Things were interesting Sunday when my brakes started rebelling on me... I really felt like a new rider all over again who had no idea how to stop. Thankfully all is well that ends well, but a couple of those intersections I will never look at the same again.

How do most of you treat left hand turns? If I am on a route where, for example, I make a right onto a busy road and have to make a left pretty quickly, say within a block or so, I will often just go ahead and get in the left hand side of the lane instead of waiting - quite close to the centerline.

In a way I've not taken the lane entirely as a car CAN pass me on the right, but it enables me the ability to turn when I need to do so, depending on on-coming traffic of course. I especially do this on roads where past experience has shown that drivers are reluctant to let me over.

I am actually very, very glad that I did this on our ride Sunday, because we hadn't stopped yet since leaving our starting point and I didn't know that I had a brake problem. On THAT street it wouldn't have been good.