I own a few motorcycles. Here’s my take on it.
Lane splitting is illegal in most states. Ironically, it’s legal in California, where it is probably one of the most dangerous area in the U.S. to lane split. Many bikers will disagree with me, but my personal opinion is that lane splitting is just asking for trouble. You’re riding on a part of the road where drivers aren’t looking for you. They are looking for cars, and if the cars around you are all stopped, they aren’t looking for another car to come zipping up in between because a car won’t fit there. So they won’t notice a bike that is lane splitting between a bunch of slower or stopped cars. Sooner or later someone changes lanes, doesn’t see the biker zipping up between lanes, and WHAM. Happens all the time and there are numerous youtube videos to prove it.
We tend to call idiots who drive too fast squids (it’s not a compliment), especially if they aren’t wearing proper gear. There are plenty of squids on youtube, and you can make a valid point that it’s the squid videos that people watch, since the video of me riding my Harley to work would just be boring as all heck. And many times, squids do cause their own problems.
That said, even us non-squid riders have to be very careful about cars. Car drivers look for other cars around them. They don’t look for bikes. Their brain naturally filters out bikes as something that’s not a car, and therefore isn’t important to them while driving. I’ve had people look directly at me and then pull out in front of me or cut me off. Even making eye contact isn’t enough. As a biker, you just have to assume that all of the cars on the road are out to get you, and plan accordingly.
This is really an issue for bikers. One of the most common causes of motorcycle accidents is a car driver pulling out in front of a bike when the biker has the right of way, simply because the car driver just didn’t notice the bike. I have to be on guard constantly for stuff like this.
Another thing - if a car skids, it just skids, and that’s it. If a bike skids, we don’t have four wheels to keep us stable. If we break traction, there’s a good chance we’re going down. The worst is what’s called a high side. This is basically where the bike starts to slide, but then the wheels find just enough traction to grab, and the momentum of the bike makes it flip over the wheels, launching the rider into the air.
Here’s a video of a high side if my description isn’t clear:
The same thing in a car would have just been some skid marks on the road and that’s it.
This is important because if say someone brake checks another car, assuming the other car doesn’t run into their back end, the worst that generally happens is that the car leaves some skid marks on the road. Brake check a motorcycle though, and the bike can skid and the rider can get thrown off, facing possible serious injury or death.
If you slam on the brakes on a bike you can also end up going over the handlebars, which again is something that doesn’t happen on a car.
If something makes your front tire skip, like hitting a pothole or a tar snake, this also can be very bad for a biker, but would not even be an issue for a car. We have to be much more aware of the road surface than a car does.
So yeah, a bike accelerates faster than a car and is more maneuverable than a car, but it’s a lot easier for us to end up hitting the pavement.
Overall, yes, cars can be a big problem, and there are a lot of idiots out there. You have to be much more alert on a bike than you do while driving a car.
The interesting thing is that this alertness kinda becomes second nature and you don’t think about it much, and you retain that higher level of alertness even when driving a car.