Per the article:
“Surprisingly, we found that the difference in speed between the motorcycle and the surrounding traffic was a bigger predictor of injury than speed alone,” said study lead author Thomas Rice, epidemiologist at SafeTREC, which is based at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. “Above a 15-mile-per-hour speed differential, the risk of injury rose significantly.”
Fascinating, this was also my intuitive feeling about danger.
As long as parallel traffic is going at similar speeds, it’s pretty safe, but if you have one lane going 100 MPH and the other going 20 MPH, that’s… scary.
On a 3 lane highway, this advice probably applies equally to regular car traffic in each lane just as much as motorcycles in those “extra” 2 middle lanes between the cars, too. Try to match speeds!
Also interesting to see the parallels here in social friction between car drivers and bicyclists, and car drivers and motorcyclists…
