Motorcycle Miles Traveled

One of my least favorite aspects of motorcycle safety statistics is the wildly optimistic "miles traveled" numbers that seem to be spouted by everyone from the dreaded AMA to the MSF to NTSA. I do not believe the average mileage traveled by motorcyclists is anywhere near 10,000 miles per year. But how do we get real numbers?

It struck me this morning that we have a ready source of data, CraigsList and eBay. So, I started paging through CraigsList ads this afternoon, copying down the bike year and miles advertised, tossed them into a spreadsheet, and did some calculations.

Observation and experiences are powerful tools. I realize that what appears to be isn't always what is, but I also realize that people making political claims are often motivated to tell less than the truth about . . . anything. One of my least favorite statistics is the "miles traveled" numbers that are used for motorcycle safety data. I simply do not believe that there are nearly as many motorcycles on the road as the industry, safety organizations, and, even, the government claims.

The Kelly Blue Book, for example, posts the following statement, "Obviously mileage will vary from year to year and model to model. A simple guide could be to consider the type of bike you are looking at: If the bike is a sportbike 600 c.c. to 999 c.c., and since these bikes are traditionally weekend only bikes, you can expect to see lower miles, about 3,000 miles per year. Tourers or Sport Tourers usually see a lot of miles, but these are generally freeway miles, between 5,000 to 6,000 miles per year." Those are silly numbers, based on fantasy. NHTA is considerably more conservative with an estimate of 1,943 miles per year for the average motorcycle. I'm not sure I buy that, either.

When people sell their motorcycles, they are pretty much forced to provide credible mileage numbers, so places like CraigsList, eBay, and local newspapers are pretty useful resources. In about a half-hour on two different days, I collected data on 60 motorcycles. So far, my data indicates the average mileage is about 1,425/year with a standard deviation of 863 miles. So far, there are some radically low-mileage outliers. The most annual mileage I've seen is 4,700/year over a 12 year lifetime. My own mileage tops that, but I'm trying to ignore anecdotal data and only collect "for sale" data to keep the information consistent and believable.

I created my own data gathering tool, a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, that allowed me to enter data that I found in various locations and make some statistical assumptions from that information. Because I'm lazy, old, half-blind, and don't feel some kind of compulsion to do all of this on my own, I' originally posted the spreadsheet on my website for others to play with. A much smarter guy, William Wahby, transferred my Excel sheet to a Google Docs format:(Geezer with a Grudge: Average Mileage) where any of us can add data. If you want to add some bikes from your region, you'll see we've included the following data entry fields for you to work with:

State

Date Sampled

Make/Model or Description

Year

Miles

These are all data entry fields. The rest of the data fields -- Miles/Year, Miles Driven, and the statistical analysis fields -- calculate mileage automatically when you enter data into the Year and Miles fields. Please just enter the traditional two-letter State designation into that field. The date format is automatic: DD/MM/YYYY. I'll take pretty much anything for Make/Model. 

This is the kind of data collection that you'd think/hope NHTSA and the states would be collecting and using for analysis proposes. From what I've been told, they don't bother.  To the right is a charty of what our data looks like, so far. Pretty disgusting, don't you think? One thing this absolutely points out is that the overwhelming majority of riders don't need a bike bigger than 150-250cc. Any damn bike will hold up for less than 2,000 miles a year and how fast do you need to go if you're only going to be on the bike for less than twenty hours a year?

My Picture of Over-40 Riders

For a year, I subscribed to Motorcycle Consumer News. I like the concept of this magazine and I really wanted to like it, but I mostly was disappointed. Many of the articles are poorly written, some are as silly as the advertiser-based magazines, and a couple of the regular writers are downright irritating (kettle calling the pot "black," I know). However, some of the reviews are not only super-detailed but MCN will look at bikes the other magazines barely notice (like this month's review of Suzuki's TU250X).

As I was digging through the crap in my MSF classroom bag, I stumbled on an old issue that cemented my disinterest in renewing my subscription back when that subscription was about to run out: "A Portrait of the Over-40 Rider." This article, written by Wendy Moon, was supposedly an analysis of a survey pasted inside a previous issue. The survey received 122 respondents and Moon makes some amazing conclusions from the results. This was a survey placed in an out-of-the-way spot in the magazine a few months back. So out-of-the-way that I had to paw through my old issues to find it. I hadn't even noticed the survey while I was reading the magazine.

With her tiny collection of responses from MCN's odd group of subscribers, Moon attempts to dispute the findings of NHTSA's crash data (and several other studies) from previous years. According to her survey results, 57% of motorcycle riders are in their 50s and 23% are in their 60s, leaving 20% of riders for the 16-49 and 70-up year-old categories. I'm not even close to buying that. Since she concluded that such an overwhelming percentage of riders are geezers, the fact that 50% of all fatalities are old folks doesn't bother her. Her conclusion was that, "In contrast to the media's portrayal, they could be said to be the safest riders on the road."

A statistic that is missing in all of the significant studies' data is miles driven, but Moon's average of 11,968 miles per year is so far from NHTSA's 2,411 and anything any reasonable person could believe that the rest of the article loses what little credibility it might have had. A substantial number of her polled riders claimed an average of 50,000 miles per year on their bikes. Hell, I don't even believe NHTSA's 2,600 mile estimate. I think most US bikes barely collect 2,600 miles before they hit the scrap heap. Asking a bunch of geezers how many miles they ride is as useful information as asking SUV owners about their gas mileage. People lie and people really lie about stuff that they think points out superior strength or weakness.

Moon and MCN's other conclusions were:

• 83% "always wore a helmet"
• full-face helmets were the "overwhelming" choice
• 75% said they "never" drank and rode
• 85% were self-taught and 60% had "some kind of training"
• 70% rode year-round in spite of the weather
• only 14% rode with a group of any kind
• 54% claimed to be daily commuters
• 40% claimed to be crash-free

Somewhere in all that silly data, common sense was totally lost. In everyone else's data, many of the douchebags getting killed on motorcycles are over the alcohol limit. While it's true that the majority of motorcyclists in the US are over 40, I doubt that they contribute much to NHTSA's average 2,600 miles traveled per year. The garage candy crowd aren't dressed well enough to experience more than a 2 month riding season in most of the country, It's tough to put on big miles when you have to self-medicate yourself every 50 miles because of your crappy suspension and awkward riding position.

Like hearing the mpg data from an SUV owner, I put very little faith in the big mileage claims of most cruiser characters. The best someone claiming 50,000 miles a year can expect from me is a polite smile. I work on that expression often. I am a firm believer in disbelieving practically amazing story I didn't witness. [How's that for a convoluted sentence?]

How does a wide range of motorcycle riders manage to put on 11,000 miles a year and while 40% of them manage to avoid any sort of crash? Not buying that, either. If you ride, you crash. If you ride a lot, you crash a little more.

She also quoted a study that concluded, "those individuals who took beginning rider training courses were more likely to be involved in an accident than those who did not, and that those who took the beginning course more than once were much more likely to be involved in an accident."

Now, that I believe. If you can take the MSF BRC and fail the test afterwards, you are incompetent as a motorcyclist. The test is insanely simple. Honestly, I suspect that most folks who are forced to take the BRC to get their license are a bit handicapped in the hand-eye coordination skills territory, anyway. There is no such thing as a "difficult DMV" test in these United States. If you can't pass that test, you are either riding a worthless pile of crap or you are not capable of managing a motorcycle. The test ought to be 200% tougher, if anyone ever really wants to reduce motorcycle deaths. For those of us over 55, it ought to be re-administered ever couple of years to check the decay of our skills.

What MCN proved is that getting useful motorcycle data is tough and that publishing sketchy data is a formula for losing credibility.

Crash Data via NHTSA and DOT

The data is always a good bit of behind current trends, mostly because getting information from many of the states is like pulling teeth. This is 2014 data, but it’s still interesting to pick apart.

I can’t imagine how they generate this over-optimistic estimate, “In 2013, motorcyclists were about 26 times more likely than passenger car occupants to die in a crash per vehicle mile traveled and five times more likely to be injured.” I just don’t buy the idea that motorcycles are that large a contributor to miles-traveled in the US. I still believe we are barely 0.001% of total miles traveled (well under bicycle miles) and, therefore, closer to 1,000 times-or-greater more likely to die per mile traveled, annually.

“There were about 8.4 million motorcycles on the road in 2014.” Yeah, no. I call bullshit.

“In 2014, 39 percent of those motorcyclists killed were not wearing helmets, down from 41 percent in 2013.” Seriously interesting.

“Over the nine years from 2004 to 2013, fatalities among the 40-and-older age group increased by 39 percent, according to NHTSA, compared to 16 percent for all ages.” Expected, since the average age of motorcyclists is climbing at about that rate.

TOP FIVE STATES IN MOTORCYCLE THEFTS, 2015

1. California 7,221
   
2. Florida 4,758
   
3. Texas 3,403
   
4. South Carolina 2,160
   
5. New York 1,902

Huh? What’s with South Carolina?

“Older riders appear to sustain more serious injuries than younger riders.” No surprise there.

This is an interesting stat, “riders of ‘super sports’ motorcycles have driver death rates per 10,000 registered vehicles nearly four times higher than those for drivers of other types of motorcycles.” Sort of fits my one hazardous moment in Colorado last week.

This will be the death of public road access for motorcycles, “The Government Accounting Office (GAO) estimated that in 2010 motorcycle crashes cost $16 billion in direct costs such as emergency services, medical costs including rehabilitation, property damage, loss of market productivity including lost wages, loss in household productivity and insurance costs, including claims and the cost of defense attorneys. ” This number will contine to climb and the percentage of costs will skyrocket as cars become smarter and motorcyclists continue to get dumber.

Liars, Damned Liars, and Statistics

One of the things that I'm enjoying the most about The Geezer with a Grudge: Average Mileage spreadsheet is the arguments about how invalid the data is. NHTSA, the states, the AMA, and insurance companies simply make up the data they use for motorcycle fatalities per mile traveled because they are too lazy to get real data. If they wanted real data, all they have to do is use the information we're all forced to provide every time a motorcycle is sold: the manufacturer, VIN number (which can easily be linked to model, engine size, year of manufacturer, etc.), and mileage at the time of the sale.

The fact is, what the database is showing so far is about what I expected to see; the average motorcyclist could get by with a 100cc scooter. With the big mileage riders skewing the data to the high-side, average miles/year is moving towards 1500/year. Still, it's hard to justify more than 250cc if that's all you're going to do with a motorcycle. This is what statisticians call a "fat-tail curve," though. There are going to be a few bikes on the right side of the curve and a crap-load of bikes on the low side. I'm not even a little surprised.

All of my life, I've bought my motorcycles by cherry-picking the 80% of motorcycle buyers (Note: I did not call them "motorcyclists."). Using good old Pareto Principles, 80% of the people who buy a motorcycle are unlikely to use it for much. Apparently, based on our current data, the more the bike costs the less likely it is to be ridden. More importantly, for me, the trendier the bike the more likely it will be found super-cheap a year after the trendiness wears off.

For example, my 1999 Suzuki SV650. I bought that bike in mid-2000, after the press had raved this bike into unobtainium for two years. My local dealers had no SV's in stock and were asking a slight premium for next year's 2001 production. However, I kept an eye on Craigslist around the Midwest and found about a half-dozen for sale for about 1/2 list price with less than 100 miles on the odometer. A young "motorcycle buyer" fell for the hype, bought a new SV for full list-plus, put the recommended farkles on the bike, dropped it in his driveway, and decided motorcycles were too dangerous. Five years and about 30k miles later, I sold the SV for slightly more than I'd paid for it and bought a year-old 2004 V-Strom (the "next big thing") for the same amount with less than 1,400 miles of local use (owned by an old guy who dropped the bike once and gave up). Well-used V-Stroms were going for serious money in 2005, but I waited for the usual suspects to show up and was not disappointed. I expect to unload my 2004 V-Strom for close to what I paid for it 50-some-k-miles later.

As our data is demonstrating, most motorcycle owners are not motorcyclists.

Not Like Everybody

All Rights Reserved © 2008 Thomas W. Day

We motorcyclists are an odd group, even compared to other members of our odd species. We are so full of contradictions that it's hard to take seriously anything humans say or do. Motorcyclists are even less consistent than "normal" people.

For example, I've heard motorcyclists claim that our vehicle should be a protected species because by riding motorcycles we are saving fuel, creating less pollution, and creating less traffic congestion. Some of that seems legitimate, although there are some motorcycles that get pretty miserable mileage and many motorcycles barely do better than modern compact cars. However, we aren't anything special in the emissions realm. A 2008 L.A. Times article1 about motorcycles stated, "In California, such bikes make up 3.6% of registered vehicles and 1% of vehicle miles traveled, yet they account for 10% of passenger vehicles' smog-forming emissions in the state. In fact, the average motorbike is about 10 times more polluting per mile than a passenger car, light truck or SUV, according to a California Air Resources Board comparison of emissions-compliant vehicles."

Even that is misleading because motorcycles are "tested at lower speeds, which pollutes less" and a bike only has to maintain that level of emissions "for the first 18,600 miles of a bike's life, compared with 150,000 miles for cars." Those lax regulations only exist for bikes over 179cc. Smaller motorcycles and scooters can crank pollutants into the air without any regulation. The Times story concluded with "Motorcycles, even small ones, are more polluting than Hummers, but it's the best that can be done for now."

Leaving behind my paranoia of being a pin in a rolling bowling pins configuration, I went on a short group ride a year ago. I discovered what those critics say about motorcycle emissions is true. In the middle of a pack of mostly modern, mostly unmodified bikes, the smell of unburned gases was strong and, after a few miles, I bailed out of the crowd to clear my head and wait for my eyes to stop watering. My wife, who is sensitive to petroleum fumes, was close to nauseous before we left the pack. A bunch of motorcycles is as noxious as a convoy of military vehicles (another group of notorious EPA rule violators).

While individual motorcycles are definitely able to reduce traffic congestion, a parade of motorcycles quickly makes up for all the benefit individual riders can create. Some riders take a lot of pride in hauling out their garage jewelry once or twice a year for a "charity ride." It has always seemed to me that simply putting the gas and jewelry money used for these rides into the charity would do a lot more good, but maybe I'm missing the point. Those parades of slow-moving hippobikes jam up traffic for miles and raise the general ire toward motorcycling. They do, in fact, raise motorcycle awareness among the general public, but not in a good way.

Likewise, motorcyclists try to link the noise of our vehicle to other similarly irritating noise producers. It's true that there are all kinds of irrationally noisy vehicles on the road and it's also true that the police do a lousy job of enforcing noise standards. However, if you would spend a couple hours along a major road with an SPL (Sound Pressure Level) meter, you would find that motorcycles are consistently the loudest non-emergency vehicle noise maker on the street and in most neighborhoods. It's fun to argue that if motorcycles have to be noise limited, every other noise source should be equally restricted, but the logical way to reduce any kind of unwanted activity is to go after the worst offenders first and work your way down the ladder to the least offensive offender. Motorcycles are at the top of the worst noise offenders.

Motorcyclists go ballistic on any attempt to resist attempts to legislate safety into motorcycling. Cagers, of course, wonder why they have to wear seatbelts and buy cars with airbags and safety cages when motorcyclists don't even have to wear clothing, let alone helmets. Bikers rant that if they have to wear helmets, everybody else should, too. The fact is, once again, we're the least safe on the street. Even bicyclists have fewer deaths-per-mile than motorcyclists. In most statistical measures, we're more unsafe than pedestrians. Again, it's reasonable to fix the worst things first. We're high on the list of worst things; less than 1% of highway traffic and approximately 12% (nationally and internationally) of fatalities.

Motorcyclists see themselves differently than what the social mirror reflects. A writer for Motorcyclist Magazine in an article aptly titled "The Great Pretender," imagined, "Everyone--at every stoplight, at every rest area and every gas stop--will want to talk about your [Harley] and participate in, however vicariously, the collective Harley-Davidson fantasy." I'm probably a little sensitive to words like "everyone," "everybody," "no one," and other all-inclusive terms that abuse reality. It's possible that many downtown Milwaukee residents are continually impressed with every Harley rider they see, but I doubt that every one of them feels that passionately about an object that is no more remarkable than a Big Mac. A few years back, I went on a ride with a friend who owned a vintage Harley something-or-other. It was heavily customized, well-polished, and sparkled like something mostly covered in chrome should. We rode from the Cities to Duluth and back via Minnesota and Wisconsin two-lanes and country roads. Every time we stopped (fairly often occurrences because the Harley beat up my friend's back pretty badly), a few people wanted to ask about my Suzuki SV and a few people talked up the Harley. He was a little miffed at the people who were disinterested in his badass ride. He probably knew that he wouldn't be able to tell our friends that "everyone" wanted to wanted to talk about his Harley.

Some motorcyclists like to think that the public service they perform by being the most obnoxious vehicle the on the road should be rewarded with legislative protection. The fantastic fetish with special "failure to yield" protection seems to be a contradiction to the "I have a right to take risks" anti-helmet attitude. It seems to me that someone who is disinterested in wearing minimal protective gear ought to at least be able to face the fact that when bad things happen, they're going to be a lot worse if you add the risk of being naked to the elements and asphalt.

According to these characters, you can't improve motorcycle safety by protecting the organ that is most often damaged in a crash, but you can legislate better driver awareness by making a "failure to yield" violation a felony. You have to wonder if these folks have made investments in privately owned prisons.

Another example of the same logic comes in the battle to protect risky activities from added insurance costs. Some states have representatives whose claim to fame is creating bills to prevent insurance companies from "discriminating" against consumers who engage in risky activities. If the public is supposed to be subsidizing our risky habits, what value do we provide for them? A recent unsigned letter-writer punctuated his rant with "Cagers need to TOLERATE us, not the other way around." [His capitalization] Obviously, this is a modern definition of "need" The fact is, highway traffic in the US has no need of motorcycles at all. We contribute an insignificant portion of commuter traffic; especially in places like Minnesota. If motorcycles were banned from public highways it wouldn't inconvenience the public at all. In fact, if you take into account the noise, public menace, and congestion that "group rides" create, most of the public would be glad to see motorcycles vanish from public roads.

Motorcyclists do epitomize the American individual-over-society attitude. The idea that "my rights are more important than the needs and best interests of the overall society" is well demonstrated in American history. When times get tough, that attitude gets more careful scrutiny than during ordinary conditions. Change happens and, when it does, the unnecessary and detrimental activities of the privileged few often get swept into history. We should be careful to not be so useless that we end up as a historical footnote.

1 http://www.latimes.com/classified/automotive/highway1/la-hy-throttle11-2008jun11,0,3268856.story

#145 Back in My Day

All Rights Reserved © 2016 Thomas W. Day

When I was young enough to still have a little of that "magic and rubber" thing going for me, motorcycling was just about to hit its first economic snag (at least in my lifetime) in the early 1970's. As a Texas friend once told me, "Back then the moon wasn't born yet and the sun was a little tiny thing barely putting out enough light to read by on a summer afternoon." When I used this picture as my Facebook Profile Picture, I got more than a few inquiries asking "when, what, where, and how?"

So, for the when I was 26 years old, father of two, sole support of my family, going AGAT for the time with armored denim overalls, a Fury open face helmet with a snap-on face shield and Scott goggles, Justin roper gloves, Malcom Smith/High Point ISDT enduro boots, and a kidney belt. Today, all that sounds a lot like riding naked, but it was geared-up for the day. I was as fearless then as I would ever be. I drove a 1970's Ford E100 Econoline van an average of 100,000 miles a year covering a service territory from North Dakota to Kansas and Iowa to Colorado. The truck housed a work bench and cabinets holding at least three-quarter-ton of equipment and parts. If I had ever come to a sudden stop, I'd have been instantly crushed by all of that crap tearing loose and shifting forward in a contained avalanche. I was always late to every appointment because my boss couldn't say "no" to anyone, so he promised me in at least three places at once, 100-500 miles apart. My average speed in that truck had to have been close to 80mph because I kept the throttle pegged anytime the coast was clear. Motorcycle racing seemed pretty tame compared to my work week.

The "what" was a 1973 Rickman 125 ISDT enduro. The Rickman was my first real off-road motorcycle, a 1971 Kawasaki Big Horn 350 being the first half-ass off-road motorcycle I'd owned before that. If I were ever to want to "go back" and restore a motorcycle I once owned and loved, this bike would be it. I just pounded the snot out of that little Zundapp two-stroke and it kept ticking like a legendary battery bunny. I raced it in a half-dozen 100+ mile cross-country events, in several years of the Nebraska state motocross series, in a few enduros, and trail rode that bike almost every weekend for three years. When I wasn't riding it, my wife was, until I bought her a brand new 1974 Yamaha MX100. Even then we sometimes argued over who'd get to ride the Rickman. I had tweeked, modified, and engineered that motorcycle for me to the point that it was recognizable at almost any distance. If you knew me, you probably knew my motorcycle. From the solid bars to the custom-canted rear Boge Mulholland long travel shocks to the blueprinted engine ports to the hand formed and welded exhaust, my Rickman 125 fit me like a glove. It was the toughest motorcycle I've ever owned.

"Where" was central Nebraska, probably a little northeast of Palmer, Nebraska. Weekends, I "lived" on limited-access roads between Palmer, Archer, and Fullerton, Nebraska. If I'd been on a bigger bike, I might have been single-handedly responsible for the 1970's gas crisis. As it was, I could ride pretty much all weekend on a tank-full of premixed premium and a spare three-gallon gas can. North of Highway 92 and south of Highway 22, there were hundreds of sandy abandoned roads between the fence lines of ranch land and a little farming. In 1975, some friends and I hosted a 125 mile cross-country race on those tractor-trails where about 40 riders experienced what we took for granted: miles of amazing trails, often crossing the Loop River, but never a single paved road. Two years later, I'd moved to Fremont for my first engineering job and my racing days were over. Once I left driving that truck, racing a motorcycle seemed a little crazy for a guy with a family to support.

"How" is a little confusing. Mostly, I just tossed on my gear and gassed up the bike and snuck out of town (illegally, since the Rickman was unlicensed) via farm roads until I crossed 92 into the trails. Sometimes, the whole family came along and we made it into a regular outing, even camping for a night or two a few hundred yards off of the official farm-to-market roads. I'd built a bike trailer out of angle-iron, expanded metal, and an old car axle, that could hold 3 bikes, two forward and one rear-facing. We'd load up the Rickman, my wife's Yamaha MX100, and my Suzuki RL250 trials bike and ride from early morning until the sun went down. The kids would play at the campsite with the children of friends who joined us and it was one big biker family party.

When I'd first moved to Nebraska, I was introduced to a kid, Mike, with a Suzuki TS250 Enduro by an employee and one of our neighbors, Randy, had a Kawasaki F6 125 Enduro. Those two, eventually, took us to their favorite trails, camping sites, and riding hangouts. When I first started riding with Mike, he'd panic and run when we found a rancher or farmer parked on one of the trails. Since I knew we weren't doing anything wrong, I rode up to there trucks and introduced myself. Mike would always hang back, expecting something awful to happen. Eventually, I got to know a lot of the ranchers who lived in the area. When we came on cattle loose or a busted fence line, I'd play cowboy on the bike and chase the cattle back into the pasture, put up the gate, cobble the fence back together, and stop at the ranch house to let the owners know their cattle had escaped, again. After a couple of years, we got to know the ranchers well enough that they helped with our one and only event.

We were all kids, then. Kids with kids, in fact. Now, we're all old. Some of us are dead. The fence lines have all been brought together and those limited-access roads are no more. Not only can you not go back, you can't even go where we went.

MMM June 2016

Postscript: I was wrong. On the way to Colorado in the summer of 2016, on Nebraska US Highway 20, I discovered there are still some amazing, rarely traveled, "unmaintained roads" that are absolutely worthy of exploration. They aren't on any state map or your GPS, but they are still out there and if you see 'em, you gotta ride 'em.

#93 Appreciating Good Luck

All Rights Reserved © 2010 Thomas W. Day

At the end of my 2009 riding season, I moved my ailing, drooling dirt bike to the back of the garage and the V-Strom was parked between our cages; ready to ride on the last ice-free days of the year before and during the period when Minnesota drops us all into the deep frozen purgatory we call "winter." By late November, I am usually down to riding to work four out of five days and that ratio will drop rapidly until it's time to dump fuel preservative in the tank, hook up the battery tender, change the oil, and call it a year. Why, at this late date, I had an awareness provoking dream about motorcycling is baffling. If I needed some sort of wake-up call from my subconscious, you'd think I would have needed it at the beginning of the season when my skills are rusty and my body is creaking from hibernation disuse and I'm about to put on some serious motorcycling miles..

I dreamed I was in dense, slow-moving traffic and I'd been stuck in that groove for a long time. Finally, I broke out of the cager pack and got up to speed quickly. The road was flat, long, and a little boring. It felt a lot like west Texas or southwest Minnesota. In the dream, I was dreaming about something (an egg in an egg) other than being in the here-and-now and I found myself in a long declining radius curve at a speed above my comfort level and drifting into the center of the road, just crossing the center line. Suddenly, there was a pickup coming in the opposite direction. For a moment, I forgot what to do. I rolled off the gas and tried to steer harder back toward my lane. Obviously, that wasn't going to work. I woke up.

It was a dream, but a really life-like simulation of a real life scenario. The dream didn't include screeching tires, crunching noises, pain, butt-clenching fear, or any of the usual accommodations of this sort of event. It didn't need to. I awoke knowing exactly where it would have ended. A moment of poor concentration and bad timing and I'm facing several oncoming tons of iron at deadly speeds. After trying to regain the night for some actual rest, I gave up and crawled out of bed to think about what this dream was trying to tell me.

Motorcycling, skydiving, scuba diving, bicycling in traffic, and all of the things we do for adventure leave little room for daydreaming. You drift off for a moment, lost in the thought of something unrelated to the activity, and you could awake in time to see your life vanishing before your eyes. That's it. No chance to recover. No saving grace. No timeouts. You are literally here today, gone today. Smelling the flowers, feeling the wind between your ears, stargazing, listening to a favorite tune, and/or checking out who is checking you out and motorcycling do not go together. But everyone does it. If you ride often and long enough, you'll find yourself snapping back to reality and realizing that you've doped out for long enough to have caused a serious problem if your luck hadn't held.

At a family party, I listened to my son-in-law and his brother dismiss bicycle helmets because of their long list of bicycle crashes and their continuing existence. Their durability has been pretty impressive, but every one of their descriptions included a healthy dose of luck that kept them among the living and the mobile. An inch here or a pound there and they'd have been killed or disabled and a little protective gear goes a long ways when you need it. Every long life, and many short lives, are filled with moments where, without a bit of luck, a brain fart could have turned into a life-ending incident.

Luck is a grossly underrated commodity. I've been present at the beginning of a trio of businesses. One was very successful, one was a disaster, and one managed to sell itself to a sucker before the bottom fell out. Luck played a big part in all three end results. The right customer finding the company's products at the right time, and we were suddenly in the money. That same kind of customer finding the product the month after the company slid past its reserve funds and the momentum goes the other way; and no amount of talent, good intentions, or demand can stop the bankers from closing the doors.

Anyone who has ridden for a few dozen years and a few hundred thousand miles has experienced more than a reasonable share of luck. Those of us who have been less-than-brilliant in our riding habits or gear selection and can still walk, talk, and carry on a semi-intelligent conversation have been incredibly lucky. I can look back on my first decade of street riding and think of more than a dozen moments where a minor obstacle placed in an unlucky position would have ended my day, riding career, and most likely my life. Some people have survived because they were prepared for the worst-case scenario, because they had well-thought-out contingency plans that worked, and because they knew what risks they were taking and they knew what they were doing. Not me. When it comes to staying alive after doing something stupid, I have been as lucky as a trust fund brat. I may have turned luck into an art form. My Plan B is to keep driving at Plan A and hope for the best.

A friend tried to give me some credit by claiming "You make your own luck." I'm unconvinced. To an extent, I know he's right. On average, I'm pretty alert, pretty conscious of where I am, what my limits are, and what I can do with my bike. If I'm not an AGAT rider, I always ride reasonably well geared-up. If I give myself credit for being on top of my riding game for 99.9% of my time on the road, that means in my 400,000+ mile motorcycling career I've daydreamed away more than 400 miles. I can't give myself credit for 99.9% awareness and I don't want to make an accurate estimate of how many lucky miles I've traveled. The fact is, I owe good luck for a lot of my survivability and that's a little scary.

There is an old saying, "If you're not worried, you are not paying attention." Anytime you can't generate a little nervousness about being on the road, it might be worth considering how much luck you need to stay alive, just to keep your edge sharp. You can only make so much of your own luck and trusting luck for your survival is putting your fate to a test that you will probably fail. So, thank your lucky star or rabbit's foot or whatever charm you trust in, but pay attention, wear good gear, and stay nervous. “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” That goes for bad luck, too.

September 2010

POSTSCRIPT: Who knows? I posted this to the blog on 5/28/2013. If I'm still alive when it arrives in your mailbox, good for me. However, it's time for me to be honest about what inspired this rant. When my grandson and I made our Rocky mountain Tour, I did a pretty good job of staying focused, riding sanely, and being responsible with that precious cargo on the passenger seat. I did, though, have one moment when I entered a Black Hills corner slightly faster than idea and we found a half-dozen elk in the road right in the middle of that blind corner. It was luck that prevented a tragedy. I am ashamed and embarrassed to admit that, but it's true. And that's why I wrote an essay "Appereciating Good Luck."

What's Wrong with Motorcycle Safety Training

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Thomas W. Day

I had a rare opportunity to talk with one of the big thinkers in national motorcycle training over the 2013 VBR3 weekend; David Hough. David has written about safe motorcycle riding tactics and skills for almost 25 years, both through his book collection (Proficient Motorcycling: The Ultimate Guide to Riding Well, Street Strategies: A Survival Guide for Motorcyclists, More Proficient Motorcycling: Mastering the Ride, and The Good Rider) and his many magazine articles with the AMA's American Motorcyclist, Cycle World, Sound Rider, and Motorcycle Consumer News. He has also stepped out as a vocal critic of US motorcycle safety training in a series of articles almost a decade ago in Motorcycle Consumer News aggressively titled "The Fuss About Rider Training" and "Trouble in Rider Training." Oddly, he and I have been concerned about many of the same things: motorcycling's out-of-control fatality and injury rate, the lack of practical application for motorcycles, and the state of motorcycle safety training and licensing that contributes to our mortality and morbidity statistics. 
 
I've harped on the counter productivity of the AMA more than a few times, but David has an insider's view of that disorganization that is even more gloomy. Unlike me, David has a profound respect for Rod Dingman, the AMA chairman, and repeatedly called him "a brilliant man." From my distant outsider's view, I would have never guessed other than during that brief instance when Mr. Dingman was asked what issues most threaten motorcycling and he replied, "Noise, noise, and noise." Typically, the AMA promptly backed off of that moment of sanity and returned to the safer territory of representing the interests of motorcycle aftermarket vendors rather than motorcycle riders. Before that quick retreat, I almost joined the AMA for the first time since my racing years (30 years ago) when membership was required to be on the track. The Motorcycle Safety Foundation has a similar problem because the heart of the organization is barely more than a lobbying tool of the motorcycle manufacturers disguised as a motorcycle training business. With that as a core purpose, motorcycle safety takes a back seat in the long, long bus full of constituents that both organizations try to serve. 
 
One of the places Mr. Hough and I totally agree is that motorcycling is dangerous business. So dangerous that in the late 1970's, Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, and Kawasaki began to diversify their business models so that, when liability problems from motorcycling's terrible mortality records overran the profits derived, they could simply quit the business and go elsewhere. Honda and Suzuki build cars. Kawasaki and Yamaha build everything else. Motorcycles are just one division of a huge manufacturing business that will not be allowed to drag down the whole. Only the lame (economically and flexibility-wise) but politically-connected Harley-Davidson constituency has protected the rest of the industry from obsolescence . . .  for a while. Our time appears to be coming, though.

David's perspective on our share of highway mortality is considerably different than the already-awful numbers with which we're familiar. His take comes from the independent Motorcycle Safety Training Institute where the data is more directly related to what we care about; driver mortality, since motorcycles are primarily a single-passenger vehicle. That data says we are 20% of the driver vehicle deaths, nation-wide. The other place David and I agreed was that "registered vehicles" is useless information. While it may be a source of pride to industry promoters that motorcycles are 3% of registered vehicles, anyone who sets up a video camera on most any freeway, highway, or residential street will discover we are rarely 0.01% of total traffic. (Optimistic motorcycle promoters might claim we're as much as 1% of total traffic, but no reasonable observation over time would substantiate that.) With those numbers in mind, it becomes obvious that motorcycles are substantially more dangerous than any other vehicle on the road; several hundred, or thousand, times more dangerous. 
 
That last bit is at the core of what's wrong with motorcycle safety training. The first thing that needs to be admitted and recognized is that your mother was right, motorcycles can kill you. That old motorcyclist saying that "there are motorcyclists who have crashed and those who haven't crashed yet" is absolutely true and if you aren't bright enough to recognize that, you aren't aware enough to ride a motorcycle. This should be the thing we talk about most in the early stages of motorcycle training classes. The 1960's "Mechanized Death" videos ought to be revived and revitalized with even gorier crash pictures and up-to-date statistics. Students should be forced to look at the carnage and mayhem from motorcycle crashes and be made well aware that they are entering into an activity that can be lethal, crippling, or mindlessly saddening when we are responsible for the injury or death of a loved one who trusted us with their life on a motorcycle.

Contrary to the industry's advertisements, riding a motorcycle is not a gleefully liberating activity: motorcycling is a life-threatening, dangerous, high-risk activity that requires all of our concentration, ability, and constant practice just to minimize the risk to "really, really dangerous." Beyond  and because of all that, the casual motorcycle "bike-curious" should be discouraged. Anyone not actively and irreconcilably drawn to motorcycling because of the many great things about taking your life in your own hands and tempting fate on a balanced pair of wheels is pretending that motorcycles are a "lifestyle" and has no business on a bike of any sort; powered or otherwise.

In fact, anyone who hasn't already put a few thousand miles on a bicycle isn't interested enough in this kind of machinery to be a motorcyclist. If you are going to take your life in your own hands, you ought to at least care a little bit about staying alive. If you don't, buy a gun and take yourself out in America's Favorite Method. Don't make our dismal statistics even worse because your daddy didn't appreciate you or your mother liked your sister better. I am dead serious about this. Riding a motorcycle is a commitment in time and money that requires concentration, study, practice, and the kind of attitude you might expect from skydivers or rock climbers. We can lightly remind beginning riders that motorcycling is a "skill of your mind and eyes," but that's just a fraction of the reality.

It is also a physical skill of the sort that you need to practice until muscle memory overcomes natural reactions. You won't get that kind of result from an occasional weekend ride. Muscle memory requires practice. Martial arts experts say it requires 3,000-5,000 repetitions to ingrain a exercise.¹ For example, just practicing the single skill of emergency stopping could take you twenty or thirty hours of continuous practice. If you want to get to 25-30mph for your practice run, you'll need at least a 100 foot range for that attempt. Add 50 feet for the return loop and you have a 250 foot total practice loop. Five-thousand attempts later and you have traveled about 240 miles. If we assume you are stopping and returning to your start point quickly, you're still going to have a hard time managing a 10mph average. That would be 24 hours of continuous practice for a single skill.  Do you have that kind of dedication to becoming a good rider? If not, you are probably the wrong person to take on motorcycling.

¹ Motor Learning and Performance,  by Dr. Richard Schmidt and Dr. Craig A. Wrisberg and Performance and Motor Control And Learning by Dr. Richard Schmidt and Dr. Timothy D. Lee