Lack of caution leads to motorcycling diaster

The best ride I ever had on an Australian road, was going through the Hunter Valley on a '78 GTS 900. Man!

If you ever get the chance…

  1. The Great Ocean Road. Absolutely spectacular, but you need to do it at 5am if you don’t want to spend it at 40km/h behind a tourist bus.

  2. The Old Road/Wollombi Road. Cop-infested on weekends, but an astonishing public racetrack on weekdays. Beware Lemming Corner.

  3. Macquarie Pass. Suicidal, but fun. Continuous 20km/h hairpins for an hour. Good pie shop at the top.

  4. The Stuart Highway. No corners for 2,000km, but who cares: the scenery is fucking spectacular. Ride until you get tired, sleep by the side of the road, rinse and repeat, life-changing.

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See, during the zombie apocalypse, I am bee-lining it to the local motorcycle super store and picking up something like that.

Yeesh. Glad the made out ok overall.

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The same kind of attitude prevails in Taiwan, so I think it’s a Chinese culture thing rather than a specific legal system thing. Although informal attitudes do factor into legal decisions in both places with alarming frequency. The principle seems to be if you get involved, you bear responsibility.

Interesting - looks like that’s not the only Vincent fork design to have problems:
http://www.cycleworld.com/2015/12/16/vincent-motorcycle-girdraulic-fork-improvements-from-racing-insights-by-kevin-cameron

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I understand that the normal train of thought is, “Hey, this will be okay”, is hard to break out of. You might think that maybe a passenger could spend 10 minutes looking up information on dispatch or something. The instinct to not call 911 absent a train wreck is pretty normal, and most parents probably taught their kids to not just call 911 for things that aren’t an emergency. As an adult, if you see something that is imminent danger to the lives of anyone around you, then you should call or encourage someone to call 911. They can route your call to the appropriate responders.

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Somewhat weird thing: it wasn’t until I was twenty years old that I realised that my Mum was sensitive about her appearance. To me, she’d always looked like that; I didn’t realise that they were scars.

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Also great are the Putty Road, old Pacific Highway (now knobbled super slow speed limits) which link to Wollombi; but the jewel in the crown is the Oxley Highway out of Wauchope. The best by a country mile.

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And for further emphasis, a “false report” would be something that was “false”, like a bomb threat. Would it be 911 “abuse”? http://www.popcenter.org/problems/911_abuse/
Would it be a non-emergency call? If someone is going at on the highway and not in control of their vehicle, they are an causing imminent danger to themselves and those around them.
You’re not pranking 911.
Is it an exaggerated 911 call? It’s possible that someone might feel the claim was exaggerated. Maybe you yourself are a poor judge of what is actually dangerous. If you look into it, there’s definitely leeway on this - you won’t get in trouble. In this case, there was in fact, clearly a dangerous situation that should have been reported. It would not be exaggerated.
I would say that given the end result, calling 911 would have not been 911 abuse at all in this situation. It’s probably a great example to learn from of when you should actually call 911.

That’s an open helmet. Might (just might) have saved his skull, but it smashed his face and probably fucked up his neck real good.

This is a real helmet. Those open thingies are vanity accessories which can be useful in a limited set of circumstances.

911 basics: would this situation be improved by having all of the nearby brown people shot?

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Right on. Wear a full face if you like your face.

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OTOH, wear an open face if you value your neck.

Jawbones make quite good crumple zones. Chinbars are highly effective at transferring impacts to the vertebrae.

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Idiocracy, yo.

Yes, that is interesting.
Race a Vincent, though? Some people have too much money.

This whole helmet thing seems to be a typical engineering tradeoff. A larger helmet means more padding but also increases the torque on your vertebrae. Open face is lighter, less likely to cause neck injuries, but obviously offers less face protection. There’s an argument (which I’m not competent to pronounce on) that pedal cycle helmets may be rather useless because the damage against which they protect is rare while the probability of serious neck injury or brain damage due to rotation of the brain in the skull is actually increased.

I liked where BMW was going with the C200, it’s a pity it was a flop. I actually considered one as a commuter but there were contra-indications for about a month in each winter. My next “motorbike” may be a Smart - the 108BHP one. I like the roll cage.

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I don’t know about Oz but in Europe it was introduced in a few countries in the late '80s. About that time, some Italian minister was widely ridiculed for suggesting it should be applied in Italy too. It took 25 years but I think it was eventually introduced, although highway behaviour over there is still pretty shocking overall (albeit slowly improving).

You’re right, thanks for the link! By the way, while accident looks serious, on original thread on Polish reddit (wykop.pl) motorcyclist writes that he did not suffer any serious injuries.

Same here. Great concept, bad implementation.
I think two factors killed it:
The crappy motor and, most of all, those ridiculous levers you had to operate for the stand. If they had come up with something better (read: cooler) like maybe something electric powered at the switch of a button…

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Oh, I’ve called 112 a couple of times, even discussing with the dispatcher that I am NOT qualified to decide that someone is just a drunk sleeping off his inebriation.

But somehow I thought that this one would be pointless.

That’s beautiful man! The way it should always be; we never know the backstory to people we first meet.