Can-Bike
Cycling is great for your physical and mental health; it provides basic, inexpensive transportation to school, work, shopping or visiting friends. It is often used as a form of daily recreation on trails, quiet back roads or residential areas. For years, many of us have used the bicycle for our annual vacations. While the bicycle is most enjoyable, it is NOT a toy. Indeed it is a vehicle under the Motor Vehicle Act and must be used in a safe and prudent manner and we, like other road users, must obey the laws as they apply to bicycles.
CAN-BIKE is a Canada-wide safe cycling educational program. There are a series of courses offered from basic “learn to ride” to advanced multi-day courses, like CAN-BIKE 2 for folks wanting to really hone their knowledge and skills and perhaps position themselves to partake in the CAN-BIKE Instructors course, enabling them to teach the CAN-BIKE courses.
The CAN-BIKE approach is very simple. Start with the basics – bike and helmet fit, then teach traffic dynamics; followed by parking lot practice and then, for some of the advanced courses, on-road cycling while being observed and coached by the instructor. All courses provide descriptive material to enhance the learning process. Quite often bicyclists enter the CAN-BIKE program with various abilities. It is our approach to work on what you know (sometimes we need to address bad habits) and present the course in a series of building blocks.
In most courses, you will be taught the ABCs of bicycle inspection, traffic dynamics, lane positioning, as well as on road skills such as straight line cycling, shoulder checks, signaling, rock dodging, threshold braking, and emergency turns as part of collision avoidance. Even seasoned cyclists will greatly benefit from taking CAN-BIKE courses.
CAN-BIKE is not a course to learn racing tactics or cycling tricks, it was designed to give participants knowledge and skills to ride in rural and urban streets in a safe fashion while sharing the roads with other users.