Special needs urban bicycling - what streets are safe?

A few weeks ago I wrote about trying residential-urban (Saint Paul, MN) bicycle commute with #2. I realized he wasn’t ready, so we’re focusing on his mountain biking. He rides with a team I manage. It’s hard work for him, but he keeps persisting. I now do a scaled practice with him — about 50-70% of our novice rider practice routine. I got the scaling idea from my own CrossFit hobby — where I’m about 50% of the male athlete standard.At that time I wrote that #1 was doing relatively well with his bike commuting. He has quite different cognitive traits; the two boys have complementary strengths. Then, on a family outing, #1 took off on a 4 lane (2 each way) 50mph+ roadway. I’m pretty sure he knew I would not approve, but he wasn’t just yanking my chain. He was also showing off how fast he is, specifically much faster than his father. (I already knew that!). I didn’t say anything at the time, but his bike was grounded when we got home.It took a while to figure out a good approach to letting him ride streets again. I started out investigating local traffic skills classes; I thought I’d adopt that curriculum for him, maybe do a hands-on course together. I decided it was the wrong fit though. Many of the skills he already did well, some of the curriculum wasn’t relevant to real world commuting, and many of the topics were too abstract.I realized we had two issues that were relatively unique to #1. One is long term hard. He has had words with people in bicycle...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - Category: Disability Tags: ADHD adult autism brain and mind cognitive impairment exercise health smartphone smartphone4all transit Source Type: blogs