Well Maverick was riding a crotch rocket in Top gun
Just sayin
Declan
Happened to us on the Jersey Turnpike a few months ago. We were in a rented SUV doing ~65 in the right lane and I had my head in a map. There was this “waaaaaaaah” and I looked up in time to see the tailight of some motorcycle in the far left lane; must have been doing at least 100. Neither of us saw it until it went by.
I picked up my cell phone and called the NJ State Police in hopes they could catch up before the fool wiped out on somoene’s rear bumper.
I’m English. We have nothing but winding roads. Still doesn’t mean I don’t check my mirrors twenty times a minute, or wonder why the hell I skipped the routine when something comes past that I didn’t know was there.
It really doesn’t matter whether I saw them or not, at the speed they were closing, there was nothing I could do to change or avoid the situation.
Motorcycles are inherently unsafe. You can tell this from looking at them. A seat bolted to a bare motor. Wow. And then you say accidents are someone else’s fault? True denial.
Yeah, because cagers never change lanes without looking and wipe out the motorcyclist they didn’t see. :rolleyes:
Well, except that if you’d seen them coming, they wouldn’t have scared the shit out of you when you came past.
Perhaps this death-defying overtake was based on the assumption that there was nothing you could do to change or avoid the situation. If I can see that someone else’s line through a corner is predictable, I dare say I could pass him either side if I had a big edge in speed. Not that I ride like that but I’ve been in situations where it’s easy enough to treat slower moving traffic as if it were stationary.
And not having been able to do anything to change or avoid this particular situation is still no excuse for not knowing what’s going on behind you. Sorry, but I’ve heard this “Bloody idiots!” line too many times. It’s just possible that the guys who shot past you had far more roadcraft than you, not far less.
/aside Wow. komb lasted a long time. :rolleyes:
I take it “lane splitting” means the practice of riding one’s motorcycle between lanes of traffic. It never occurred to me this might actually be legal somewhere in the U.S. That’s ridiculous.
No. I think it means when two motorcycles split or share a lane. But hell, I’m just guessing.
One of the reasons I was so glad to get out of Atlanta was the sheer number of dipshits zooming down the dashed white line on I-85.
That and the number of people I’d see reading the newspaper on I-285… while barreling down the highway at 75+ miles per hour.
I rarely saw motorcycles on I-85 when I used to drive on it regularly (about three years ago). I guess they wiped out around SC somewhere. The newspaper reading bastards made it all the way up to Durham a couple of times, though.
They were all over I-40 between Raleigh and RTP when I was working at Glaxo many, many moons ago. Maybe they disperse around Mooresville.
I’ve had the “joy” of sharing the road with these guys:
http://www.starboyz.com/
(Me, looking in rear mirrors, “Oh sh**!!!”)
Lately they’ve been doing a better job of confining their more insane tricks to the racetrack, but it was rather unnerving for awhile. Look guys, I’m a crap driver, it’s not really safe for you to pop wheelies on either side of my car!
No, Baldwin has it exactly correct. It is when motorcycles pass other traffic by travelling between the lanes of traffic. Ed the Head had a pretty good explanation.
Of course the idiots being referred to in this thread are those that use lane splitting to go as fast as they like safety be damned.
I find sharing the road with squids like these a lot more terrifying than sharing the road with a bunch of cars. Motorcyclists like to say that ‘all cagers are crazy and will kill you if they get the chance’ as a way of reinforcing the idea that when you’re on a bike, you always have to be alert and looking for the next threat. But in the case of squids, it seems like it’s the truth.
There was a case here in the PNW last year where a squid snuck up in the blind spot of another rider on the freeway, then blasted his engine as loudly as he could as a prank. The second rider jumped in his seat, and lost control of his bike. He fell off, was run over, and suffered permanent debilitating injury. The squid sped off. A witness was another biker, who wrote the whole thing up on a local messageboard.
Those kinds of bikers are the reason motorcycling is viewed the way it is.