More Proficient Motorcycling E-Book

David L. Hough

• Herausgeber: CompanionHouse Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 479

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Written as a stand-alone or follow-up to David L. Hough's wildly successful duo, "Proficient Motorcycling" and "Street Strategies," this book contains invaluable lessons for avoiding nasty accidents. Presenting new tips and topics geared toward protecting riders from road dangers with a special focus on mental and physical preparedness. Diagrams, examples, plain talk, and Hough's practical attitude make this one of the most accessible guides available.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

 

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

 

CHAPTER 1 - LEARNING TO RIDE

Biker Bill’s Last Ride

How to Become a Better Rider

 

CHAPTER 2 - THE PROFESSIONAL ATTITUDE

Motorcycling as a Combat Mission

Wimp-o-phobia

 

CHAPTER 3 - ROAD RULES

To Speed or Not to Speed

Alcohol

 

CHAPTER 4 - RISKY BUSINESS

Navigating the Roar

Construction Ahead

Avoiding the Elephant

 

CHAPTER 5 - TUNING UP YOUR SKILLS

Sparing Trailing

The Slow Ride

Move It or Lose It

Quick, Stop!

 

CHAPTER 6 - RIDING IN THE REAL WORLD

Sight Distance

Expert Eyeballs

Being Seen in All the Right Places

 

CHAPTER 7 - CORNERING

The “Trendy Delayed Apex Line”

Mastering the Throttle

Coming Unglued

Countersteering vs. Bodysteering

Feeling the Bike

 

CHAPTER 8 - GETTING YOUR HEAR IN THE RIDE

Riding Systems

Positioning

Passing

 

CHAPTER 9 - TRAVELING TACTICS

The Flagstaff Travel School

Moto-Psychology

When in Rome...

Know When to Fold ‘Em

Weather

 

CHAPTER 10 - THE BOTTOM LINE

Ten Tips That Can Save Your Lift

Between Rides

 

Resources

Glossary

Index

Copyright Page

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all the magazine editors I’ve worked with over the years. The editors are the ones who do all the hard work to make each issue seem fresh and interesting. Editors are the ones who remind contributors to get their work in, so they can sweat an issue together in time to ship to the printer. And the editors are the ones who take all the flak from readers when they read something they don’t like.

I’ve learned a great deal from every editor I’ve worked with, but I’m especially indebted to Fred Rau, Senior Editor of Motorcycle Consumer News. Over the years, Fred has continued to encourage me to keep writing my skills columns long after I felt I should back out of the picture. Without his support and friendly persuasion, the “Proficient Motorcycling” column would have disappeared from Motorcycles Consumer News, and books such as Proficient Motorcycling, Street Strategies, and More Proficient Motorcycling might never have been published.

Foreword

I get on a plane and listen to the flight attendant drone on about emergency exits and flotation devices, and I sincerely hope I never have an occasion to make actual use of this information. In my checkered motorcycling career, however, I have put helmets, jackets, pants, boots, and gloves to the test, mostly because nobody ever taught me how to ride a motorcycle. Back in those “I Like Ike” days, we pretty much taught ourselves. And the lucky survived.

My riding days began when I was fifteen, when my equally underage friend Dick bought a Harley 125. The owner delivered it to Dick’s house, which, fortunately, backed onto woods and a river. Dick’s father, a Corvette-driving doctor, returned home, saw the little motorcycle, muttered, Death machine, and never mentioned it again. Dick and I went down into the woods and learned the rudiments of riding all by ourselves. This was simple “woodsing,” poking along the dirt paths, learning how not to stall the engine and not much else.

I passed my sixteenth birthday and paid a high school chum $10 to go down to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) with me and let me get my license on his Whizzer. After giving me the written test, which I barely passed, the DMV inspector came out to the steps of the building and said, Okay. Go around the block and if you’re back in five minutes, you get your license. Done.

My parents said I could have a motorcycle if I earned the money to buy one; which I did, whereupon they presented me with a helmet and the warning that if I were ever seen on the bike without the crash hat on my head, it would be the end of my motorcycling days. Pretty smart.

But had I learned to ride a motorcycle properly? Not a chance. I had mastered the rudiments of a motorcycle’s controls, but insofar as knowing what to do when something unexpected happened on the road: of that I was entirely ignorant. So I went out on my used NSU 250 Max and had a series of minor accidents, all part of the learning process of the 1950s.

I thought the front brake was something to be used when waiting at a traffic light on a hill, and in my first panic stop, I locked up the rear wheel and fell down. Darn! Why did that happen? And I found that train tracks were very slippery in the rain, especially if approached at an acute angle.

Learning by experience can be painful, but that is the way it was done in those years before the advent of safety consciousness and the Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF). A dealer thought nothing of selling a neophyte a bike, showing him where the clutch and gas and brakes were, watching him do two loops in the parking lot, and sending him on the road. More experienced riding friends would offer advice, but there was really nowhere that I knew of that I could go to acquire this knowledge beforehand.

In the late 1970s, I began reading Road Rider magazine and soon came across the writing of Dave Hough, who regularly wrote about motorcycle safety. Heck, after twenty-some years of riding, I knew it all. Or thought I did, until I arrived at a sort of minor epiphany: I could become a better rider if I paid attention to what people like Dave had to teach me. There is no final exam when it comes to motorcycle safety, no point at which a rider can say, I’ve done it all; there is nothing else to learn. Riding safely requires constant attention, and the learning process is equally constant.

These days, I read Dave’s books, I take the MSF’s Experienced RiderCourse (ERC) every few years, and I listen when my riding buddies tell me that I sometimes tend to be less than overly cautious when overtaking. I intend to lead a long and happy life, riding well until I am fourscore and something. I don’t like to fall down. And maybe some little bit of knowledge imparted through Hough’s experience will save me from myself.

If a single thought from this book helps you avoid a spill, it is definitely worth the small money you spent on it. A simple low-speed low-side in a sand-strewn corner will cost you a great deal more in terms of repairing fiberglass and flesh—plus the substantial damage to ego, which MasterCard does not cover. Safety cannot be overvalued. Yes, it can be boring, it can be tedious, it can even be overdone, but it cannot be valued too highly.

 

—Clement Salvadori

 

 

Clement Salvadori is a motorcycle journalist and world traveler. Clement writes many different columns and articles formotorcycle publications in the USA but is best known for the “On Touring ” column in Rider magazine.

Preface

If you’ve already read my first book, Proficient Motorcycling, you’ll know that accumulated my knowledge of motorcycling firsthand from thirty years of daily commuting to work by motorcycle. And you’ll know that I pronounce Hough like “rough” or “tough,” and that I wrote for Road Rider magazine and kept on writing when it became Motorcycle Consumer News (MCN).

But I’ve made some recent discoveries about my personal history that I’d like to share with you. In the process of digging up all the illustrations needed for More Proficient Motorcycling, I ran across a tattered, old black-and-white photograph of me as a chubby twelve-year-old sitting on a motorcycle. I’d forgotten all about it. In the photo, I’m wearing a leather aviator cap, fleece-lined leather mitts, and I’m covered by a canvas lap robe. The machine belonged to my father’s friend, a mysterious Russian sailor who loved to play chess. The Russian had ridden up from the Oregon Coast in midwinter to play a game, face-to-face. The cold weather was the reason for the heavy fleece gloves, aviator cap, and lap robe.

At twelve years old, I wasn’t riding the bike; I was merely posing as sort of a photographic joke for my father. The time frame was the winter of 1949-50. The location was Aberdeen, Washington. And I didn’t know anything about motorcycles. It would be many years before I bought my first motorcycle.

For the first time since that photo was taken fifty-two years ago, I studied it carefully. The motorcycle appears to be a 1937 Indian Sport Scout with a 1947 front fender light and leather saddlebags. The 45-cubic-inch Sport Scout was no slouch for its day, clocking a 111.55 mph speed record at Daytona Beach in 1938. That’s pretty fast considering that wimpy little front drum brake.

Until seeing the photo, I hadn’t realized that the bike and I were the same age. Then, when I thought back through my motorcycling experiences, I was jolted by some coincidences. First, I’ve ridden the Oregon Coast many times on different motorcycles. I suddenly realized that I’ve ridden sections of old Highway 101 that are almost the same today as they were fifty-two years ago when the Russian rode up to Aberdeen. Those weren’t all summertime rides, either. I’ve also done a few wintertime transits on the Coast, and I know from personal experience what a tough ride that trip can be on a bike.

Out of curiosity, I added up the years I’d been riding motorcycles before I happened upon that faded old photo of me on the 1937 Indian. Would you believe I’d been riding for thirty-seven years? This was getting creepy. The final jolt came as I was getting ready to ride off the ferry from Seattle. I was thinking about my upcoming birthday, and for some reason glanced down at the speedometer on my vintage BMW. The odometer read 37,373. I’m not a superstitious person, but I had to stop and take a picture to prove I wasn’t making this all up.

Do you suppose there was something about that wintertime trip and the 1937 Scout that planted the seed that sprouted into my interest in motorcycles and eventually the subject of riding skills? Naw, it’s probably all just an odd coincidence. But if I find an Indian Scout for sale next March 7 for $3,737.37, I’ll be buying it.

Whatever the start of my fascination with motorcycles, I’m still involved, and More Proficient Motorcycling gives me another opportunity to share my passion—and maybe a little humor—with other motorcyclists.

 

—David L. Hough

introduction

The book Proficient Motorcycling is a collection of columns from Road Rider and MCN. That first volume was my personal selection of the columns that I felt would best explain motorcycle dynamics, control skills, and accident avoidance tactics.

Like the first book, More Proficient Motorcycling is mostly a selection of columns previously published in Road Rider and MCN. But this volume covers a wider variety of motorcycling topics and also includes a few articles written for other magazines, plus one or two that were written exclusively for this book.

Since the publication of Proficient Motorcycling in 2000, more than a few motorcyclists have asked about advanced riding skills. A common question is, Is there a course I can take that’s a notch above the ERC but not quite as intimidating as a racetrack cornering school?

That question is a hint that some riders believe that there are some secret advanced skills we are withholding. The truth is, no one is holding back any secrets. The information is already available. The limiting factor isn’t the availability of knowledge, but rather the lack of motivation to master what’s being offered.

More than a few readers have admitted to me privately that they skim through my articles but don’t really study the information. Others admit that they study the articles carefully but never practice the suggested skills on the bike. Obviously, not all riders are interested in changing their habits. And I’m not here to try to force you to do anything you don’t want to do. But for those of you who can’t seem to get enough information, this book should help you on your quest to master the ride.

If there is a secret about “advanced” skills, it’s that they are mostly mental skills, not physical skills such as countersteering (push steering) or controlling the throttle or hanging off. Yes, there are additional physical skills to hone, but mostly it’s a matter of observing, predicting, planning, and timing, rather than using muscle power. And it’s not only a matter of controlling the motorcycle you’re riding but also controlling the situation around you.

More Proficient Motorcycling is a continuation of what I started in Proficient Motorcycling. You’ll find many of the same subjects, many of the same fictitious characters (based on real people and experiences), and even many of the same topics. But now we’re going to dig a little deeper into the mysteries of motorcycling and add a few subjects that weren’t covered in the first book.

Note that this book adds to the information in the first book, and we’re not going to repeat all the basics in this volume. It isn’t absolutely necessary to read Proficient Motorcycling first, but you’ll probably find that More Proficient Motorcycling is easier to understand if you read the two books in sequence.

CHAPTER 1

LEARNING TO RIDE

Biker Bill’s Last Ride

Today, circumstances will conspire against Biker Bill. Down the road a few miles, his knowledge and experience will be challenged by a special situation, and the situation will beat him. This story is based upon a real crash that happened during the summer of 1991, although Biker Bill is a fictitious name. This is not an indictment of the rider but rather a potential learning experience for every touring motorcyclist.

The Ride

The day is young, the desert is cool, and the air is still. The evaporating dew leaves a heady perfume of sagebrush and juniper in the air. The sky is the light turquoise color that hints of perfect weather. The road surface is clean and dry, and the motor homes have yet to clog along. It’s hard to imagine that anything could go wrong on a day as perfect as this, especially to a rider as well traveled as Biker Bill.

Bill is not a youthful rider with a need for excess. He is married with children at home, and he understands his responsibilities. He knows only too well how his family feels about the dangers of riding a motorcycle. Bill and his good riding buddy have been riding together every summer for the past eight years, gradually expanding their touring horizons. This year, they have been exploring the Southwest. Yesterday it was the Grand Canyon. Today it’s off to Monument Valley.

What special circumstances had conspired to turn a great ride into a disaster in a few short seconds?

Bill and his companion don’t usually ride in formation. The attention required to pace another rider hour after hour distracts from the full attention needed for riding their own machines. So, instead of riding just a few seconds apart, they split up and ride toward a common destination at their own paces. Bill is the following rider today, perhaps ten or twenty minutes behind his companion. They have agreed to meet at the restaurant of a trading post to take a coffee break and share the discoveries of the morning.

The Road

The two-lane highway meanders east across the top of a juniper-strewn mesa. An hour into the ride, the road drops over the edge in a series of switchbacks, then straightens out at the bottom and heads like an arrow toward a distant horizon, rising and dipping slightly with the ripples of the landscape like long waves at sea. Somewhere to the right, there is a shadowy canyon where the Colorado River has cut a deep groove into the red rock. To the left is a long reef of brilliant reddish pink cliffs so awesome that the scene sends a tingle up Bill’s spine.

Bill feels good to be here, riding a powerful motorcycle in the cool morning air with the pungent scent of the desert stinging his nostrils. How marvelous to be so far from the confusion and noise and pollution of the cities, and to be flying across the desert waves on a sweet-running machine. The speed limit is humorously posted at a creeping 55 mph out here in the desert, but everyone seems to drive at least 70. The big four-cylinder BMW hums along comfortably at 80 mph.

The awesome Vermillion Cliffs demand that they be appreciated, and Bill can steal about two second’s worth of breathtaking scenery at this speed before the rushing road demands his attention again. He even develops a little routine, waiting until the machine tops a rise to provide a view and then stealing another two-second glance at the cliffs.

This routine goes on for another half hour. Bill considers stopping to take a picture of the cliffs. He even considers pulling the auto-focus camera out of the tank bag with his left hand and trying a shot on the fly, but he decides to keep motoring along and get a shot when he stops for coffee. Besides, he feels a need to catch up and share the excitement of the ride. Or perhaps the urgency is because he doesn’t want to be thought of as a slow rider, even by his friend. The K-bike feels sweet at 80 mph, and he holds it there.

Bill can steal about two second’s worth of breathtaking scenery at this speed before the rushing road demands his attention again.

The Crash

Topping a rise in the undulating road, Bill steals another glance at the cliffs. But when his eyes flick back to the road, it isn’t there anymore, there’s just sagebrush. He suddenly realizes the pavement has made a left turn, but the bike is heading straight into the desert at warp speed.

It is a short flight—perhaps only two seconds, maybe 200 feet. When the front tire touches down in the soft sand, bike and rider are flipped into a cartwheel. Plastic is peeled off the bike like the skin of an orange, and the saddlebags explode into a trail of clothing.

When the desert finally stops spinning, Bill finds himself lying on his back in the sand with the sun in his eyes and a terrible pain in his ribs. Fighting the urge to pass out, he tries to make sense of what happened. He remembers the mesa, the straight road, and the Vermillion Cliffs. Then slowly he remembers riding a bike, and the road curving away. Bill tries to roll over to look for his bike, but a searing pain shoots across his chest to his forehead and he almost blacks out again. He lies still, trying to ignore the pain, wondering how far he is from the road and whether he’ll make it out of this disaster alive.

Fortunately for Bill, a passing motorist catches a glimpse of something shiny off the side of the road and slows to investigate. The motorist is shocked to realize that he is looking at a serious and very recent motorcycle crash, and he rushes back to the trading post to call for help. The police arrive within a few minutes, radio for a medevac, and less than an hour after the crash, Bill is in the hospital in emergency care. He survives the crash, but it is enough of a crisis to end his motorcycling career forever.

Was Bill a Dangerous Rider?

So, what do you think? Was Biker Bill an irresponsible, daredevil zoomie we would expect to crash? No. We’ve established that Bill was an adult touring rider with a family at home and a good sense of self-preservation. He’s a lot like you or me. Does that mean you or I could have gone flying into the sagebrush if the same circumstances had ganged up on us? Maybe we had better take a closer look at Bill’s unfortunate crash, and see if we can figure out what really went wrong.

What Happened?

The police wrote down “excessive speed” as the cause of the accident, but we might suspect that speed was only part of the problem. The question they didn’t ask is, Why would an apparently experienced rider miss this particular turn? Let’s consider Bill’s proficiency and then see if we can figure out what went wrong.

Bill, like most of us, had absorbed some better riding skills over the years. He followed better cornering lines, maintained a leading throttle during the turns, understood the relative traction of his tires, and favored the front wheel brake. Coming down off the mesa, he practiced these skills, entering turns closer to the outside to follow the safer delayed apex line and keeping his eyes level with the horizon for better spatial orientation. He smoothly applied the front brake to keep speed in check when approaching each turn, released brake pressure just before leaning, and countersteered to accurately control his cornering lines.

Closes to the Edge

Intellectually, Bill understood the importance of keeping speed within his perceived sight distance, distance he would need to decelerate or stop should he encounter an obstruction such as an antelope or a tourist making a U-turn. But with experience, he learned that his K-bike could stop very quickly, so he became complacent about sight distance. Like many of us, Bill kept pushing the speed up more and more every year, accepting the occasional loss of sight distance without slowing down. While he used to cruise at 55 or 60 mph eight years ago, now he cruises at 70 or 80. While he might have taken a tight corner at 35 mph, he now leans over confidently at 55.

The setting for Bill’s crash becomes as clear as the desert air when you look at the road from the direction in which he had come. The road runs straight as an arrow over the waves of the desert, with no hint that it doesn’t just keep going straight forever. It just happens to curve left beyond the crest of that last rise.

Warp speed may seem reasonable out in the desert, but be aware that you can’t see what’s over that rise ahead.

Let’s back up 20 miles to where Bill dropped off the mesa because that’s where the crash started. Bill got into a routine of riding over each little rise without realizing that he couldn’t always see the back side of most of them until he crested the top. His brain just filled in the missing road, and sure enough, when he crested each hill, the road was always there. Well, “always,” except for that last rise.

Bill’s machine probably could have taken this particular curve at 80 mph in the hands of a skilled rider, except that this rider wasn’t prepared for a curve. More importantly, what could have been a close call was morphed into an accident by some other bad habits—habits that many of the rest of us could claim as our own:

1. Bill allowed assumptions to override his sight distance and allowed his complacency to become a routine, mile after mile. A wise rider makes predictions only on what can be seen, not on assumptions. And when the view closes up, a smart rider immediately slows down to allow full control within the roadway in view.

2. Bill allowed his attention to be distracted by the scenery. At 80 mph, Bill’s bike was eating up 234 feet of road every two seconds. With his attention distracted, he missed the important clues that would have warned him about the upcoming curve. The wise rider either slows down to take in the scenery or punctuates a fast ride with frequent stops to gawk.

3. Bill was attempting to catch up to the leader. Think about that: catching up requires that you ride faster than the leader. It’s critical to ride within your own limits, even if that means letting the other guy disappear over the horizon and making him wait for you.

Managing Risk

There are a lot of riders who just go riding without much thought about managing the risks. Too many believe that motorcycling is simply a two-wheeled form of Russian roulette. Take a spin and maybe your number will come up. In other words, if it isn’t your turn to crash today, then don’t worry about it, and if it is your turn, then there is nothing you can do to prevent it. But was it just chance that Bill’s companion managed to keep the rubber side down riding the same road on an almost identical motorcycle?

The moral of this sad tale is that to a considerable extent we make our own luck. A rider’s skill, knowledge, and attitude help control the relative risk. Some veteran riders have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles without an accident by being constantly aware of the situation and staying well within the limits of their bikes and riding skills. That’s not easy, but it’s possible.

How to Become a Better Rider

You learn to ride when you first get a bike. Then about the time you think you’ve learned it all, you get another opportunity to learn to ride. Punching through the envelope and cartwheeling off into the landscape is a harsh wake-up call to the risks of motorcycling. I’ve drawn the short straw a couple of times in 800,000 or so miles of riding. And I can tell you that crashes look a lot like close calls, right up to the point where you hit or miss. So, whether you have an accident or a near miss, it should be motivation to improve your knowledge and skills. Let’s back up a bit here and think about how we learned to ride.

Trial and Error

When I learned to ride back in 1965, there weren’t any rider training courses available. I just got on the bike, rode off into traffic, and learned by trial and error. I looked to my buddy Ricochet Red for sage advice about motorcycling. After all, Red started riding a couple of years before I did and had moved up to a powerful Marusho 500 while I was still learning on my Suzuki 150, so by comparison he was the “experienced” rider.

My first bike was a little Suzuki 150, which I learned to ride by trial and error with a little help from my buddy, Ricochet Red.

Red’s collective wisdom was summed up in one serious statement: There’s only two kinds of bikers, Hough. There’s them who have crashed and them who are gonna crash. But Ken and Donna, a couple who had ridden motorcycles for many years, offered a different philosophy: If you ever stop being afraid of a motorcycle, it’s time to park it. Sure, Red’s folk wisdom was true. Just about every motorcyclist gets the turn to crash once or twice in a lifetime of riding. Ken and Donna had a point, too, about not getting too cocky on a bike. But I didn’t find those sage statements particularly helpful. They are a lot like saying, Be careful, or, If you can’t run with the big dogs, stay on the porch.

The question is what do I need to do to survive today? What are the right tactics for managing the risks? For instance, is it better to ride at the same speed as other traffic, at the speed limit, or faster than traffic? Should I lean the bike by countersteering, by bodysteering (shifting my weight on the bike), or both? Should I brake just short of a skid during a quick stop, or should I slide the rear tire? Should I wear bright hi-viz (visibility) yellow, or camouflage? And during a desert ride, would a nice cool beer help stave off dehydration or make the situation worse?

You’ve probably heard the expression, “Experience is the best teacher.” That theory when applied to motorcycling means that you just get on the bike and ride. And after you’ve ridden long enough and under a wide enough variety of conditions, cultures, and climates, eventually you should have absorbed most of the needed lessons.

The trouble with learning about motorcycles by trial and error is that a lot of motorcycle hazards aren’t obvious. For instance, you might not appreciate how dangerous an edge trap is until the bike topples over and throws you down the road. What’s more, not all control skills are easy to master. Let’s say you suddenly need to pull off a quick swerve around a left-turning car. Do you think you can resist the urge to snap off the throttle?

The point is that learning by trial and error can be painful and expensive. Learning to become a proficient rider is hard work, and it takes a humble attitude. Many riders don’t seem to be willing to take their learning seriously. Slithering through mud washes is nothing compared to the way many riders slither around the subject of riding skills.

A few years ago, a local rider smacked into a deer on his way home and neither survived. The rider’s fellow club members wanted to do something to make everyone feel better about the situation. One of the officers called me to get the address of a national motorcycle safety organization so the club could make a donation in the rider’s memory. I suggested that rather than send the money off somewhere else, perhaps the donation would be better spent subsidizing rider training for the local club members. The officer bristled, Do you really think rider training would help anyone else avoid an accident like that one? Just give me the address where we can send the money!

Yes, I do believe that rider training could potentially help the other club members avoid accidents, including deer strikes. But of course spending the money on local riders would have been an admission that the “experienced” motorcyclists in the club didn’t know it all. The club’s way to slither through the situation was to cough up some money and keep on riding the same as always. It’s a modern-day version of Roman soldiers throwing coins into the baths to help ward off evil spirits before they rocket down the road on their chariots.

Cutting Through the BS

A big part of getting smarter about motorcycling is cutting through all the misinformation. “Everyone” seems to know that motorcycles are dangerous. Just ask your coworkers, your mother-in-law, your family doctor, or your local newspaper columnist. If you don’t believe them, look at the scary statistics from the National Center for Statistics and Analysis, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, or the National Safety Council. “Everyone” knows that motorcycles are ten times (or twenty times or whatever) more dangerous than automobiles.

Basing your riding strategies on the opinions of nonriders, newspaper articles, or statistics is unreliable. First, friendly advice may not be very friendly. Second, being a professional in some field doesn’t make that professional an expert in motorcycle safety. Third, there is no such thing as an average rider. Finally, is it really worthwhile to look at what crashees did wrong, or should we be figuring out what successful riders do right?

Ignore Friendly Advice

The chances are your nonriding doctor (or coworker or helpful neighbor) is probably less interested in helping you improve your odds and more interested in feeling superior to you. One day I had a coworker put his hand on my shoulder, and with a disparaging glance at my helmet plead sympathetically, I sure wouldn’t want my son to ride one of those things. This paternalistic coworker might actually have been interested in helping me avoid injury, but he certainly didn’t have the foggiest idea of where to start.

What’s more, there are a lot of people who have a secret desire to ride motorcycles but can’t overcome their fears. Putting you down is a way of justifying their fears and jealousy. The point is you can safely ignore “sympathetic” advice from people who don’t know anything about motorcycles.

Ignore the Professional Experts

Let’s say you finally get a few minutes with your family doctor, and he spots your riding jacket and mumbles something about “donor-cycles.” Doc may think he knows something about motorcycle safety, but most medical doctors only see the results of accidents, not the successful riders. From their viewpoint, it’s obvious: swing a leg over a motorcycle and BAM! It’s your turn to be an organ donor.

But consider that being a doctor, lawyer, or engineer doesn’t automatically make that professional an expert on motorcycling. After all, motorcycle safety isn’t taught in medical school. So just thank Doc for any opinions he offers about bikes, and then refocus the conversation on his specialty. If Doc can’t let it go, you can always remind him that statistically a human is more likely to die from a hospital error than from a motorcycle ride.

Forget the Movie Stars

You should also ignore what the movie star biker wannabes do. It’s tempting to think that Cher or Arnold Schwarzenegger or Gary Busey are good role models for your own riding tactics, but wealthy actors are some of the world’s worst riders. They have plenty of bucks to buy into the biker image but don’t seem to understand that motorcycling is real life, not show business. Riding a bike is not a movie stunt where the director can call cut and do the scene over if something goes wrong. Don’t pattern your riding gear or riding tactics after what the movie stars do.

I bring up all these examples of bad advice because they contribute to considerable misinformation about how to manage the risks of motorcycling. The opinions of nonmotorcyclists and biker wannabes are a frequent distraction and a waste of time and energy.

Statistics

On the other hand, wouldn’t it be helpful to know the truth about motorcycle accidents? Well, there are a lot of statistics floating around, but the last good motorcycle accident study conducted in the U.S. was the Motorcycle Accident Factors Study (the Hurt Report) released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) back in 1980. There have been some excellent motorcycle accident studies elsewhere in the world but not in the U.S.

Certainly there are some valuable lessons we can draw from the Hurt Report, but times have changed quite a bit since and the research was limited to the Los Angeles area. One current source of motor vehicle accident data is from the NHTSA. The NHTSA tries to collect good data, but it has never been much interested in motorcycles. There aren’t many motorcycle experts at NHTSA who would appreciate the subtleties of motorcycle trends, such as an increase in fatalities during a time frame in which motorcycle registrations are increasing.

Still, the NHTSA does collect a lot of data, and it’s worth looking at. The National Center for Statistics and Analysis (NCSA) has considerable information available on-line. Just be aware that a nonmotorcyclist tends to sort the numbers based on the bias of an automobile driver. For instance, the researchers may note an increase in the average engine size of motorcycles involved in fatal accidents and theorize that big motorcycles are overrepresented in accidents. Well, gee, guys. If you were aware of what was happening in motorcycling, you’d know that American motorcyclists are in love with big engines. If there are more engines over 1500 cubic centimeters (cc) on the road today, wouldn’t you expect more accidents and fatalities involving engines over 1500 cc?

Television and newspaper reports are usually less than helpful. The report under the headline “Local Biker Dies” will probably note whether or not Zoomie Zed was wearing a helmet but not whether Zed was drunk or sober, licensed or not, whether he had taken rider training or learned from a friend, or how long he had been riding. More to the point, you won’t hear anything about Able Al (the guy who didn’t crash), because riding a motorcycle safely isn’t exciting enough for today’s news media.

The big mistake with statistics is making them personal. Even if you think you’ve discovered some reliable statistics, remember that hardly any of us are “average” riders. When novice rider Zoomie Zed smacks into a Ready-Mix concrete truck a mile away from the showroom floor, his personal averages are one fatality per mile. By comparison, Able Al may enjoy 500,000 miles of accident-free riding. For Al, accidents and fatalities average out to zero per 500,000 miles. So, unless you’re close to the profile of an “average” rider, the statistics are likely to be way off for you. My actual risk or your actual risk depends on a number of important variables.

Motorcycle Accident/Fatality Statistic

While there hasn’t been a comprehensive North American motorcycle accident study since the 1980 Hurt Report, motor vehicle statistics are being gathered by the NCSA,

an office of the NHTSA. The NCSA not only gathers statistics but also analyzes and attempts to make sense out of the data. As Hugh H. (Harry) Hurt pointed out a couple of years ago, the problem with allowing nonmotorcyclists to analyze motorcycle data is that they often don’t have the background knowledge about what the numbers might be indicating. For instance, fatality rates in NCSA charts may be in “rate per 100,000 population.” That might make sense for automobile occupants, but it wouldn’t be as helpful for motorcyclists, who have widely different riding seasons based on weather. For motorcycles, it would probably be more informative to show the rate in terms of “fatalities per 100,000 registered motorcycles,” or better yet, “fatalities per 100,000 licensed riders,” or perhaps “fatalities per 100,000 licensed riders per million miles traveled.” We have to remember that some motorcyclists own more than one machine, some riders borrow machines they don’t own, and riding mileage varies significantly from one rider to another,

unlike automobile drivers. As reported by the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA) in June 2002, figures released by the NHTSA indicate that 3,067 motorcyclists were killed on the nation’s roads in 2001, up from 2,862 the year. The preliminary estimate represents a 7.2 percent increase over the rate in 2000. The recent upward trend followed seventeen consecutive years of decline. From 1990 through 1999 alone, motorcycling-related fatalities dropped by 48 percent. The AMA noted that one significant reason for the increase in motorcycling-related fatalities is that motorcycling has seen an enormous increase in popularity, with sales of new street bikes up more than 100 percent over the previous five years, from about 243,000 in 1997 to more than 500,000 in 2001. So if registrations approximately doubled between 1997 and 2001 but fatalities only increased slightly, we’re still seeing a significant decrease in fatalities per registered motorcycle.

There seems to be an increase in accidents and fatalities whenever bike sales are on the rise. That hasn’t been investigated, but it would be logical that a new rider would have an increased accident potential for two or three years and that with experience, the accident potential would decrease. If that’s true, then we should expect to see an increase in accidents and fatalities during any increase in motorcycle sales. However, we have to recognize that new motorcycle sales are not limited to novice riders.

The 2001 NHTSA figures indicate that although motorcycle-related fatalities were up for the fourth straight year, the 2001 increase was half that of 2000. Could the tapering off of the fatality rate be a result of novice riders gaining experience? Limited statistics are available, but we need to think very carefully about how the numbers are portrayed, and what they really mean.

The NCSA statistics are crunched into every conceivable connection, from age vs. blood alcohol concentration (BAC) levels, to engine size vs. rider age. There are different breakdowns for non fatal accidents and for fatal accidents by age, motorcycle displacement, license compliance, helmet use, speeding, highway type, and BAC level. Scanning through the fatality charts, there are some clues that different age groups have different priorities. For instance, older riders apparently tend to drink more, and therefore alcohol is more involved in accidents for older riders. For riders in the age group of thirty to thirty-nine, a higher percentage than younger riders die while intoxicated. Younger riders tend to ride sober but closer to the limits of performance, so younger riders seem to die more from speeding than from drinking.

The statistics are complex enough that no simple charts can provide much real insight. The National Agenda for Motorcycle Safety recognized the need for a new comprehensive nationwide study of motorcycle safety, but no federal agency has indicated any desire to back such a study. Motorcycle accident studies are being conducted in foreign countries, but any resulting data is not likely to be accurate if applied to motorcycling in the U.S.

If you want to access the data it’s important to recognize that the federal government is a huge bureaucracy with many offices. The NHTSA is an office of the United States Department of Transportation (DOT). The NCSA is an office of NHTSA. And, there are many other agencies, including the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) that collect, analyze, and distribute statistical information. A good place to start is the NHTSA Web site at www.nhtsa.dot.gov by selecting “Crash Statistics.”

Who to Measure?

We should also remember that while the Hurt Report was a milestone in researching how and why motorcycle accidents occurred in Southern California, it doesn’t say how other riders managed to avoid crashing. The assumption by rider training developers has been that the key to motorcycle safety is learning to avoid what the crashees did. The problem that researchers can’t solve is how to measure the successful riders to figure out what they do right.

Back around 1979, the late Roger Hull, then editor-publisher of Road Rider magazine, asked the MSF why they based training programs on accident numbers rather than on the techniques veteran riders used to ride successfully. Roger convinced the MSF to hold a conference at which the safety experts could listen to veteran motorcyclists describing their individual approaches to motorcycling and accident avoidance. The MSF finally relented and agreed to hold a conference.

The 1980 “Bikers’ Roundtable,” in Missouri, was a unique, weeklong gathering of motorcycling veterans. The MSF tried to focus the seminars on skill tactics such as swerving and braking. But the veterans kept suggesting that evasive maneuvers aren’t really important. Instead, they kept suggesting that the key is to avoid riding blindly into dangerous situations. They brought up mysterious stuff such as a sixth sense that warns them of an impending accident situation that is not yet in view. The MSF didn’t really know what to do with the feedback.

Back in 1980, a group of motorcycling veterans tried to explain to the safety experts how they avoid accidents.

I suggest that the pearl of wisdom hidden in all those Roundtable seminars is that motorcycling is primarily a thinking game. The veteran rider seldom has to pull off sudden evasive maneuvers because he (or she) knows what trouble looks like and makes small adjustments to stay out of harm’s way. That sixth sense is not magic but simply being aware of clues that less experienced riders don’t observe, such as a flash of light reflected from the windshield of a car about to exit an alley, or a waft of spilled diesel oil.

To think of this another way, veteran riders focus on doing things right to avoid problems, not on sudden evasive maneuvers at the last second. They maintain their awareness of the situation and make small corrections early to avoid riding into hazards.

A large part of my working career was as a graphics specialist in flight crew training for The Boeing Company. Way back when my daily ride was a Moto Guzzi Ambassador, I realized that airplane pilots have a lot in common with motorcyclists.

Using my Moto Guzzi 750 Ambassador for company errands in the 1970s, I could see parallels between flying and motorcycling.

It’s not just a matter of both airplanes and motorcycles banking into turns but the whole approach to managing the risks. Motorcyclists, like pilots, put the priority on avoiding accidents rather than attempting to survive accidents. The energy is focused on doing everything right, rather than on surviving the crash. That’s a significant difference that motor vehicle safety experts in the U.S. seem unable to grasp. The NHTSA approach has always focused on crash padding, rather than on driver skill.

Flying within the Envelope

Pilots often describe their tactics as flying within the envelope. The envelope is an imaginary balloon representing the physical limits of the situation at any moment in time. For example, let’s say a particular airplane needs a minimum takeoff speed of 140 knots for the weight, temperature, and airport altitude. If speed doesn’t exceed 140, the airplane simply won’t fly.

Motorcyclists also have an ever-changing envelope. For example, let’s say your bike can lean over to 45 degrees on a clean, dry, positive camber curve. If the pavement changes camber, or spilled oil reduces traction, or you increase speed until the bike touches down and levers the tires off the pavement, the motorcycle will go squirting off on a tangent. What’s most important to remember about the envelope is that it is ever changing and mostly invisible. So, how do we learn to predict our envelope? And can we increase our own personal skill limits to expand that envelope?

Considering that the risk management tactics of motorcyclists are similar to that of pilots, we might take a lesson from the airplane drivers. Pilots take high-quality training in ground school classes, study their operations manuals frequently, and take recurrent training on a regular schedule to keep their skills and knowledge up-to-date. Commercial and military pilots also spend a lot of time in flight simulators, increasing and testing their skills in a realistic but risk-free environment.

Rider Training

Rider training courses can quickly help you improve both your knowledge and your riding skills. Think of it as the motorcycle equivalent of ground school. It’s a low-risk way to cram a lot of trial-and-error learning into a few hours. If you haven’t taken the MSF’s ERC yet, that ought to be a high priority. Yes, the ERC is based on accident statistics, but it’s still an excellent way to learn more about the physical limits involved in cornering and braking, as well as accident avoidance tactics.

If you think of yourself as an advanced rider with too much experience to get anything out of a parking lot course, there are track schools that focus on high-speed cornering. Track schools will certainly help you improve your cornering skills. Just remember that cornering schools don’t deal with accident avoidance strategies for riding in traffic. So, regardless of your experience level, my suggestion is to take the ERC first, and then think about a track school.

Pilots spend a lot of time in training, with every move being scrutinized by a check pilot before they are approved to fly a specific airplane on their own.

Three-Wheeler Training

You should be aware that sidecar and trike training is managed by an organization separate from the MSF. Three-wheelers such as sidecar outfits and trikes require considerably different skills than two-wheelers. If you have physical limitations that make it difficult to ride a two-wheeler, or if you just want to expand your motorcycling horizons, consider taking a sidecar/trike course. The national Sidecar/Trike Education Program is administered by the Evergreen Safety Council, in Seattle, Washington.

Advanced Riding Clinic

Former MCN editor Lee Parks has developed a course that focuses on cornering techniques for the street rider. Lee’s Advanced Riding Clinic is for experienced rider who wants to increase skills above the ERC level but in a less intimidating environment than the track schools. Lee offers his Advanced Riding Clinic at different locations around the country.

What About Simulators?

The aviation industry is big on flight simulators. The big advantage of a simulator is that you can make a big mistake without anyone getting hurt. Commercial jet pilots must prove that they can fly the simulator even with abnormal situations such as an engine failure before they are allowed to fly an airplane.

The big flight simulators used in the airline industry act just like airplanes, complete with real-time motion and a matching computer-generated visual display out the cockpit windows. All the controls and instruments function just like an airplane’s would under the same conditions, with both feel and sound. Flight simulators are so sophisticated that the industry talks about “zero flight time” training. In other words, if you can fly a simulator, you can fly an airplane.

Wouldn’t it be great if motorcyclists could practice and test their skills in a riding simulator before taking to the streets?

Wouldn’t it be great if motorcyclists could practice and test their skills in a riding simulator before taking to the streets? You could get learning experiences such as handling left-turning cars, edge traps, corners with a decreasing radius, or rain-slick streets—knowing that you couldn’t get injured. You could try different cornering lines and throttle techniques, and if you “took a tumble,” you could just reset the simulator and try again.

Sorry, but there aren’t any motorcycle simulators. Years ago, there were a few bikes on rollers. There are rumors that Honda has been working on a riding simulator. And there have been some computer games. But at the moment there aren’t any realistic motorcycle simulators. That means you’ll have to explore the envelope on a real bike on real streets. So, you’ll need to be much more careful about punching through the envelope while you’re exploring the limits.

Keep Reading

If motorcycling is primarily a thinking game, you can understand how reading can make you a better rider. Motorcycles usually come with an owner’s manual to tell you how the bike works, but they don’t come with an operations manual to tell you specifically how to ride them. The Motorcycle Operator Manual (MOM) used by most state licensing departments is intended for raw novices, not experienced riders, so it’s not very helpful once you have your endorsement (license).

Skills columns in motorcycle magazines can be useful, helping you expand your knowledge and filling in those little details that training courses or the MOM don’t have time or space to include. The sad truth is that most motorcycle magazines ignore riding skills. One of the few magazines that publish a monthly skills column is MCN.

You can think of the book Proficient Motorcycling as a general operations manual for a wide variety of bikes and riders, and its companion Street Strategies as a refresher on common street hazards. More Proficient Motorcycling expands on that knowledge base. Three other books worth studying are Motorcycle Touring & Travel by Bill Stermer, The MSF’s Guide to Motorcycling Excellence: Skills, Knowledge, and Strategies for Riding Right by the MSF, and A Twist of the Wrist by Keith Code. Reading can also help you keep your knowledge fresh. As time goes by, we forget what we’ve learned. If you’ve ever wondered what airplane pilots carry in those heavy black suitcases, much of the load is a full set of operations manuals for the airplane so they can study the details whenever there is a question. If you’re serious about your riding, don’t be bashful about rereading a book such as this one next winter or pulling a copy of Street Strategies out of your tank bag to scan while you’re waiting for your buddies to catch up.

CHAPTER 2

THE PROFESSIONAL ATTITUDE

Motorcycling as a Combat Mission

My image of a good ride would be cranking up the throttle and motoring around my favorite twisty back road or cruising down a lonely highway through little towns with strange-sounding names or arriving at a big motorcycle event to rub elbows and gawk at the machinery.

That’s a common problem in motorcycling: we tend to daydream about what it will be like when we get there and don’t focus enough on what we need to do before the ride to make it happen successfully.

Keep your mind on your ride.

Traffic

We might not think of riding in traffic as “combat,” but that’s a pretty good description of what goes on. Car drivers tend to ignore motorcycles and run right into us. Motorcyclists have always been at risk among other vehicles, and it’s getting worse. On top of the usual transgressions such as drivers running stop signs and failing to signal, more people today are frustrated and angry, and it shows in their driving.

Being in combat is a pretty accurate description of riding a motorcycle in traffic.

I submit that riding a motorcycle is just as serious as flying an airplane. A motorcyclist can’t afford to make mistakes any more than a military fighter pilot can. Some statistics might help us put things in perspective.

According to the NCSA, a lot of motorcyclists get injured and killed in car/bike and truck/bike collisions. Here’s how it stacked up for a recent year in the U.S.:

Bike-only accidents:motorcyclist injuries: 14,000fatalities: 214Car/bike collisions:car occupant injuries: 4,000fatalities: 17motorcyclist injuries: 21,000fatalities: 596Light truck/bike collisions:Truck driver injuries: 1,000fatalities: 0Motorcyclist injuries: 7,000fatalities: 386Heavy truck/bike collisionsTruck driver injuries: 400fatalities: 0Motorcyclist injuries: 1,000fatalities: 114

It’s pretty obvious that when bikes and cars try to occupy the same space at the same time, the motorcyclist gets hurt a lot more seriously and more often than the driver. And when bikes and trucks collide, motorcyclists are often injured fatally. The point is if you want to survive traffic combat, you need to be smarter than the average motorist or truck driver and a lot more skillful than the majority of motorcyclists seem to be.

One rider I know is a military fighter instructor—one of those top gun pilots. We’ll call him Phantom Phil to disguise his identity. Phantom Phil treats each motorcycle ride with the same seriousness as a military combat mission. He chooses his “weapon” for the ride at hand, perhaps taking his Ducati for a mountain ride with the boys, or his BMW K-bike for a cross-country journey.

Riding Attire

Phil points out that our protection is not only what we’ve learned from our training (skills and knowledge) but also what we wear. Phil chooses his riding gear for the “mission.” If he is taking an easy ride downtown to the club meeting, he may wear reinforced jeans and a heavy fabric jacket. If he is heading out for a mountain run with some buddies, he dresses in full “combat” gear, including track leathers and boots, armored gloves, a full-coverage helmet, and a flawless face shield.

The Checklist

Phil also makes sure that all bike squawks (mechanical problems) have been resolved before he leaves home. Before each ride, Phil actually goes through a pre-departure bike checklist for the motorcycle and for the ride. As Phil points out, when your mission takes you into “enemy territory,” there is no excuse for mechanical failures, forgotten gear, or an incomplete plan. A written checklist helps to avoid overlooking some important detail, such as packing the reflective vest and clear face shield for a ride that’s likely to end after dark, or making sure you’ve got the water bladder for a mission into the desert.

Phil describes this in military terms: A mission through the mountains at slightly higher speeds requires a “weapon system ” that has no squawks that will cause you to go down. A detailed preflight check of the bike and riding gear allows you to correct any discrepancies before you “clear” the garage.

Most of us would chuckle at the image of a motorcyclist extracting an airplane-style laminated checklist from a jacket pocket. But every serious rider runs through some sort of checklist, even if it’s just a pause to mentally recall what he or she has packed. Consider your own routine for checking engine oil level and tire pressure before the ride. How do you recall what tools are on the bike, and whether up-to-date registration and insurance papers are on board? Do you always check your fuel load before “departing the fix?”

Personally, I don’t use a written checklist for local rides, but I do make a list for cross-country trips to make sure I don’t forget my address file, maps, the electric vest I might need for higher altitudes, business cards, slides for a rally presentation, emergency directory, or that T-shirt I intend to give as a gift.

For longer rides, I typically fuss with bike maintenance the week before the ride, looking for loose fasteners, lubricating cable ends, topping off fluid levels, and scrutinizing the tires. The day before a ride I turn on the headlight to be sure the battery is up, and then make sure I switch the ignition off so the battery is still up the next morning.