Warren Huska was tired of cars buzzing him on his bike commute.

His home province, Ontario, had just mandated that drivers give cyclists at least a meter of space before passing. But on the busy arterial roads of Toronto where Huska commutes 20 miles every day, most drivers demonstrated no awareness of the new policy. A run-in with an angry pickup driver in May 2015 was the last straw. Huska needed a way to carve out his own bike lane, so he turned to the one tool capable of capturing the attention and grudging respect of passing motorists: a pool noodle.

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This cyclist says attaching a pool noodle to his bike makes Toronto streets safer for him pic.twitter.com/EII94xFca1 — Toronto Star (@TorontoStar) October 18, 2016

“I just said, ‘enough!’ and slapped it onto my rack to stake out the space I’m entitled to,” Huska says. “I started to feel that I was allowing close calls to happen by only taking up a small part of the lane and giving cars implicit permission to try to squeeze past me.”

And somehow—whether due to increased visibility, spatial psychology, or just the mere absurdity of seeing a colorful water toy make its way through city traffic—drivers gave Huska a wider berth. He knew he was onto something on the noodle’s maiden voyage.

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“I was gritting my teeth and looking back, but it was almost like something was wrong—cars weren’t in my lane, and they were changing lanes to pass,” he says. “I felt like I had hit some magical sweet spot. The noodle is disarming—it’s not threatening like my earlier experience with trying to use a flag. People don’t know what to do so it disarms their defensive mechanism and throws them off, so they do what they would normally and avoid the obstacle.”

Huska says the noodle has only been clipped by cars a few times and just bounces back into place. Learning to ride with it wasn’t much of an adjustment—he’s not concerned with the wind drag, and in more than a year, it hasn’t fallen off from its bungee attachment. The response from motorists has been almost all positive; the number of heckles, roughly equivalent to his pre-noodle days.

“Motorists will come along and shout, ‘Great idea!’ across the passenger seat,” he says. ‘I’ve had high-fives from police officers. People see it and they get it. They understand immediately what it’s for—that I’m claiming space in the lane.”

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Sometimes other cyclists will drop in behind Huska and reap the benefits of his noodle’s-worth of space on the road. He suspects some consider his setup “undignified,” but he doesn’t care—he’s just happy to feel safer and less stressed on the road. Huska also rides with a helmet mirror and GoPro to safeguard against traffic altercations and report irresponsible drivers.

But the noodle is what opens people up and gets them talking.

“It’s a bit of public education—of reminding people what they already know about the new passing law,” Huska says. “I think in some ways I’m promoting safe streets as a team effort, like now we’re all working together on the road, we’re not opponents. If I have to look a little goofy to do that, I’m good.”

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