Why I Will Not Ride

August 23, 2007, 3:30 pm; posted by
Filed under Articles, Steve  | 10 Comments

Another summer week, another fatal motorcycle accident.

More than half of the Bweinh!tributors drive through this intersection several times every week, if not every day. It’s not an unsafe intersection, not at all, if you’re paying attention. Visibility is nearly unlimited. After somebody died there a few years back, they even put up special signs to remind those who are stopped that the cross traffic keeps going.

But this week, because some idiot turned left without looking, a young woman was thrown off a motorcycle and run over by a teenage boy, guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He literally could have been one of us, and if Mom (Connie) had decided to bring Rose dinner that night, it might have been her.

I’m big on justice. I want to blame the guy who turned left, and I wish there was more that could be done than just citing him for ‘failure to yield the right of way.’ Obviously he’s at fault here; his carelessness took a woman’s life, shattered her husband’s, and drastically affected yet another. When do you get over — when can you forget — running over another person?

But aside from the obvious, there’s one more thing I want to say about this tragedy.

Don’t get on a motorcycle.

I have become totally convinced that riding a motorcycle is not safe — in fact, it’s recklessly unsafe. It’s probably the most dangerous form of travel that’s still legal.

Don’t be upset with me; this has nothing to do with your skill or ability. Even if you’re the most talented rider in the world, two things are still true: (1) you’re traveling 88 feet each second with only leather between you and the road, and (2) you’re surrounded by morons in massive cars who care more about their incoming text message than your life.

I worked at a Harley dealership for a few months, home from college one summer. It was not my favorite job, for boss-related reasons, but it was valuable life experience and the source of many interesting stories. One of the tasks I had was organizing their customer files, then calling bikers whose bikes had been serviced, to make sure they were satisfied. I made a lot of phone calls. I read a lot of names.

I immediately started to see those names again, one or two at a time, in the pages of the newspaper. They were crushed by semi trucks, or they were injured by deer, or they were (most often) victims of their own stupidity or drunkenness.

We lost about a customer a month.

Those motorcyclists didn’t do anything wrong at our intersection this week. I don’t blame them for this tragedy. But put them in a car, even my cardboard box of a Chevy Cavalier, and chances are they’re both alive today. They’d have been a lot easier to see and far safer in a crash.

Actuary tables say you have a 7% chance of being in a car accident in the next 20 years.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says motorcyclists are 16 times more likely to die in one of those accidents.

Odds like those just aren’t worth it.


Comments

10 Comments to “Why I Will Not Ride”

  1. Mom on August 23rd, 2007 4:37 pm

    Having just witnessed another motorcycle accident as it happened in front of BOCES, I have to agree with you about the safety issue. But who gets to decide safety over vehicle choice? Hopefully the individual makes the right choice. All I know is, is that on August 4, when a woman in a huge SUV pulled out of Floral Drive and turned toward Watertown, she tore apart a small motorcycle and a 20 year old or so boy, and sent him spinning right toward me. I blessedly had time to stop before I would have had the same set of circumstances happen to me as my dear friend Sheryl Crandall’s son Justin experienced last Sunday. The difference was probably a mere 5 or 6 seconds. But maybe people shouldn’t be allowed to drive SUV’s?

  2. David on August 23rd, 2007 5:06 pm

    Around the 4th of July I was returning from Columbus GA when a torrential rainstorm hit. We all slowed down and in the midst of the worst section I saw two crumpled motorcycles on the shoulder, one crumpled driver, and one other driver standing over him trying to get someone to stop and help. I and several other motorists stopped. They had been slowing down to get off the road when a lady in a midsized car (who had not slowed down) sideswiped one into the other sending them both off the road. No one was badly hurt but I agree, motorcycles are too dangerous. They cannot compete with an 1,800 lb. car much less a mammoth SUV.

  3. Tom on August 23rd, 2007 5:17 pm

    You’re at the playground with your children, and they’re playing (as children often will), when a 200 pound jogger runs into them to send them sprawling on the sidewalk, do you argue for children not being allowed on playgrounds? No. You make a list of the names of the morons who can’t turn right without looking, and go all WBC on their butts.

  4. Steve on August 23rd, 2007 5:53 pm

    Forgive me, but your comparison is not very good. I’m not saying we should outlaw motorcycles from the road, first of all.

    Being a small child is not a choice. Traveling 90 to 120 feet per second on two wheels and a seat is a choice, a spectacularly unwise one. It’s more akin to letting your children scrimmage with the high school football team.

    I support your freedom to make this stupid choice. I just advise — very strongly — against it.

  5. David on August 23rd, 2007 7:16 pm

    Tom has a motorcycle!!!

  6. Aarong on August 23rd, 2007 10:17 pm

    Sorry, I’m confused. Motorcycles are dangerous and should be eliminated because of other people? Sketchy logic. Though I concur that they are dangerous in and of themselves upon occasion. But maybe people should just learn to be better drivers and we shouldn’t eliminate the pleasure that it is to ride a motorcycle. People don’t ride motorcylces for safety. But, no surprise here, people also don’t drive SUV’s for safety. Motorcycles give one the unheralded honor of enjoying modern technology with old world travel. Movements at high speeds whilst being able to take delight in the wind and scenery moving around and through you.

    I’ll never hop on a hog and can’t quite grasp the fearlessness (read: bit of the insane) it takes to get on them. But actuary tables insist it’s safer to take a plane than to drive — are we to take planes down to 7-11?

    But I wonder if, in the late 1800s, they ran into (no pun intended) the same problems with carriages (the Victorian SUV) and horses (the Oliver Twist Moped, if you will).

  7. Steve on August 23rd, 2007 10:22 pm

    Come on, guys, did you read the article? I didn’t say they should be eliminated; I don’t believe that at all. I just don’t recommend riding them. Because — as you agree — they’re not safe.

    Your plane comparison is a little strange. Planes are safer than cars, but they don’t make any logistic sense at all for trips less than a couple hundred miles. Cars and motorcycles are almost equivalent in their range. The one place motorcycles make sense is a city, because they’re easy to maneuver and there’s less danger of death.

    And I think people do drive SUVs for safety, however foolish a notion that is.

  8. Missy on August 24th, 2007 12:21 am

    I am a strong supporter of motorcycles + prayer.

  9. aarong on August 24th, 2007 9:07 am

    I think I’m arguing just to argue. I pretty much agree with you — let’s be clear. And you didn’t say they should be eliminated; but it was all but implied that without them, you believe it would be for the better.

    I don’t know why I’m arguing. I think I read Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance differently than I ought — seems like it glorified the bike a little too much for me. But riding a motorcycle, like I said, holds this ideal. This collision of the old and the new. And its got practicality itself.

    And my plane allusion was meant only to suggest, not that we should take planes to stores, for their practicality is supremely in question for satisfying that midnight Slushie fix, but that if we follow the argument in lines of safety and “more likely to die [in this vehicle or that]” arguments, then we inevitably end up there. I was attempting to be more humorous than profound.

    Did you think you’d ignite such an inane discussion by pointing out a horrible tragedy? I apologize for overlooking that in my argument. I work in news. I am desensitized to tragedy. And in such cases I continue to hold to ideals — like motorcycles– however wrong and against reality because it keeps me sane, keeps me hopeful. I see evidence that backs up your point all the time. And it’s horrible. But I can’t help but think that for maybe that one ride, it all has to be worth the risk.

  10. David on August 24th, 2007 9:33 am

    I don’t think anyone wants to ban motorcycles. I think a saner approach is to remove the coolness factor by requiring each rider to wear a large fiberglass helmet that has been shaped to look like an oversized Michael Jackson bobble head. That and steel toed fuzzy pink slippers should do the trick. Maybe a small backpack shaped like a teddy bear.

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