentions the right hook turn that we’ve been discussing. The other danger is a car suddenly pulling out from a driveway not realizing you’re right there.

Forester says that in order to be able to perform the instant turn in an emergency you must practice it over and over on soft ground so if you fall you won’t hurt yourself badly. Once you’ve got it down, here’s how it works, quoting from Forester’s book:

“You turn your front wheel left – the wrong way, towards the car. By doing this you’ve forced a right lean, and you’ll start to fall right. The moment you’ve got a good lean started, a tenth of a second or so, turn your front wheel right and you’ll find yourself in a tight right turn. 

Do you understand what you’ve done? To make a right turn you must lean right, so to hurry up the leaning process you made your bike track to the left a few inches. Then you are leaning over properly and can steer a right turn. 

This doesn’t ever feel natural, and you must train yourself to do it. It is a jerk in the wrong direction at the start of the instant turn when you deliberately unbalance yourself by steering the whole bike out from under you.

You can’t safely learn the instant turn on the road, and you will never do it right without practice. Take a large sponge out to a playground and throw it on the ground. First pretend it is a rock, and practice rock dodging round it. It won’t hurt anything if you hit it, but you could spill, so start cautiously and get more aggressive as you learn. 

Then progress from rock dodging to instant turns. The instant turn is just rock dodging without the last straightening up. If you dodge round the rock to the left, you end up by going right. A few 10-minute practice sessions will increase your skill remarkably, and might save you and your bike someday.”

Your turn

I remembered John Forester’s instant turn and wanted to share it here, but it’s not something I’ve learned or have ever done. I know John’s Effective Cycling course was taught by instructors across the country not too many years ago. I don’t know if it still is. If you are or were an Effective Cycling instructor, or if you can perform the maneuver, it would be great if you would share your insights on John’s instant turn. Here’s more on John’s amazing contribution to cycling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forester_(cyclist)

Jim Langley is RBR’s Technical Editor. A pro mechanic & cycling writer for more than 40 years, he’s the author of Your Home Bicycle Workshop in the RBR eBookstore. Tune in to Jim’s popular YouTube channel for wheel building & bike repair how-to’s. Jim’s also known for his cycling streak that ended in February 2022 with a total of 10,269 consecutive daily rides (28 years, 1 month and 11 days of never missing a ride). Click to read Jim’s full bio.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. yeah that is a good one

    need to practice first though!

    just any ‘jerk to the left’ might cause a crash too

  3. Someone turning left across your path is called “a left cross”, not a “left hook”. One needs to know the correct boxing analogies/terminology if one is to be a cyclist!

  4. The “instant turn” is just another term for countersteering. That’s something any cyclist does to initiate any turn, whether they’re conscious of it or not. It’s the thing that causes learning difficulties when you move from tricycles to bicycles. Calling it be some other name is only confusing. Confusion in emergency conditions is a bad thing.

    Telling people to turn left to turn right is confusing also. Instead, just push down on the inside end of the handlebar. You push the wheel left and naturally shift your weight to the inside of the turn you want to make. Same end result, less confusion. You can also use the same method to tighten up your line if you enter a turn too quickly or the road curves more than you thought it did.

    Practicing before you need it is a good idea in any case.

    • This ^^. I learned it 50 years ago when I took a motorcycle safety course. I recognized it as something I had been doing on the bicycle for years. A simple way to remember it is “push the bar in the direction you want to turn. Practice is good, especially as an emergency maneuver… but many cyclists will probably recognize this as something they already do. 🙂

  5. I taught bike safety for several years to support a local charity ride. The Instant Turn was one of the parking lot drills that we included in the curriculum. It’s somewhat counterintuitive for cyclists, so it’s a tough drill to teach (especially on asphalt!). But it does work (I also had to use it once when I car turned right in front of me) if you take the time to practice it.

  6. Great stuff, thanks.

    As a roadie with decades of experience, I took motorcycle-driver training a few years back.

    They teach a maneuver they call the swerve or emergency swerve. And they made us prove we could do it in the licensing test at the end of the training.

    The procedure is to shove down hard on the handlebar on the side of the direction you want to go. HARD. That accomplishes the countersteering move you mentioned to start the instant turn, and transitions cleanly into the banked turn.

    The other part of it is to look where you want to go, not at the obstacle you want to avoid. There’s something about looking where we want to go that helps guide our bikes, but I don’t claim to understand it.

    (Hey, let’s not use the word “accident” for anything except being struck by meteorites or used airplane parts. A crash is a crash. “Accident” ascribes it to random chance and lets us off the hook for finding and fixing its root causes.)

    • Pushing down hard may work with a motorcycle, but if you do it on a bicycle, you’re going to crash. Countersteering definitely works, but it requires judicious pressure applied to the bars, which requires practice, as the amount of pressure required varies from bike to bike.

      The one place where I get a lot of relatively safe practice countersteering is ride a gravel bike or mountain bike on twisty MTB trails. I also find that lifting my butt off the saddle allows me to lean the bike into the turn and quickly start carving the turn in the right direction. However, you can overdo this and end up getting thrown over the high side. Again, practice is the key to success.

      Another important point is to stay off the brakes. If you don’t, you’re likely to end up in either a slide or getting pitched off the bike.

  7. Nice to see I’m not the only one with one of John’s original books! I used it teaching a class in cycling at college in the ’70s, and the ’emergency turn’ was a standard drill on the first day of all the tours I led over 2 decades. It works, if you practice it first!

    • I have the yellow one and the blue one. Not a ‘Forestrian’ since IMHO integration with cars does not work! I never had the courage to practice this maneuver. Not about to now!

  10. I have been cycling for almost 50 years. My wife and I do month long bicycle touring in the US and Europe. Our cycling typically reaches about 7000 miles/year here in Arizona. . We also mountain bike. Last year I was the victim of a drunk driver (at 8 in the morning) that decided to turn right in front of me while I approached a side street. I don’t know why, but I instinctively turned my front tire towards the side of the car coming towards me. This resulted in my bike being pushed backwards and out of the way of the car. I did tumble to the ground but there was no injury to me or to my bike. This wasn’t exactly the maneuver described here but it worked for me and I lived to see the driver arrested and lose his job for operating a company vehicle while drunk. Sometimes the stars do align and all is right with the world.

  11. A rare example of John Forester not promoting a wrong-headed approach to safety.
    A complementary tip would be to never, ever, overlap with a motor vehicle at intersections, and to *always* assume the vehicle will unexpectedly turn in front of you at intersections. Avoiding trouble in the first place is always better than having to react suddenly to save your life.

  12. I missed last week’s column in which you began the discussion of “right hooks.” You mentioned that someone who nearly got you exited their car, apologized, and said “I didn’t see you.” Irrespective of polite apologies, I’ve heard the “I didn’t see you” line too many times. The problem is it is not an excuse; it is an explanation. Failure to do see someone is likely a failure to exercise due care in the circumstances and that is negligence. On those occasions, I have made it a point to explain to the driver that they are supposed to see me. and that’s not an excuse. Often they get angry and yell at me, which I do not mind because I know my point has been made.

    • Hi Jim,
      I don’t look at this email address very often, which is why this response is so late.
      I also have a copy of John’s Effective Cycling which I used most often to lace a wheel correctly. About 20 years ago I took a class called Traffic Skills 101 from the League of American Bicyclists and followed up by taking a weekend Seminar to learn how to teach it to others. It is currently called Smart Cycling. I’ve been teaching the class mostly in Oceanside, CA for over 15 years to over 1000 students. The 3 hour classroom session is a pre-requisite to the 6 hour road session which includes parking lot drills that Teach the Quick Turn, among other skills that help cyclists avoid crashes. The entire course is based primarily on John’s statement that “Cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles.”
      The course covers the best practices for safe, efficient, and courteous cycling on anywhere it is legal to ride.
      There will be a classroom session tomorrow night and a road session this Saturday in Oceanside. A direct link to sign up for this class and the others that will be offered this year is: https://sdbikecoalition.org/full-calendar?category=Smart%20Cycling

  14. Getting ran over by a right cross should never happen if the cyclist knows how to handle traffic. A cyclist needs to first of all take the lane, and then stay behind a vehicle instead of along it’s side, then simply act like a car, use your hands to signal the car behind you that you are turning right, wait for the front car to go, then you go and make a right turn without ever exposing yourself to the right cross.

    Never ever come along the side of a big truck or bus, or whatever, as I said about a car. Those big vehicles can’t see you, and they need a lot of space to turn, they may be in part or in the entire lane next to the lane your in because they need both lanes to make the turn. While they are supposed to be checking for cars over on their right, but you can’t rely on them to do their job, this is your life, you have to do your job as well.