He died as he lived.
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Stupidly.
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That’s exactly what I did. But I was never convinced it wouldn’t happen to me.
Commuting in a city on a motorbike is both the most boring and most dangerous way to ride, but I did it for years. Nuts. An average week had two or three moments where diligence and judgement saved my skin. “An expert rider uses expert judgement to avoid using expert skill” was drummed into my head during training.
I finally gave it up shortly after our second kid was born and I was sleep-deprived and getting stupider and stupider in traffic. “These stories don’t have happy endings” I muttered to myself after one hairy commute home where I missed a lot of critical cues. I hung up my leathers that evening and put the bike up for sale. Haven’t been on one since.
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Survivorship bias at work tbh. A lot of you didn’t, they’re just not here to talk about it.
We know. We experienced it, and knew even then that not everyone survives such accidents.
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I’ve had these sorts of drives in a car, but in a car the price of failure is a whole lot lower. Realizing that is part of what convinced me to never get on a bike, even though a lot of me still wants to, to this day. Glad you made a choice to prioritize your family! Because the thing is, nobody can have perfect judgement all the time. The thing that will get you won’t be your fault. It’ll be the cement truck that runs a light or a tire blowout mid-corner or whatever.
I used to have a lot of biker friends, and one thing that struck me is how they all have hairy near-death or near-quadriplegic experiences. Anyone who has ridden for any length of time has had a very bad close call. Again, in a car, it’s a call to the insurance company and a few weeks of hassle. On a bike, it’s wondering if you’ll ever walk again.
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A friend of mine who used to ride told me that the first thing his instructor told him when he was first learning was “There are two kinds of riders: those who have crashed, and those who haven’t crashed yet”. My friend attributed his success (not crashing) to remembering those words every time he put his helmet on.
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Question from a non-American: what is driver education for bikers like there? Does a regular drivers’ licence work for motorcycles too, or do you need separate training?
As a Norwegian (where we can not-so-humbly brag of one of, if not the lowest traffic mortality rates globally with some variance depending on how you measure it), I know motorcycles are a lot more dangerous than cars here, but I’m curious as to the proportions. In 2021 we had 80 total traffic deaths, of which 16 were bikers - and motorcycles really aren’t very common here, in part due to them being unusable for large parts of the year in most of the country. Still, the 34x number seems very high. The latest source I can find on this for Norway is old - 2005 - but it claims around 15x higher chance for all types of motorized two-wheelers compared to car drivers and passengers combined (source in Norwegian, sorry!).
Which leads me to question: how much of this is due to bikes being inherently more dangerous, how much of it is down to lacklustre training, and how much of it is down to an (intentionally or not) borderline suicidal biker culture?
My brother drives a bike - not for commuting, you really don’t want to do that in Norwegian weather - but he goes on a few trips a year with a group of other bikers, both domestically and internationally. And of course there’s risk involved, but they’re extremely safety-conscious, and have (thankfully) not had a single accident in the group since he joined. Which is of course at least partially luck, but still makes me wonder just how much this is affected by the intersection of culture, laws and training.
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Varies state-to-state, but in my experience in California the requirements are pretty lax.
If you already have a regular (“class-C”) driver’s license and are age 21 or older, you will need to get a learners permit to ride a motorcycle, which is easy to get by passing a basic written knowledge test. That will allow you to immediately start riding a motorcycle alone with no additional testing or training, and is good for 6 months. After that you can get your license by taking a skill test. No training is ever required here.
After 6 months if you don’t want to take the skill test you can just renew the learners permit. I understand that some people just do this indefinitely.
I found the skill test to be ridiculously easy to pass on my Vespa. It involves things like puttering around a painted circle in a parking lot and driving/stopping in a straight line. The test person told me that a lot of people try taking it on high performance street bikes and fail miserably.
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That does indeed sound pretty lax. Here it’s pretty strict - though also rather complicated as there are three classes of motorcycles, A1 (125cc/15hp), A2 (47.6hp), and A (unlimited), which also have different age limit and training requirements. You can get an A1 lincence at 16, an A2 lincence at 18 (also the age for car licences here), and A either at 20 after having an A2 licence for two years, or at 24 without having an A2 licence first. Each class has mandatory training with a licenced driving instructor, and while you’re allowed to practice (there’s no such thing as a learners’ permit here), you need to be accompanied by someone with an A or A2 licence, above the age of 25, who has had the relevant licence for at least five years, either on the same bike or following directly behind on their own bike. I can’t find the numbers, but there’s a required number of mandatory training courses that you need to go through, both theoretical and practical, as well as a pretty thorough test. And it’s also worth mentioning that all of this is pretty expensive - this isn’t something that’s done on a whim.
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That sounds reasonable.
Some states don’t require a special motorcycle license to ride a small moped or scooter but in California you do need one. However, once obtained, that same “M1” license will let you drive a 1200cc superbike racing motorcycle even if you passed your skill test on a <50cc moped. Doesn’t make much sense.
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I think of the same when i drive my car. I always assume someone’s out there determined to ruin my day and my car, i’ve managed to avoid a good number of bad circumstances because of my defensive mindset when driving. That said sometimes you can do everything right and still get in a wreck, the stakes are higher for those on bikes (obviously).
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Wow, yeah, that’s pretty loose. “Yeah, I’m pretty good on my Vespa, I should be able to handle 200mph on this Kawasaki, right?”
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There are many places that offer Motorcycle Safety training courses here but they aren’t actually required to get a license.
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A nurse friend put it very well: “Motorcyclists! The ones that don’t walk with a limp can’t raise their arm above their shoulder! And those are the ones that are still walking!”
I walk with a limp.
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Australia: Separate class of license. It varies by state, but loosely speaking: First two or three years (or just a year, if you’re older than 30) you’re restricted to low-power bikes. It used to be 250 cc or less, but there are some absolute rocket-ship bikes in the 250 cc category. No carrying pillion passengers when you’re on the restricted class.
A written test plus practical off-road training is required to get started. A practical on-road test is needed to get past the restricted stage. Some states require a certain number of logged hours during the restricted phase as well.
regarding risks:
In Australia, a motorcyclist is roughly as likely to crash as a car (maybe a bit less but not as much as I thought [1]). But a motorcycle rider is much much less likely to survive a crash. The disproportionate number you’re seeing isn’t caused by the crash rate - it’s caused the survival rate [2].
[1] I personally suspect the risk for motorcycles is divided into two groups: a very high-risk group and a very low-risk group. Possibly more so than for cars. In my head, I can divide the car drivers I know into roughly three groups: the careful drivers, the average drivers who don’t know much about driving but aren’t dangerous, and the high-risk drivers. Among the motorcyclists I know, I don’t know any “middle group” riders. If they’re going to bother getting on a motorcycle, they’re either super-careful or super high-risk.
[2] In Norway, I suspect there also isn’t much winter riding. In most of Australia, motorcycle riding is a year-round thing.
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Almost all due to point two I would guess, from conversations with US riders (a small number, not representative) the light-touch process of becoming licensed seems guaranteed to result in injuries and deaths. Some have a theory that this is due to political lobbying on the behalf of national motorcycle manufacturers.
Motorcycles are not inherently more dangerous – motorcyclists are inherently more vulnerable; and, after a suitable amount of training combined with a structured introduction to more and more powerful motorcycles, most riders are not the “borderline suicidal” group that a lot of road users often assume they are. Training and experience and the ability to admit to yourself that you have to take responsibility for your own safety and back off when you find yourself threatened by conditions.
After more than 40 years of riding (frequently hearing the same blithe comments about organ donors and asking for injury) I am not dead or injured.
The victims who sadly died have been written off for not wearing helmets. Helmets may have helped them survive – they certainly would not have hindered their survival prospects – but there are other aspects which are not addressed in the article which may have affected the outcome.
According to many records the majority of severe incidents (death or permanent injury) in the UK are single vehicle accidents – where no other moving vehicle was involved. And excess speed for the conditions is often cited as a contributory factor.
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In Michigan you must take a course with a certified trainer and you must take a certified road test.
When I got mine 41 years ago you just drove in a circle in a parking lot while the inspector guy watched and then you got a cycle endorsement that’s still good today.
I quit riding daily about 10 years ago. We own a Suzuki Bergman scooter that we carry on our RV for emergencies, it’s basically a motorcycle and can easily do 80+.
I’m confident in my skills, it’s everyone else that terrifies me so I only ride it occasionally for rides into town when we’re camping.
When I insured it, Michigan had just repealed the helmet law. The insurance company has different rates for wearing a helmet or not. Something about the way it pays out with or without a helmet.
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I always wonder what the breakdown is between naive feelings of invincibility and/or ludicrous underestimates of what real bad outcomes look like and more or less overtly cynical knowledge and exploitation of the fact that most other people aren’t sociopathic randroids; so you can get away with talking the talk about it being a matter of personal responsibility and nobody else’s business because if you walk the walk your odds that someone(whether it be ‘society’ broadly, family, etc. ) will flinch and subsidize your expensive mistake rather than taking you at your word and shoving you into the street to go be your own problem as soon as the money runs out.
I’m not sure that you could get either IRB approval or a sufficient number of people to administer the experiment; but it would be fascinating to see whether, how much, and among what demographics, support for such a law would change if you changed it from “as long as you have $10k in insurance coverage for motorcycle accident injuries” to “and agreed to waive any protections based on entitlement to services beyond those covered by your accident insurance”; with regulations regarding discharging unstabilized patients, programs funding supportive care for the disabled, etc. not applying since you voluntarily undertook an otherwise forbidden level of risk.
I suspect that some people are sincere; either in the (unsupported but common) belief that it won’t happen to them; or in the notion that you should be able to do foolish things on an ‘on my own head be it’ basis; but I also wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of rugged individualists would turn a slightly greenish color and mumble awkwardly if they were informed that hooray, they win, the nanny state will get off their backs; but they should be advised that there’s no such thing as ‘society’ if they are expecting someone else to cover the tab.
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There’s a darkly humorous paper that assesses equestrian activity as though it were the recreational drug ‘equasy’; with the assessment that it should be a Class A drug for the purposes of regulatory classification.
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