I don't have a good solution either. Along with Muirenn's thread about the wet shorts in public ... DH got a road bike a couple of years ago and I really wanted to encourage him, but I wound up being really discouraging to him because it was in equal parts terrifying and infuriating. He rides like a 9-year-old boy, up and down on sidewalks, in and out of traffic, hugging the curb. It's bad enough when you're in a group of experienced cyclists with testosterone flowing (and that is pretty dang bad). When someone doesn't have the skills, and when the massive trove of traffic awareness they have from hundreds of thousands of miles on motos goes right out the window when they don't have a motor underneath them ... I just won't ride road with him. Tootling around on our commuters is as good as it gets with us, sadly.