Riding a motorbike doesnt impact my life insurance much at all - it’s negligible, I don’t believe they even asked.
Those peeps are the pros.
In the larger context, riding smart, the risks are there, but cancer is a bigger beast.
On the numbers.
Never an accident on my chopped '69 Triumph Tiger, but…
…a broken collarbone, fractured wrist, and compressed L1 vertebra in three separate incidents on my 1995 Kona Kiluea.
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Maybe he sees them in his rear view mirror first. Before they ALL overtake. (All the ones he sees.)
Just so you know, ‘pavement’ in UK is where pedestrians walk. Road is where vehicles drive. Over here you cannot legally even ride a bicycle on the pavement (let alone a motorbike) so doing it responsibly is still illegal.
I assume you are referring obliquely to the possibility that your responsible behaviour on the road may not survive the transition to ‘off-road’ motorcycling. (Yeah - English is not logical. ‘Off-road’ does NOT mean ‘on pavement’ ;-))
(So do the death stats only cover on-road riding or off-road too? Just to be rhetorically pedantic about it, so, no, I have not gone back to check.)
Anecdata: I’ve sustained three broken arms (you have three arms!?), a severe concussion, many scars, and have been hit by a car while operating a two wheeled transportation device. Never even had so much as a broken finger nail in a car (though one time was damn close, and I absolutely used up one of my nine lives).
I wouldn’t ever begrudge someone from riding any vehicle they felt in control of. Obviously, for me personally, that excludes anything with exactly two wheels.
Now a unicycle…
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Cliche answer to cliche joke: I got your organ right here.
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Eyyyy. Git outta here
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What’s another name for a motorcycle rider?
Happy
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No, as @EggyToast said, you have to think about the overlap.
Say 50% of accidents involved speeding. And say 50% of accidents involve not wearing helmets. Does this mean you will have 0 accidents if you don’t speed and wear a helmet? No, because those two groups above may intersect a lot.
Further, you can’t just subtract percentages like that, even a single percentage, because you don’t know the baseline.
Say (made-up example) 70% of accidents involve people below the age of thirty. Does that mean that you have 30% of the chance of an accident if you are above thirty? No, because you don’t know what percentage of people riding are under thirty. If 90% of the people riding are young, then the statistic above actually proves you are safer riding under thirty than above.
So those raw percentages of accidents actually tell you very little.
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I don’t want to be on my deathbed and congratulate myself for not doing all the things I wanted to do.
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Also consider baseline rates.
For example:
Say that a study finds that 70% of bike fatalities involve speeding riders. But add to that another study that says that 90% of riders speed to some degree on a frequent basis.
Does that 70% figure suggest that speed is a risk factor or not?
Thanks for the information. By “pavement”, I was referring to anything paved, the secondary definition of the word. I should have been more specific.
I was able to ride unsupervised at a pretty young age as long as I kept to dirt roads and trails. Of course I did some stupid things, but I was never seriously injured. Of course, there is no traffic to deal with, the speeds are much lower, and the surface is more forgiving most of the time. But every time you crash a bike, you learn from the experience.
So when I hit the age of sixteen and got a license, I had 7 years of riding and off-road racing experience, and I was a much safer rider. This was a deliberate plan on my Dad’s part, and I have done the same for my kids.
I do think there is a risk/experience curve involved. I do not have any data, but experience tells me that a 19 year old with little or no riding experience who buys a “sport bike” is the most dangerous type of rider.
This is anecdotal, but my friends all rode as well, and there were many spectacular crashes, but nobody ever got seriously injured.
My daughter had a pretty good crash in the mountains last summer. She was scared but unhurt, and the four wheeler ended up sideways in a crevasse, making her a pedestrian. To walk home by the trail would have been about 12 miles, so she took a direct course home, over about five miles of very rough country. We retrieved the bike, did some minor repairs, and she was riding again the next day.
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Ya, that’s what I said. 
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And apropos of not very much to do with the topic, and now fixated on ‘paved’ and ‘responsible behaviour’… there’s a very paved area in an industrial estate around here (basically the parking and loading area in front of a number of builder’s merchants and the like) that periodically gets its entrance blocked and is used by some sort of motorcycle dare-devil/stunt-rider guys who have fun doing wheelies and saddle stands and whatever other larks they fancy. Obviously not the public road and no idea if technically public or private land, but it sure is not what anyone would define as your standard, responsible, getting from A to B, ‘pavement’ riding behaviour!
But I am sure it is a properly supervised and entirely responsible endeavour on its own terms. Maybe they are trying to build a display team. I’m sure guys like these are far less than 27x more likely to die than auto drivers.
ETA But a single motorcyle accident may take out 27 or more of them all at once.
Yes, and note that, “pedestrian deaths nationwide were at their highest number in more than four decades — surpassing motorist fatalities.” That part was really surprising to me.
When I am in my truck I think “predator”, when I am walking, biking or on the board I think “prey”.
Having been a bicyclist for more than forty years I can attest that motorists have always been and forever will be idiots.
As to motorcyclists; motorists are idiots, most motor enthusiasts are aware of safety, most motorists are not enthusiasts.
You can say that texting or drinking or whatever explains bad driving, but the fact is most humans are stupid.
The most dangerous thing about an automobile is the nut behind the wheel.
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I ride mostly off road, but when I do hit the pavement, I try not to hit the pavement (or anything else) by assuming that all four or more wheeled pilots are out to get me. My goal is to not give them any opportunity to do so. I don’t speed or do any stunt driving. I save that for off-road opportunities. I try to be as polite a pilot as possible, but today it’s getting more and more difficult to avoid accidents even in my car. Smart phones have given the lunkheads even more opportunities to show their stupidity.
Of course motorbikes are safer than cars, you never hear about an old bloke falling asleep on a Harley and wiping out a daycare centre or a lady on a Vespa mowing down a pack of cyclists, do you?
