Yeah, those 3-wheelers were nasty. I knew a guy who lost a brother on one.
This is one of many factors that figure into the risk faced by a motorcyclist and their passenger. To the extent that motorcycles are deathmobiles, a lot of times it’s because the riders were:
- drunk
- unlicensed (correlates with unskilled)
- unskilled (the licensing test here in the US is very basic; a lot of crashes involve riders who could have avoided a crash if they had turned or braked harder)
- young (correlates with inexperienced/unskilled)
- not wearing gear (correlates with a general lack of concern towards risks)
- riding a small bike with dark colors and crummy lighting (these make it harder for you to be clearly seen)
- riding in heavy traffic
- riding at night
- tailgating
- riding near the middle of their lane (this is where road debris tends to settle)
- lingering in the blind spots of cars
- doing a piss-poor job of assessing the scene ahead of you and predicting what cars might do next (and what you should do or be ready to do)
- a thousand more little things like these
The more of these risk factors a rider addresses, the better off they are. After 23 years and nearly 200,000 miles in the saddle, I still haven’t crashed my bike; luck has certainly had a part to play in that, and I’ve certainly indulged in some of those risks from time to time, but I like to think that my overall attention to risk management has had a big effect on my riding record.
“No thanks, I prefer to stay alive” is a bit of a flippant response to an invitation to ride, but the woman in the OP was quite sensible in declining to ride with a guy she had only just met in person. She may never want to ride along - being a moto passenger isn’t everyone’s cup of tea - but OTOH she might come around eventually if she sees that the guy has his head on straight and doesn’t do stupid stuff when he’s riding.
This is not correct. For a given turning radius and speed, the lateral traction force required from the tires does not change with the lean angle of the tires. For track riders on super-grippy race tires, hanging off is the only way to achieve the extreme lean angle (measured from the tire contact patch line to the combined bike/rider center of mass) required to make full use of all of the available tire grip to get around a turn as fast as possible. For road riders, a similar situation exists: if you stay planted in the saddle and turn tighter and tighter, most bikes will start dragging hard parts (sidestand, centerstand, foot pegs, etc.) before running out of grip, so hanging off will keep the bike more upright and let you utilize more of that grip (this is especially true for bigger/heavier touring and sport-touring bikes). At the same time, keeping the bike more upright orients the suspension to better absorb the bumps and dips in the road, helping to maintain control.
Very good analysis!
Thanks I, knew I was probably misremembering the exact mechanism of how knee dragging works. I’ve certainly read and watched explanations of it before. My main takeaway has always been, that I need to always ride in control, and at speeds where achieving maximum lean angle plays no part in whether or not I cross the centerline.
And all of this adhesion ceases when the front tire hits a teeny tiny bit of loose debris on a turn.
Well, maybe not all of it. It depends how big that piece of debris is, how many there are, and how hard you’re pushing the limits of traction when you ride over that debris. Nobody should be riding at “ten tenths” on public roads, but the general point is that a motorcycle provides a lot more traction than most riders know is available or are willing to even explore. If a rider never learns what they and the bike are capable of when it comes to turning and braking performance, then they’ll be ill-prepared to deal with a situation that requires emergency action.
You may have heard of the unfortunately named Hurt Report. It was published way back in 1981, but I’d be willing to bet that a lot of its findings haven’t changed much since then:
A couple of findings from the report that are relevant to this discussion:
- In the single vehicle accidents, motorcycle rider error was present as the accident precipitating factor in about two-thirds of the cases, with the typical error being a slide-out and fall due to overbraking or running wide on a curve due to excess speed or under-cornering.
The main thing to note there is the under-cornering. There are any number of videos out there showing riders who ran wide on a turn when they absolutely did not need to; it’s just that they had no sense of what the bike could do, and were so scared to try that they instead opted to steer the bike right off the road.
- Motorcycle riders in these accidents showed significant collision avoidance problems. Most riders would overbrake and skid the rear wheel, and underbrake the front wheel greatly reducing collision avoidance deceleration. The ability to countersteer and swerve was essentially absent.
I was once caught behind a rider who was creeping forward on a very twisty stretch of road (US129 south of Deals Gap, for anyone familiar with the area). I could see that they really had no idea what countersteering was or how to make it work for them, and I overheard them in a parking lot later talking about how nervous they were. This is the kind of rider who is likely to eventually crash in a very mild emergency situation because they are too scared to really use that front brake or apply aggressive countersteering inputs.
When you can’t countersteer and tend to underbrake the front wheel and overbrake the rear, this is what you get (not my video - no gore, probably no serious injuries, but plenty of swearing):
I’m not sure why you’re trying to spin this. You hit a small patch of gravel on a motorcycle while turning then the front wheel will slide and you’re going down. You hit it in a car and there are 3 other wheels solidly gripping the road.
What you’re trying to describe is a world of super bikers that don’t exist. The average biker is going down while turning a corner if the front wheel hits gravel. It’s very common for country roads to have a triangular patch of gravel at T intersections. They just accumulate over time from cars because the roads are often paved by laying down gravel and then taring over it. I’ve hit them before and was lucky there wasn’t a car there. I was able to straighten the wheel to keep the bike up.
All that aside it’s a fact that a motorcycle is less stable than a car and offers zero protection in an accident. ZERO. I’ve been riding for ten years and have no delusions of the risk involved.
I don’t think it’s spin, just that it seems to me @Machine_Elf is envisaging literally one piece of gravel (which may or may not cause the front tyre to lose traction) whereas you mention a “patch” of gravel (which is, as you say, almost certain to bring the bike down - though if the angle of the tyre is not too steep, and the patch really small, and the speed low enough, it is possible to regain traction before disaster takes hold).
First of all, you didn’t say “a small patch of gravel” in your previous post. You said:
You also described a total loss of traction in that situation:
and an ineluctable consequence:
You make it sound like a miracle that any rider comes home alive from a casual Sunday afternoon ride.
So if the average biker is guaranteed to crash when hitting gravel (of unspecified length, breadth, and depth), and you’ve hit gravel patches and managed to keep the bike up, are we meant to understand you’re a super biker?
FWIW, I happen to agree with you that the average biker isn’t terribly good. My point was that a rider’s long-term survival is best served by being better than average, which in part comes from having a visceral understanding of what they and their bike can do so they can call upon those capabilities when the need arises.
Well no, as I originally stated I kept the bike up because there wasn’t a car in the road. If there was a car there it wasn’t going to end well. the choices would have been to hit it upright or slide into it.
I agree but it’s difficult to practice sliding on gravel while cornering in an 800 lb cruiser. I learned on a 450 lb beater and was able to test it as best I could on gravel. You can man-handle a smaller bike but not a heavier bike.
Now that I have a cruiser I’m really cautious about taking corners as a result of my experience with the lighter bike. I’ve taken it out exactly once on a gravel road and it didn’t go well.
ECG would the bike in that photo be considered a cruiser?
Yes. It’s a 1997 Harley Davidson Dyna Wide Glide.
Harleys like this are usually the stereotypical example given when someone asks was a cruiser is.
On top of all that, I think there is also target fixation going on. They could’ve made those corners without issues if they were decent riders.
Riding a motorcyclist without a helmet is just asking for trouble. Practice safe sex, people.
My brother was not a terribly experienced rider who was injured in two single vehicle accidents before thankfully giving it up. His first one was pretty minor but broke the plastic fairings on the bike when it fell. His second accident broke both his wrists when he spilled it going around a curve without noticing sand in his line.
When I had teeth extracted, I declined general anesthesia because the risk was too high. Which is consistent with my refusing to ride bikes. Of course, I do race cars, so who am I to judge?
Lightning never strikes the same place twice, right? He should have been perfectly safe. It’s just a statistical certainty.
Another way of putting it is that riding a motorcycle once is statistically equivalent to that 45 year old to giving up 20 days of their life. No thanks.
Which is a little surprising to me. I thought general aviation was safer. I got a couple of hours towards my private pilot’s license before I decided it was going to be too costly to pursue. I guess I made the right choice.
Recently my friend told me he wanted to buy a bike. The very next day I was in my Miata when I saw a woman roll through a stop sign looking for all the world like she was going to stop and then just floored and drove straight into a bike. The bike rider didn’t remember the accident seconds later so I’m sure he had a concussion but he was conscious and walking after the accident at least. Plenty of witnesses. The driver kept claiming he was speeding and came out of nowhere. I’m like lady, if you saw him, ramming him wasn’t the right course of action and if you didn’t see him, how do you know how fast he was going? It’s one or the other. Not both.
My godmother’s kids had an old one of those when I was growing up. I never rode it (I was too young) but I remember the sheer number of times they would be riding, make what looked like a perfectly normal turn, and it would just roll over on them. They never got hurt, shockingly, but it could have just as easily snapped their neck with a bad landing.