But pedaling on a treadmill make you fall over.
What the hell?
this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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Can confirm. Last week, I got home from a ride, stopped in front of the garage, couldn't unclip, and promptly fell over. It turned out one of the bolts fell out from the cleat during the ride, so the cleat just rotated, instead of unclipping. D'oh. Fortunately, I mostly landed in grass, though I did scrape my ankle a bit.
Yeah, I can relate to this...
Everyone is wrong. It's the encabulation effect.
Modern bicycles include an isotropic harmonization manifold to achieve the same thing without an encabulator.
Having the pivot point (steering) for the front wheel behind it's axle helps
Yes there are demonstrations on YouTube of bikes just wanting to remain upright. You can role it down a hill and it will self correct. Something to do with physics but I forget the terms.
Same principle as a gyroscope: a turning wheel will tend to stay perpendicular or parallel to the direction of the gravity vector because if it starts tilting away from such orientation there's a force that pushes it back.
Also works better with bigger wheels (if I remember it correctly the effect is related to spinning momentum).
I was pretty surprised when learning Physics and they show us how to derive the formula for that (which I totally forgot since that was over 3 decades ago).
Edit: Actually the gyroscopic effetc is just a part of it. See this article
Actually, it's the bike's geometry rather than a gyroscopic effect. Try rolling a bike backwards rather than forward - it'll topple quickly
Freestyle BMX riders go in reverse all the time and they don't fall over.
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Yeah, you're mostly right: Why bycicles stay upright.
There's some gyroscopic effect, but per that article it's not the main reason.
Yep. And it is an easy one to test. Just immobilize the bike's steering and see how well you can get it to balance.
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It's the central pedal force
my bike doesn’t have a central pedal. how does it stay up right?
first, and less importantly, your wheels are gyroscopes
second, and much more importantly, at speed you use your steering to compensate for imbalance. You lean a little right? slight steering to the right compensates. When standing still, steering is no longer an option (duh)
Think of this as you inch forward until the green light with a motorcycle behind you. Just stop. Riding at 2 mph is misery.
Get a lighter bike, mate. Scooter goes brrrr! But also, yes. Please god, the misery of traffic jams must stop. Let me lane split!
I got a tenere 700 coming from a rebel 500, both relatively light bikes but the tenere is so tall it's hard to waddle. I'd honestly love a scooter just for commuting and errands.
I live in a state where splitting is illegal but I can get away with filtering at stoplights. :)
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If you’ve forgotten high school physics (like me), this is a legitimately strange phenomenon.
What's really hard is getting a 5 year old to understand this before you run out of energy from trying to hold their seat and run at the same time.
My kid screams "un-let go" at me while balancing perfectly well. She understands, she does not accept.
That's how I learned it. My dad got tired, let go and stopped.
I noticed it was suddenly much easier to pedal, so I turned around to see him standing 30ft behind me, then I crashed.
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Real talk, science doesn’t have the answer to this yet.