Is steering a motorcycle different from steering a bicycle?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve never ridden a motorcycle. I’ve ridden a bicycle a lot. Steering a bike wasn’t hard to learn: you just turn the wheel in the direction you want to go. Intuitive and easy.

I’ve translated a bunch about motorcycles in my job as Japanese translator, and I’ve read about steering motorcycles. For some reason, it’s never compared (in what I’ve read at least) to steering a bike. Rather, you get stuff like, “You have to turn left to go right,” and all this crap.

Is it really different? If so, why?

Thanks!

2

You countersteer when you take a bicycle around a corner, too. Just like when riding a motorcycle, it’s best not to think about turning left to go right, you just look and lean in the direction you want to go.

3

They both behave the same, but “turn left to go left” only works at slow speeds where the gyroscopic stability isn’t as powerful. Bicycles, at least the sort that people put around on, spend most of their time at those slow speeds, whereas motorcycles spend most of their time at higher speeds. Once you’re up over 15-20 MPH on a bicycle you turn right to go left, you just don’t really think about it. But when you’re trying to turn 600lbs it’s a lot more noticeable.

4

Steering a motorcycle around a parking lot at very low speeds is a lot like steering a bicycle. If you want to go left, you turn the wheel left.

Once you get above about 15 to 20 mph or so though, it doesn’t work like that any more. At higher speeds, if you want to go left, you lean to the left. The problem is, the bike has a lot of momentum and wants to go straight. It’s hard to make it lean. However, if you push on the left side of the handlebars, turning the wheel slightly to the right, the bike will end up quickly leaning left. You lean left with it (otherwise you’ll flip over to the right), and you go left.

This is called “countersteering”.

You can countersteer at low speeds as well. It’s just that instead of leaning with the bike, you need to keep yourself upright. Otherwise the bike will tend to fall inwards. I personally tend to countersteer a lot even at low speeds. You just get used to it.

You can countersteer on a bicycle too once you know how to do it.

Here’s a good video demonstration of it. There’s a bit of explanation at the beginning, then at around the 3:30 mark or so he demonstrates it by pushing the handlebar with his fists to make it very obvious which way he’s turning the bar.

ETA: The phrase they teach is push left, lean left, go left. Push right, lean right, go right. In other words, push left on the handlebars (turning the wheel slightly to the right), the bike will lean left, and you'll go left. Similarly, push right (turning the wheel slightly to the left), the bike leans right, and you go right. And of course you always want to look through the turn. Focus your eyes on where you want to go, not where you are currently pointing.

The lean does more of the actual turning than the moving of the handlebars. Pushing on the bars initiates the lean, and the lean turns the bike.

5

This is a fantastic explanation!

The only nit I have to pick is with the bolded portion. The wording implies that your body leaning left is what leans the bike left, when in reality we know it’s the countersteering right that leans the bike left.
Also, regarding the 15 to 20 MPH thing:
The wiki page I’ve read on countersteering states that even at low speeds countersteering is still necessary.

I don’t understand that, but I’m not going to argue with the physics majors!

6

Generally, steering a bicycle is very much faster, think, see corner, and you turn, motorcycles usually take a little more time - albeit at much higher speeds.

On a motorcycle you have two main ways of steering, counter steer and opposite lean.

Counter steer is done at speeds at least 15mph upwards, all you do is to push down on the bars opposite to the direction of turn. Also very useful to maintain a straight line in blustery crosswinds, it allows you to react very quickly.

Opposite lean you do at much lower speeds, especially if you have limited steering lock, you tilt the bike the way you want to go, whilst leaning yourself the opposite way, you also see trail bikes doing this at higher speeds when they try to keep the wheels in a specific part of the track especially in races. You might do this on a mountain bike on a trail if your wheels are in a rut and you don’t want to hit the edge of the rut sideways - which will definitely throw you off - you use it to adjust your body weight to

You can get a very tight turn at low speed on opposite lean, good for weaving.

One other way is to slide the back end aka as Backing in, its basically over steer.It is fraught with risk, it can allow you to change direction, keep on the gas at the same time so that you don’t have to bring the engine up to speed on corner exits, race track stuff only and you will frequently see riders getting badly wrong - not recommended. Steering in these situations is largely done using front brake and throttle.

On a road bicycles you would not do this at all unless by accident around say a tight hairpin, and you are most likely sliding off the bike of even the road, you might use it on a mountain bike trail if you are skilled and there is some natural looseness in the ground - it hurts when you fall off! (always)

I have had downhill runs on mountain bikes on loose trails where neither wheel had traction, and slipping in different directions, when this happens you are a passenger and you just try to keep it upright and aim for something softer than a wall, any little steering control you have is based on shifting your body weight about, still it is reasonably thrilling and you do feel something of a buzz when you get down the hill in one piece.

7

If you are looking for Youtube vids, you may wish to put in the search term Counter balance instead of opposite lean

8

[quote=“engineer_comp_geek, post:4, topic:769021”]

Here’s a good video demonstration of it. There’s a bit of explanation at the beginning, then at around the 3:30 mark or so he demonstrates it by pushing the handlebar with his fists to make it very obvious which way he’s turning the bar.

[/QUOTE] Hey yeah, this video was really great, thanks! :)
9

Another way to think of steering a bike/motorcycle is to consider that what you’re doing is moving the contact patch out from under (and to one side of) the center of mass. Once the contact patch is out there, the bike leans in to redistribute the forces.

10

Basically, the process is - on the inside of the turn you want to do you give a little push. (i.e. turn left, push the left side a little bit.) This will cause the bike to lean “into” the turn, and then you can turn the handlebars the direction you want to go.

Once you’ve ridden a motorcycle for a few minutes, this becomes instinctive. What is dangerous, is that this is instinctive. I had ridden a motorcycle for a 15 years before I got a chance to ride a trike (one of those 3-wheel ATV’s that were popular years ago.) Twice, I almost went into the ditch before I figured out the problem. I was twitching the handlebars the wrong way to try to turn, so instead of turning away from the side of the road I kept creeping toward it.

Apparently, this is the reason why there were so many accidents with these type of vehicle, not just the instability because they could not lean but also people were not learning the difference fast enough.

11

Strictly speaking, I don’t believe this is true for motorcycles or bicycles. At any speed, if you want to turn left, you first need to steer the contact patches out from under you to the right to establish a left lean. That means turning the bars to the right first. At low speeds there isn’t much gyroscopic stability from the wheels, so the bike will fall to the left very quickly, which means that the initial steer-to-the-right movement (the countersteer) will be correspondingly very small and very brief, enough so to go unnoticed if you’re not paying attention; this is what leads most people to think that you don’t countersteer at low speeds.[sup]*[/sup]

As to the difference between bicycles and motorcycles…motorcycles have a lot more mass (compare 25 pounds for a bicycle, vs. 400-800 pounds for a motorcycle), and a lot more gyroscopic stabilization from the wheels due to the much greater rotating mass and speed. This makes countersteering (relatively speaking) much more subtle on a bicycle, but it’s still there. It has to be.

Even when your hands aren’t on the handle bars and you are steering with body english, the countersteer still happens:

[ul][li]while riding in a stable straight line, you suddenly lean your body to the left.[/li][li]the bike responds as Newton predicts, by leaning to the right.[/li][li]because of the right-lean of the bike, the self-correcting steering geometry makes the handlebars turn themselves to the right (this is the countersteer).[/li][li]the contact patches get steered out to the right.[/li][li]now your body’s mass, to the left of the contact patches, causes the bike to lean to the left, establishing a left turn.[/li][li]depending on how far to the left you’re hanging your body, the self-correcting steering geometry should stabilize the bike at a corresponding lean angle/turn radius.[/ul][/li]
The experiences of steering a motorcycle and a bicycle are different enough that caution is warranted if you haven’t done one or the other for a while. On one occasion after riding a motorcycle for several years, I got on my bicycle for the first time in as many years and just about threw it to the ground when I attempted a snap-turn. :smack:

Hands-free steering is quite different on a bicycle and a motorcycle. Whereas a bicycle is fairly maneuverable using body English, it has much less effect on a motorcycle, due to the aforementioned mass and gyroscopic stability. Some motorcycles have enough of a lateral weight bias (typically those with a driveshaft and/or single-sided swingarm, like BMW bikes) that you will find yourself leaning far to one side just to keep the motorcycle going in a straight line. Without handlebar inputs, leaning into a turn at highway speed happens VERY slowly.

*Knowing that countersteering matters at parking lot speeds is useful. At parking-lot speeds, some riders appear to navigate almost accidentally; when you are conscious that countersteering works, you can apply it deliberately and forcefully when needed, like the motorcops at police rodeos (fast forward to about 50 seconds to see the low-speed skills demo).

12

I learned to ride a motorcycle in my early twenties, by just riding around with friends until I felt ready to go for my test. It was some time after I got my license that someone explained counter-steering to me. Perhaps I had been doing it unconsciously, but mostly, I turned at speed by leaning into the corners. Deliberately counter-steering felt weird to me.

I wonder, too, if being female and having a low centre of gravity changes some of the dynamics. I tended to push the bike over with my hips at times, rather than lean my whole body.

13

I’ve even spent time in the parking lot demonstrating and practicing this at the lowest speeds possible. The initial input is a slight, brief countersteer. As the bike reacts and starts to lean, we’ll instinctively turn the wheel in that direction to arrest the “fall”. This makes it appear that we’re steering in that direction -and at that point in the travel we may be- but the countersteering is certainly playing a part, even at that snail’s pace.

14

There’s been over the years a lot of discussion on line about countersteering, and by ‘discussion’, I mean flaming invective from both sides. No shortage of people claim that they are not counter steering, or not counter steering much, but instead steering by shifting their body weight.

The pro-countersteering faction makes a claim along the lines that in the process of shifting your weight, you’re providing the correct input on the bars whether you know it or not. The anti-countersteering faction, well, it’s hard for me to summarize their viewpoint fairly, so best I can do is relay that they say “no”.

Keith Code, racer and founder of the California Superbike School, decided to test the claims. He had built a bike with two sets of handlebars. The traditional set was used for all regular riding, and then there was a completely fixed set that only allowed for throttle and braking, no steering at all. When your hands are on the fixed set, the regular bars are completely free to react, they’re not locked up. He called this the “No BS Bike” for 'no bodysteering.

As all of the pro-countersteering faction predicted, pure bodysteering, all the way up to massively hanging of to one side or the other, resulted at best in a very lazy arc. I’ll see if I can find the video.

The conclusion is that while body position is very important for things like maintaining ground clearance and other niceties of cornering, it won’t steer the bike, no way no how.

Great article about the experiment…

Keith Code’s description at his site…

The video…

15

If you’re going slow enough on a small motorcycle, you can lean it just by body leaning. You don’t necessarily have to countersteer to initiate the lean. You can lean over a bicycle fairly easily as well.

Once you learn to countersteer though, you kinda do it instinctively even at low speeds. I’d probably have a hard time just leaning and handlebar turning a bike at low speeds just because I’m so used to countersteering it, but it can be done. Steering the contact patch out from under you is definitely the easier way to do it, IMHO.

You can probably even lean over a heavy bike at high speeds, if you’re on something like an airport runway and have plenty of room to turn. It’s going to be a very long slow turn though. I wouldn’t want to try it on a regular road.

16

If you ever watch motorbike speedway racing, you’ll see that the front wheel is almost always “steering” the opposite way to the way the bike is turning around the track: Flat Track Motorcycle Racing at FIM Speedway - YouTube

17

While true (and exciting) that’s not to be taken as an example of countersteering. That’s simply the front wheel chasing the sliding rear wheel.

18

Suppose we want to turn left. Your claim is that by leaning to the left, you can make the bike turn left without any countersteer. “Lean to the left” means our center of mass somehow gets moved to the left of the contact patch line. To make that happen, you must to push the bike to the right (so that the bike pushes your body to the left). In doing so, the self-stabilizing steering geometry makes the countersteer happen even without any direct rider input to the handlebars. The rider may not be deliberately countersteering (may not even have his hands on the bars), but the countersteer happens nonetheless.

If you take away the standard/stable steering geometry (e.g. build a bike with a vertical steer axis and zero caster), the countersteer will not happen without deliberate, conscious rider input. Hands off the bars, you can lean your body left, and the bike will lean right…and the bike will continue to travel in a straight line.

19

As I said, countersteer is subtle and intuitive once you are used to it. I didn’t realize I was doing it until I was on a handlebar-steered device that didn’t lean… and then it took me a while to catch on. Big turns, especially at low speed, were easy on the trike. It was the subtle steering to stay “in the lane” that I instinctively pushed the handlebars the wrong way.

20

This is one of those topics (as stated by a previous poster) that creates a lot of debate.

I think part of the problem is the actions taken (which can be very different) vs the physics and action of the bike (the same).

For example, when I took the MSF course 8 yrs ago, I had never really ridden a motorcycle, just a bicycle. In fact, they said you needed to know how to ride a bike to take the class. Though mostly, it was just the idea of balancing on two wheels.

In class, they would talk about pushing the bars left to go right and right to go left. At the slow speeds of the class, it was not something I could easily do and my brain was not getting it. It is of course counter intuitive.

So for example, if I am stopped on a road wanting to make a 90 degree left turn, I turn my handle bars and therefore my tire to the left (pull back on the left bar, push forward on the right) to start the bike pointing to the direction I want the bike to travel. There will be a leaning to the left as I negotiate the turn.

If I am riding down a straight road and I want to have some fun, I will start to slalom. I can do this 2 ways (probably more, but I primarily do it with these two methods). I most often will shift my weight back and forth (like swinging my hips). This will cause the bike to go side to side in a slalom motion, it can be tight or larger variations based on the degree of the hip swing. The other method is simply pushing the handlebars alternating fairly quickly.

Both will produce the same effect. Both seem very different actions. And actually the handlebar one does not feel as “safe” as the other due to my not engaging the whole body. It feels less fluid. Both probably actually are due to the same physical forces, but because I am actively doing different things with different parts of my body, it seems different to me.

Unless I am messing around, I do not actively think of pushing the handlebars to lean the bike. I may be doing that instinctively, but that is not what it going through my mind.

This is probably why there is such disagreement because when riding, we are doing things we are not thinking about.

I can say it does not take much of a push on the bars to create quite a lean (like don’t push much on a straight road), but it will come back to straight once pressure is removed.

I do love the feel of the bike when the whole body is engaged, it feels like you are a part of the bike and it is so fluid.

For the OP, quit translating and just go for a ride. :slight_smile: