7 ms·

Not quite sure yet how this influences my recent urge to start riding motorcycles. There seems to be a (near) 1:2 ratio between motorcycle and vehicle fataliti

Not quite sure yet how this influences my recent urge to start riding motorcycles. There seems to be a (near) 1:2 ratio between motorcycle and vehicle fatalities. I already knew motorcycle riders were 5 times more likely to get in accidents, and those accidents were 35 times more likely to result in very serious injury. In my life so far I've been in one small fender bender. This does confirm some of the self-imposed safety rules I'm planning. No car commercial road joyriding. Lots of yellow in the hills. Highway driving seems to be relatively safe, which is comforting. Extreme caution at intersections (look at the bay bridge on-ramp). No riding at night.

mootothemax 15y ago
This does confirm some of the self-imposed safety rules I'm planning. If you live near a major city, try spending a couple of weeks cycling around it first. You'll learn to spot danger warning signs at much less dangerous speeds :)
ImprovedSilence 15y ago
I ride a motorcycle. They say if you're a lifetime rider, odds are you are going to get in one major crash in your lifetime. Both my uncles, several neighbors, and my grandfather have been in wrecks (none lethal, thank god), but everyone of them knows someone who died in a motorcycle accident it seems. I dumped my bike once, nothing serious, but I'm still overly cautious while riding. My big suggestion is to act as if every car is either going to break the law (run stop signs) or not see you, so you've always got to be on the defense. Other comments on the map, it's kinda odd feeling, finding the places of people you knew who died in a car crash, and seeing them as a statistic.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Well, at least one. As for cars breaking the law- don't act like they are about to, but don't trust them. Don't be surprised when they DO screw up, and have a plan.
lutorm 15y ago
Being a rider before I left the Bay Area, it's kind of spooky to look at Highway 9, 84 to La Honda, and Summit road. You can literally see the yellows in the corners, and looking at the map, I can see many of those corners in my mind's eye. That said, if you spend some time around Hwy 9 on a summer weekend, it shouldn't surprise you that the accident rate is high. If you don't ride like those people, your risk will not mimic the statistics.
- wilkenm 15y ago
  Also check out the Angeles Crest highway (just North of Los Angeles), or 'The Dragon' out in the South East. You can trace the roads by the yellow dots.
barrkel 15y ago
Highway / motorway riding is excruciatingly boring, even in the absence of speed limits. I've ridden from London to Kiel in Germany and back a couple of times, via France and Luxembourg, and found it infinitely preferable to avoid motorways, even though it takes 3 days rather than one (long) day per leg. Doing 200km/h+ gets old really fast when you're going in a straight line. If you've got speed limits and intend on mostly highway riding, without a significant filtering component, I wouldn't bother with a bike. So yes, you'll want to spend some time in the hills and curves. Don't start on an all-out superbike with torque that kicks in suddenly at high revs; start with something with a flatter torque curve, like a midrange twin (e.g. SV650 or Ninja 650r) or detuned 600. An unfaired bike, if you don't mind the looks, will feel faster from the wind blast. Most of the fun in a bike is from acceleration and corners, and on the street rather than on a track you'll want to have that fun at perhaps surprisingly low speeds. Taking a tight corner at 30mph is harder than it looks, takes more skill than a long curve at 90, and is a lot less dangerous if you crash. I've had a low-sider on my scooter (it was new to me and I didn't know its lean angle limits well enough) at about 25mph in a t-shirt and jeans (but full-face helmet, as always), and walked away with nothing more than a scratch on my arm and a few more scratches on the fairing. You'll remember the first time a corner surprises you by tightening up half-way through. But the real warning signs come earlier than that IMO: if you find yourself letting off the throttle half-way through a turn rather than smoothly accelerating through it, or changing gear half-way through, that's a sign of poor technique and / or poor reading of the road. Even more dangerously, you can end up learning these mid-course correction habits and think you're doing well, building false confidence. Bikes are fantastic fun and don't let the raw statistics dissuade you too much. You'll see a lot of idiots on the road doing stupid things, and get a better idea of where the stats come from. Filtering, where legal, can be intoxicatingly enjoyable. And you'll appreciate differences in road geography to a huge degree. I've ridden in Belgium, Netherlands, northern CA, northwest France, Luxembourg, UK and Germany, in approximately increasing order of fun, though for different reasons. Belgium has terrible (back) roads and is mostly flat; northern CA has some very curvy roads, but they are often very narrow, poorly surfaced and have double-yellow no-overtaking lines to an extreme; though it does have filtering. UK also has many fairly poor country roads - a lot of hedges blocking views - but makes up for it with filtering. Germany is strictly anti-filtering, but has very high standards even for curvy minor roads, which are wide and have high speed limits (depending on state). (I own a scooter and a big bike and live in London. Scooters are better for filtering in the city, and a lot more practical. I don't own a car, and only ever take public transport if I'll be consuming alcohol.)
georgieporgie 15y ago
Something like 70% of single-vehicle motorcycle collisions involve alcohol, so that's the big one to avoid. Here are my tips, from 17 years of riding and commuting by motorcycle: * Avoid alcohol before riding (edit: personally, I never ride within six hours of consuming any alcohol). * Wear high-quality, full-body protective gear. * Avoid rush hour when possible, particularly evening rush hour when drivers are tired, cranky, and aggressively want to get home. * Absolutely avoid riding during drunk hours. Basically, stay off the streets after 9pm on Friday and Saturday, and stay away from sporting events, concerts, etc.
- lancewiggs 15y ago
  I emphasize that enough - riding after any alcohol is temporary citizenship. But aside from not drinking or rising like an idiot the biggest thing we motorcyclists can do to increase our safety is to wear a high visibility jacket. It creates a noticeable difference in the percentage of other road users that see you, which addresses the major cause of accidents. Protective gear is a last resort - it's better to avoid the accident in the first place. The best protective gear is the stuff you wear, so for short trips if you are tempted to leave the heavy gear behind, at least throw on a light flouro jacket.
  - mkopinsky 15y ago
    Temporary citizenship? Is this some idiom I'm not familiar with?
    - kgermino 15y ago
      Early death.
      - mkopinsky 15y ago
        In that sense, all citizenship is temporary. Only a question of _how_ temporary. :-)
  - georgieporgie 15y ago
synnik 15y ago
Just be smart... My favorite bad example is a former kung fu teacher of mine. He was in a motorcycle accident that put him in a wheelchair a number of years ago. He recovered, mostly. And I always had sympathy for him, assuming he was a safe rider. That is, until he told me the story, and it started with, "I was going 120mph in the left lane on on the LA Freeway one night..." Don't be that guy, and you'll have much better odds.
tibbon 15y ago
When you cut out really young people, inexperienced riders, people who haven't taken the MSF, intoxicated people and those on 600cc sport bikes... fatalities on a bike go down a great deal. Many, but not all motorcycle wrecks are preventable. The guy in his mid 50's touring all around the US on his 1800cc Gold Wing is far far far less likely to get killed than a 21 year old who has 'a few drinks', and tries to impress his friends on his 600cc superbike around the city (and not wearing any gear). Take joy rides. Learn how to use your bike. Hit the mountains. Don't be afraid of cornering- just learn how to do it. Night riding is sub-optimal I will agree, but don't be afraid to just slow down. A country road that I might rip down at 100mph during the day might become a 20mph road for me at night in the fog with bugs, recently rained on roads and deer. Make sure your bike is well lit and you're wearing all your gear that you can stand to wear. If you're in SF like many people on HN, the weather is amicable to wearing almost full gear every day. In Austin or somewhere else hot, I doubt you could wear full gear in the summer.
wavephorm 15y ago
A coworker and friend of mine was riding his motorcycle to work one morning and got run over by a schoolbus. He died instantly. It kind of ruined the term "if you get hit by a bus" for everyone at the office.

mootothemax 15y ago

This does confirm some of the self-imposed safety rules I'm planning. If you live near a major city, try spending a couple of weeks cycling around it first. You'll learn to spot danger warning signs at much less dangerous speeds :)

ImprovedSilence 15y ago

I ride a motorcycle. They say if you're a lifetime rider, odds are you are going to get in one major crash in your lifetime. Both my uncles, several neighbors, and my grandfather have been in wrecks (none lethal, thank god), but everyone of them knows someone who died in a motorcycle accident it seems. I dumped my bike once, nothing serious, but I'm still overly cautious while riding. My big suggestion is to act as if every car is either going to break the law (run stop signs) or not see you, so you've always got to be on the defense. Other comments on the map, it's kinda odd feeling, finding the places of people you knew who died in a car crash, and seeing them as a statistic.

sliverstorm 15y ago
Well, at least one. As for cars breaking the law- don't act like they are about to, but don't trust them. Don't be surprised when they DO screw up, and have a plan.

lutorm 15y ago

Being a rider before I left the Bay Area, it's kind of spooky to look at Highway 9, 84 to La Honda, and Summit road. You can literally see the yellows in the corners, and looking at the map, I can see many of those corners in my mind's eye. That said, if you spend some time around Hwy 9 on a summer weekend, it shouldn't surprise you that the accident rate is high. If you don't ride like those people, your risk will not mimic the statistics.

wilkenm 15y ago
Also check out the Angeles Crest highway (just North of Los Angeles), or 'The Dragon' out in the South East. You can trace the roads by the yellow dots.

barrkel 15y ago

Highway / motorway riding is excruciatingly boring, even in the absence of speed limits. I've ridden from London to Kiel in Germany and back a couple of times, via France and Luxembourg, and found it infinitely preferable to avoid motorways, even though it takes 3 days rather than one (long) day per leg. Doing 200km/h+ gets old really fast when you're going in a straight line. If you've got speed limits and intend on mostly highway riding, without a significant filtering component, I wouldn't bother with a bike. So yes, you'll want to spend some time in the hills and curves. Don't start on an all-out superbike with torque that kicks in suddenly at high revs; start with something with a flatter torque curve, like a midrange twin (e.g. SV650 or Ninja 650r) or detuned 600. An unfaired bike, if you don't mind the looks, will feel faster from the wind blast. Most of the fun in a bike is from acceleration and corners, and on the street rather than on a track you'll want to have that fun at perhaps surprisingly low speeds. Taking a tight corner at 30mph is harder than it looks, takes more skill than a long curve at 90, and is a lot less dangerous if you crash. I've had a low-sider on my scooter (it was new to me and I didn't know its lean angle limits well enough) at about 25mph in a t-shirt and jeans (but full-face helmet, as always), and walked away with nothing more than a scratch on my arm and a few more scratches on the fairing. You'll remember the first time a corner surprises you by tightening up half-way through. But the real warning signs come earlier than that IMO: if you find yourself letting off the throttle half-way through a turn rather than smoothly accelerating through it, or changing gear half-way through, that's a sign of poor technique and / or poor reading of the road. Even more dangerously, you can end up learning these mid-course correction habits and think you're doing well, building false confidence. Bikes are fantastic fun and don't let the raw statistics dissuade you too much. You'll see a lot of idiots on the road doing stupid things, and get a better idea of where the stats come from. Filtering, where legal, can be intoxicatingly enjoyable. And you'll appreciate differences in road geography to a huge degree. I've ridden in Belgium, Netherlands, northern CA, northwest France, Luxembourg, UK and Germany, in approximately increasing order of fun, though for different reasons. Belgium has terrible (back) roads and is mostly flat; northern CA has some very curvy roads, but they are often very narrow, poorly surfaced and have double-yellow no-overtaking lines to an extreme; though it does have filtering. UK also has many fairly poor country roads - a lot of hedges blocking views - but makes up for it with filtering. Germany is strictly anti-filtering, but has very high standards even for curvy minor roads, which are wide and have high speed limits (depending on state). (I own a scooter and a big bike and live in London. Scooters are better for filtering in the city, and a lot more practical. I don't own a car, and only ever take public transport if I'll be consuming alcohol.)

georgieporgie 15y ago

Something like 70% of single-vehicle motorcycle collisions involve alcohol, so that's the big one to avoid. Here are my tips, from 17 years of riding and commuting by motorcycle: * Avoid alcohol before riding (edit: personally, I never ride within six hours of consuming any alcohol). * Wear high-quality, full-body protective gear. * Avoid rush hour when possible, particularly evening rush hour when drivers are tired, cranky, and aggressively want to get home. * Absolutely avoid riding during drunk hours. Basically, stay off the streets after 9pm on Friday and Saturday, and stay away from sporting events, concerts, etc.

lancewiggs 15y ago
I emphasize that enough - riding after any alcohol is temporary citizenship. But aside from not drinking or rising like an idiot the biggest thing we motorcyclists can do to increase our safety is to wear a high visibility jacket. It creates a noticeable difference in the percentage of other road users that see you, which addresses the major cause of accidents. Protective gear is a last resort - it's better to avoid the accident in the first place. The best protective gear is the stuff you wear, so for short trips if you are tempted to leave the heavy gear behind, at least throw on a light flouro jacket.
- mkopinsky 15y ago
  Temporary citizenship? Is this some idiom I'm not familiar with?
  - kgermino 15y ago
    Early death.
    - mkopinsky 15y ago
      In that sense, all citizenship is temporary. Only a question of _how_ temporary. :-)
- georgieporgie 15y ago

synnik 15y ago

Just be smart... My favorite bad example is a former kung fu teacher of mine. He was in a motorcycle accident that put him in a wheelchair a number of years ago. He recovered, mostly. And I always had sympathy for him, assuming he was a safe rider. That is, until he told me the story, and it started with, "I was going 120mph in the left lane on on the LA Freeway one night..." Don't be that guy, and you'll have much better odds.

tibbon 15y ago

When you cut out really young people, inexperienced riders, people who haven't taken the MSF, intoxicated people and those on 600cc sport bikes... fatalities on a bike go down a great deal. Many, but not all motorcycle wrecks are preventable. The guy in his mid 50's touring all around the US on his 1800cc Gold Wing is far far far less likely to get killed than a 21 year old who has 'a few drinks', and tries to impress his friends on his 600cc superbike around the city (and not wearing any gear). Take joy rides. Learn how to use your bike. Hit the mountains. Don't be afraid of cornering- just learn how to do it. Night riding is sub-optimal I will agree, but don't be afraid to just slow down. A country road that I might rip down at 100mph during the day might become a 20mph road for me at night in the fog with bugs, recently rained on roads and deer. Make sure your bike is well lit and you're wearing all your gear that you can stand to wear. If you're in SF like many people on HN, the weather is amicable to wearing almost full gear every day. In Austin or somewhere else hot, I doubt you could wear full gear in the summer.

wavephorm 15y ago

A coworker and friend of mine was riding his motorcycle to work one morning and got run over by a schoolbus. He died instantly. It kind of ruined the term "if you get hit by a bus" for everyone at the office.