The Risks of Riding

A fair number of our customers agree about one looking like a dork/Road Grimed Astronaut if riding for transportation and utility, vs. when riding primarily for sport and recreation. These two different-but-related applications have at least this in common: they both involve a single-track motorized vehicle. In rich countries like America, transportation/utility/commuting riders generally do both kinds of riding, but most motorcyclists ride more exclusively for sport and recreation. This makes a lot of sense for a lengthy list of strong cultural and logistical reasons.

Evaluating the risks of motorcycling-in-general through the lens of utility and transportation riding is difficult to sort out concisely, but still worthwhile. An important paradox is how we become better risk managers in all things, the more we do the thing. This means as we increase our overall motorcycling risk exposure by riding more, the better we become at managing and mitigating the various risks involved.

But beyond that, the relative and comparative risk landscape for this type of riding has changed dramatically during the years I’ve been riding, worsening despite important improvements in protective gear and great motorcycle technology and performance advances.

There are many components to this motorcycle-relative-to-automobile statistical worsening. Here are a few, not listed in any order of priority:

• Automobiles have become tremendously safer due to the development of required passive and active safety systems, beginning with easy-to-use seat belts during the 1970s.
• Roads have become far more crowded. Most rider accident scenarios that produce serious injuries and deaths involve another vehicle.
• More drivers (as a percentage of all drivers) are not driving as well as in the past because of underlying factors including increased risk-compensation behavior due to the above-mentioned passive safety systems becoming universal, of being better insulated from (and more oblivious to) their immediate surroundings (cars became better sealed climate-controlled ‘capsules’), of there being more compelling distractions inside the vehicle, and probably also because of an increased percentage of marginally skilled and poorly trained drivers becoming licensed and having access to an automobile.
• In collisions, cars and light trucks have become riskier to riders because of the increased popularity of taller and more slab-sided vehicle shapes.
• Changes in road architecture and surrounding infrastructure has made driving safer while doing the opposite for motorcycle riders. Typically, making roads easier to drive causes drivers to pay less attention to their surroundings, and also adding roadside barriers to help cars and drivers during crash scenarios usually increases harm to riders during motorcycle crash scenarios.

So compared to driving, riding is now relatively riskier than it was forty years ago. This may be one reason (of several) why the X, Millennial and Y generations have not been adopting riding in as large of numbers as Boomers did. Those younger generations may not have broken down riding’s increased risks as I have described above, but they know by both intuition and cultural meme it’s become riskier. This may be part of the reason they don’t want it as much as I did. They perfectly recognize and appreciate its pleasures, benefits, and coolness, but it is not enough.

The importance of acquiring the fluency and risk-management experience that comes only with increased ride frequency cannot be overstated, but acquiring this risk-mitigator is a lot harder today than it was when Boomer-riders were starting to ride in large numbers fifty years ago. 

Nevertheless, it still can be done. Here’s a concrete example: If someone pulls out from a side street directly in front of a rider, or turns left in front of an oncoming rider at precisely the exact-to-the-microsecond wrong moment, the bike and the car will collide. Same for a random deer suddenly leaping out of the forest at the exact-to-the-microsecond wrong time. No matter what gear the rider is or isn’t wearing, or the age and type of motorcycle they are riding, they are going to experience some level of impact. But — and this is ultra-important — there are risk-mitigating things riders can do which dramatically lower their statistical chances of experiencing one of these scenarios.

For situations where approaching drivers may be violating a rider’s right-of-way at exactly the wrong time, riders can tactically reduce the risk of a collision when they:

• Ride the speed limit, not faster.
• Wear bright clothing and a bright helmet.
• Add and use auxiliary lighting. (I prefer a single asymmetrically* located additional light, believing this looks more visually anomalous, and thus more irritatingly noticeable. Research indicates any additional forward lighting is a bit more noticeable if it is yellow or amber colored. *Meaning positioned relative to the low headlight beam at about 10AM, 2PM, 4PM or 7-8PM, and not at 3PM, 6PM, or 9PM.)
• Wiggle the bike side-to-side slightly for a couple of seconds if it seems like an approaching driver may not be seeing the rider.
• Ride only sober, and always in a relaxed yet subliminally slightly paranoid frame of mind.
• Automatically and unconsciously position one’s bike in the lane(s) and relative to other traffic so as to be more easily noticed.
• Automatically pay acute micro-attention to other vehicles' micro-movements which may indicate they are about to violate one’s right of way.
• Ride an unfaired and un-windshielded bike to visually appear more irregular in silhouette and more human in profile.
• Never rely on “eye contact” with other drivers because they can be looking directly at you and still not see you.
• Whenever possible choose routes one is more familiar with. Commuting on familiar roads with familiar and more predictable types of surrounding traffic makes a difference.
• Also, whenever possible choose optimal times of day. 2 AM bar-close is a poor time to be riding, and ‘rush hour’ is similarly riskier than at other times.
• Choosing optimal weather is a factor. Snow, ice, rain, and fog are all riskier times to be riding. (Do as I say, not as I do…)
• Ride the same familiar bike for years and maintain it well.
• Regularly practice ‘emergency’ riding skills like aggressive swerving and braking.

For the deer jumping out of the forest scenario, there are other things one can do to reduce this risk, but with both exactly-at-the-right-time-in-the-wrong-place situations, the higher risk of riding never goes to zero. It may be reducible by 99.87% (or whatever…), but it never goes to zero. I like to think about the senior commercial airline pilot ‘Sully‘ Sullenberger who famously landed his jet full of passengers on the Hudson River after losing both engines shortly after takeoff.  He’d probably done that exact same take-off scenario (without losing engine power) maybe 5,000 times (a guess) over a career-long time span. The risks involved were never zero, but close, and when that one-in-a-few-million event occurred, he did essentially all of the best possible things, which worked out pretty well for him and his passengers. He knew how to use his plane and knew that particular familiar location extremely well.

Despite recent measurably increased risks of riding, the above list of tactical risk mitigators lowers the overall risk of transportation and utility motorcycling to an acceptable level for most riders in most riding locations. For me, this type of riding is always going to be worth it, at least knock-on-wood so far. It’s still the best part of my day. But should I ever be badly injured or become disabled because of being on my motorcycle in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, all bets are off. As many novelists, screenwriters, poets, and others have built their compelling stories around, you can never perfectly project how you’ll actually feel about some kinds of things until you are experiencing them. That’s life. (Also a good Frank Sinatra song lyric.)

Lastly, in addition to my ongoing usual daily commuting and utility riding, this new year I hope to again get back to a little more recreational riding. Especially exploring interesting roads, trails, and places involving motorcycle camping. It’s been a couple of years since I last did this type of riding because of my stupid fear of the stupid pandemic/plague.

- Mr. Subjective, January 2023