Start Seeing Unicorns

All Rights Reserved © 2014 Thomas W. Day

We're turning over a new leaf in our family. I hate driving four-wheel vehicles and after a fairly miserable several months stuck as the sole driver of our winter excursion in an RV, I am giving up driving our family car as much as possible. My wife, on the other hand, gets car sick when she isn't driving, can't read a map, program a GPS, or provide useful directions as a passenger and claims to actually like driving. After 46 years of being the family primary driver, we're swapping roles. She is a perfectly fine driver with good skills, reasonably good vision, and decent judgment. I hate driving and am prone to zoning out after a few minutes behind the wheel.

So, we're on the way to visit our daughter's family in Dinkytown on a warm April evening. My designated driver is about to turn left on Hennepin Avenue across two opposite direction lanes after a barrage of vehicles finally created a slot. She's focused on the cars coming toward us, about 100 yards away. I saw a motorcyclist in the far lane and provided a slightly-over-the-top warning (not quite a shout) before she turned into his path. She stopped safely and the completely undressed kid on the black motorcycle, wearing black clothing (without a stitch of protective gear), and who'd cleverly disabled his daytime headlight shook his finger at us as some kind of warning. As usual, he hadn't made even the slightest effort to remove himself from any aspect of the near-crash: no braking, no evasive maneuver, no horn honking, headlight flashing, or even a shout. Just a limp finger-wagging. Loud pipes wouldn't have done him any good, since they're only good for warning people behind the motorcycle that a noisy asshole is in front of them. 

This is where the "Start Seeing Unicorns" comes in. Delusional motorcyclists and safety bureaucrats imagine that if enough propaganda and severe enough penalties are applied, motorcycles will magically become visible to drivers who have real threats to worry about. Not only do most motorcyclists dress to be invisible, but at 0.001-0.01% of total traffic on any given perfect-for-motorcycling day, we're about as common a sight as unicorns. Nobody but little girls who watch too much television looks for unicorns because they are a statistical unlikelihood. The same logic applies to motorcyclists, with only a minimally greater chance of a sighting. Asking other road-users to watch for us when we are rarely present and don't make the slightest effort to be seen or rescue ourselves is an exercise in hubris. Your mother may have told you that you are the center of the universe, but no one else on the road has heard of you and, worse, probably won't notice you until you are bouncing off of their vehicle or sliding down the highway on your bloody ass. 

Earlier that day, I met a guy who bragged that he'd crashed 18 times before he quit riding a few years ago. His last crash was into a house, after an uncontrolled wheelie and jumping a curb and tearing through a garden. He crashed into a house. He admitted that "all of my accidents were my fault, except one." Speeding, lousy cornering technique, poor judgment, and an irrational belief in his indestructibility all were to blame for all but one crash. The one that he claimed wasn't his fault was because a woman "pulled out in front of me." Based on his other experiences and my own later the same day, I suspect that blaming the one crash on someone else misses the point of that one experience. Like the rider who narrowly escaped becoming a hood ornament on our car, this ex-rider clearly needed some decent skills, a dose of common sense, and protective gear.

In fact, too many people supposedly involved in motorcycle safety issues argue the nutty fallacy that motorcyclists are pitiful victims. For example, a University of South Florida's Center for Urban Transportation Research study found, "that 60 percent of the time motorists in other vehicles are at fault when they collide with motorcycles." I'd love to see where that data came from, in detail. Since 34-50% of fatal motorcycle crashes are single vehicle events, it's pretty obvious that we can't even deal with the freakin' road, let alone traffic. What kind of fool would believe that a group of people who are totally responsible for killing themselves half of the time are innocent victims during the other half, when traffic is involved? Seriously? We can't ride well enough to keep from flinging ourselves into the trees on a solitary road but we suddenly become more competent in heavy traffic? I'm not buying that for a second. And my experience on motorcycles for nearly three-quarters-of-a-million miles totally contradicts that wishful thinking. Every one of the motorcycle fatalities I've seen were either completely the motorcyclists' fault or would have prevented with the tiniest bit of riding skill and reasonable protective gear.

Instead of wishing and hoping that drivers will start watching out for us and compensate for our invisibility and mediocre skills, I think giving up on that dream and getting on with learning how to ride competently would be a good start toward reducing motorcycle crashes. If a rider is serious about staying jelly side up, becoming as visible as possible, and  getting real about the slim chance that anyone will be looking out for us while they are worried about giant trucks, distracted bozos in oversized pickups and SUVs, and their own distractions is absolutely necessary. The whacked idea that people in cages are going to save us from ourselves is delusional, arrogant, and foolish. In 2013, motorcyclists accounted for 15% of national highway deaths. There is no justification on this planet for that massively disproportionate contribution the the estimated $228 BILLION in "societal cost of crashes." At some point, the country is going to decide to either make motorcyclists prove their competence before obtaining a license, wear reasonable protective gear, or get the hell off of the public's roads.

I'm not saying motorcyclists need to be paranoid and tell themselves "they're all out to get me." We aren't that important or interesting. They don't even know we are on the road because we are not a serious threat. You could drive most mid-sized 4-wheel drive pickups over the whole Minnesota contingent of biker gangsters' toys and still make it to the store for bread, milk, and cookies and back home before you worried about scraping the biker gunk off of your bumper. Not being a threat is much worse than being a potential enemy. You can sort of guess what someone who's out to get you might do next. If your opponent doesn't even recognize your existence, there are an infinite number of awful things they might do completely unaware of you and your motorcycle. If that doesn't make you want to gear up and put your riding skills and motorcycle in order, you do not belong on a motorcycle.

#83 The Motorcycling Community

All Rights Reserved © 2007 Thomas W. Day

By the time this reaches publication, I will have completed my four-year term on the Minnesota Governor's Motorcycle Safety Advisory Committee (MMSAC). It was an interesting and educational opportunity: my first in government, my first attempt to labor under Robert's Rules since high school, and my first experience hanging out with a substantial group of motorcyclists for more than the few minutes it usually takes for me to fill up a gas tank. I'm not much of a social being. I'm well aware of the fact that people are the "most dangerous animal" and the older I get the less likely I am to put myself in harm's way. On top of that, I firmly believe in the proverb, "Meetings: all of us are dumber than any of us." 

In the current segregated and polarized political climate, I didn't expect to get much done in this committee and I didn't disappoint myself. I hoped to represent the tiny minority of motorcyclists who don't wear patches, tattoo motorcycle brand names on their butts, belong to gangs or clubs or special interest groups, who regard motorcycles as a practical means of daily transportation, who care about the environment and our communities, and the even smaller group of bikers who try to teach motorcycle safety to new riders. I like math and science and I hoped to introduce a little of each into the suggestions that the committee made to the Governor and the Department of Public Safety. In the end, we managed some small accomplishments, chewed up a lot of time and energy, and I learned some things about motorcyclists as a "community."

The biggest thing I learned is that we aren't much of a community. Not many of us have similar opinions about motorcycles, transportation, safety, or government. In this small, hand-picked assembly of motorcyclists, I found fewer than three or four with whom I agreed; on practically any issue. For a change, I wasn't the only person in this boat. In conversations after meetings, it was common for each of us to feel that our viewpoints were under-represented in the committee. 

Predictably, the ABATE crowd is well (or over) represented in this political arena and they are more uniform in their positions than were the rest of the members. There was a small contingent of motorcycle safety instructors (including me) who were mildly in agreement on a few issues. There is an even smaller sample of non-special-interested motorcyclists who were all over the place, depending on the issue at hand. I think everyone was well-intentioned and committed to promoting motorcycling and protecting motorcyclists. Politics is about compromise and motorcyclists may be less able to make compromises than most people. I suspect I am a particularly good example of that disability.

From my perspective, all of the fine ideas for promoting motorcycle safety are hampered by the microscopic contribution motorcycles make to traffic. It's hard to imagine a "Start Seeing Motorcycles" campaign having much effect when a motorcycle is spotted on our highways barely more often than unicorns or flying pigs. To me, the best thing that can be done to improve on motorcycle safety would be for more motorcycles to be on the road, generating attention, reducing congestion, and providing justification for our vehicle of choice. However, if we fill the roadways with unskilled riders, our crash statistics are going to go through the roof. To me, this makes a strong argument for tougher licensing standards and more training requirements. To the ABATE crowd, my conclusions sound like more "government interference." I'm probably more fond of the consequences of the Darwin Effect than most, but I'm convinced that most people don't tolerate high death rates as well as ZPG (Zero Population Growth) advocates like me.

I've heard rider complaints about my stance on helmets, motorcycle noise, and motorcyclists' testosterone-driven hooligan tendencies. Their argument is that we need to present a "unified front" in promoting motorcycling; that any negative statements about motorcycling from motorcyclists is motorcycling treason. I know where that tactical concept comes from, it has been a successful political strategy for at least one political party, but I don't think it will work with motorcyclists. There are as many of us who don't like parades as there are those who only ride in miles-long displays of garage candy. There are motorcyclists who believe that hooligan riding tactics, loud exhausts, and high death rates will damage the future (the near future) of motorcycling. There are riders who wouldn't ride if motorcycling meant that they had to be courteous, quiet, and prudent. Motorcyclists are a "community" that defies group-ness. Participation in the MMSAC made that clear to me. 

I've said this before, but people who ask "why can't we all just get along" and demand that we "present a common front" are really asking everyone to line up behind them. I didn't run into any of that in the MMSAC group. No one demanded that the rest of us conform to their viewpoint or pretended that dire consequences would follow if we didn't step into line.

Among this small community of riders, there was an understanding that we are representing an insanely diverse population. What the garage candy crowd wants for motorcycling is almost diametrically opposed to what daily commuters want. The daily commuting crowd ranges from folks who oppose helmets and protective gear to folks who gear up, every morning, like they are heading off to the race track. Commuters ride bikes that vary from race-ready sport bikes to leather-and-chrome cruisers, from the latest and greatest bikes on the market to rat bikes that leak fluids that were never intended for use in internal combustion motors. Sport bikers don't see safety, licensing, and training issues in the same light as does the cruiser crowd. Touring bikers are a whole 'nother special motorcycling interest that has as many dissimilarities, among that narrow group, as similarities.

Our opinions on motorcycle noise sway from "loud pipes save lives" to "loud pipes cost rights." Our perspectives on the "value" of our vehicle spreads between vehicles that are economical, ecologically responsible, practical, and responsible (i.e. "tree-hugging") to bikes that are loud, emissions-spewing, recreational-use only, and more expensive than space travel (tree-hating?). Where is the middle ground between those opinions?

In the MMSAC, I met MSF instructors who believe that helmets do not contribute anything valuable to motorcycle safety and at least one fair-weather rider who wouldn't leave home without his lid. I worked with folks who are often derided as "safety pussies" because of their positions on helmets and riding gear and met a few of the folks who do the deriding. I continued and, hopefully, expanded my friendship with ABATE's mortal enemy, Pat Hahn, and the man who aids and abets Patrick as his boss, Bill Schaffer. My membership in the MMSAC presented opportunities for some spirited and interesting conversations with an ABATE officer who is always a source of insight and counter-opinions, who will remain unnamed to protect his good relationships inside his "crowd."

In all, I don't think I could find a wider collection of opinions, intellects, and skills in any portion of humanity than in the "motorcyclist community." However, I fail to recognize many symptoms of "community" or "group-think" in our group. Presenting a motorcycling unified front seems to me to be a pipedream. I think the best we can hope for is to do as little damage to our image with the majority of road users and trust that is enough to allow continued use of the highways.

August 2009

Politically Incorrectness

Ah, political correctness:. saying what shouldn't be said, calling things what they are, expecting common sense in a world that has made sense about as common as unicorns. A friend recently sent me a definition of "political correctness" that included the phrase "a doctrine . . . that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end." (Credited on the WWW to a student from Texas A&M, the University of Melbourne, and several other institutions, including the US Army.) The rest of this definition included the delusion that political correctness is a property of liberals and that a minority is vested in this delusion, so I'm less than impressed with the whole. The part I quoted, however, seems pretty true.

My wife and I are deemed politically incorrect by our daughters and their husbands. One family is largely liberal and the other is very conservative. We're as incorrect to one as the other. Hence comes a portion of my belief that political correctness is one of those perspectives that depends on the viewer. Rush Limbaugh and his cronies have just as many untouchable subjects as do the most radical of the left, those topics are just found in different areas. In other words, both groups display typical "common sense" in their touchiness.

In a discussion about gayness, one of my daughters suggested that "no one" would "choose to be outcast" by a substantial portion of society. I'm not disputing the biological aspects of gayness, but I suspect (and always have) there there is a portion of nurture involved in most human qualities and decisions. Nature, while powerful, doesn't have much more power than does nurture. I know that's politically incorrect, but I'm too old to care.

In my eyes, this politically correct position was particularly funny coming from a woman who shaved her head (when not dying it a variety of florescent colors), spiked her nose, ears, and other body parts with all sorts of odd sharp objects, tattooed herself with a ball point pen, and did everything she could to make herself as strange looking as possible from age 15 until her early 20's. Knowing my own history as a 60's long-haired hippy freak, you'd have thought some aspect of discontinuity might have struck her during this proclamation.

In our speck of American culture, motorcyclists are packed with these sorts of intentional social rejects. The most obvious is the Harley gangbanger crowd. The majority of society looks at these folks as outcasts, even other motorcyclists. Why anyone would want to dress-up like characters out of a 1950's B-movie escapes me, but a substantial portion of the wanna-be crowd is really into looking like society's unwashed and unwanted and unemployed. There must be a strong call to those who can't find acceptance in polite company to make a sincere effort to find a home wherever they can. If that's true for punks and bikers, I can't help suspect it might be true for other outcast micro-cultures.

Once a group finds enough members to create critical mass, that group begins campaigning everyone else to grant their different-ness with proper respect. If respect isn't possible, fear seems to suffice. A group can leverage fear in a variety of ways: threatening legal action, threatening popular condemnation, or with violence. Fear rarely turns into respect, regardless of the tactic, and many of these groups continue to alienate the majority without a thought for the fact that fear is closely related to hate. Generating hate usually backfires.

The gangbanger motorcyclist attitude is creating that sort of back-pressure for motorcycling in general. In promoting their threatening, law-disobeying lifestyle, air and noise polluting "rights," and a lousy safety record on public roads, Harley's corporate image and the company's fans are spilling over into motorcycling in general. We're becoming as easy a bad guy stereotype as the Mob, IRS, FBI, CIA, and Arab terrorists. When an author or screenwriter wants to whip out an easy character to hate, a biker is as likely to come to mind as is any other culturally negative stereotype. I just finished John Stanford's Storm Prey and, for the 4th time in this 20-book series, bikers are among the bad guys. Stanford doesn't even have to work to create believable, crazy-vicious, stupid motorcycle characters. They just flow from the page without a hint of lost credibility. If you know these guys in real life, you know they are just as sociopathic and worthless as Stanford draws them.

In the not-so-long-run, this connection to the majority or motorcyclists is going to cost motorcycling a lot of rights and privileges. Our lame "representative," the AMA, is trying to handle this turd by what it hopes is the clean end. But as long as motorcyclists allow bikers to cling to some corner of "respectable motorcyclists" we're all getting tarred with a black leather brush. I'm starting to think that motorcycle commuters and touring riders need their own organization, one that seperates itself from the cruiser crowd and returns to Honda's successful "you meet the nicest people" sort of image-making. The boys in bandannas and leather can whine about how they are politically incorrectly seen as gangsters and bums, but the rest of us should serious consider what linking our means of transportation to their gangbanger activity does to/for motorcycling.

Think about it.

#94 Maybe It's Not for You

All Rights Reserved © 2009 Thomas W. Day

"I put my SV up for sale. My wife and I had a scare on a country road and I decided I'd rather be around or, at least, not in a wheel chair when I have kids. And I realize I'm talking to a great example of the fact that riding can be safe, but it's the things beyond my control that scare me. I have someone stopping by tomorrow to look at it."

So ends the motorcycling adventure of a young man. I meet the 45-60 year old version of this guy in almost every motorcycle class I teach. The "born again" empty nester, recently divorced Baby Boomers who decided they missed something the first time around and, now, want to be a motorcyclist. Honestly, I think the younger guy's odds of survival are better than the older version. We talk about motorcycling being a skill of the eyes and mind, but the fact is it is more than a bit physical and both the eyes and the mind are sharper in youth. It's possible that the improved wisdom of age might compensate for decaying senses and strengths, but I suspect a person whose judgment has substantially improved with age wouldn't consider taking up motorcycling at 55.

As far as the bit about giving up motorcycling out of fear of "things beyond your control," practically everything in life is beyond control. "Safe" is a relative thing. I'm no "great example," either. In my 45 years on motorcycles and 50+ years on bicycles, I've been incompetent, skilled, lucky, paranoid, cautious, and careless. I've busted bones and torn muscles and ligaments on bicycles and motorcycles and basketball courts and working around my house. People break their necks in the shower or on their doorstep. When it ends, life is over in a moment.

There are things you can do to improve your odds, but if riding a motorcycle doesn't push your buttons strongly enough to want to go that route, it's probably not worth the effort. Motorcycling is not for everyone, as much as the motorcycle manufacturers would like you to think it is.

On a short Wisconsin vacation trip with my wife, I watched people on an elephant ride in Baraboo cling obediently to the safety rail of their saddle. "Sir, keep both hands on the safety rail at all times," lectured the girl on the megaphone as a forty-something dad sat, bored out of his skull, at the back of his clan while the elephant trudged down the fenced path. Insurance companies and our national avoidance of personal responsibility has reduced practically every activity to a Big Mommy-sheltered endeavor that would sedate Martha Stewart. Anyone who could fall out of a waddling elephant, fenced into a saddle and pinned by four other harnessed passengers, should not be allowed to reproduce. The gene pool should rejoice if such a person managed to crawl out of that entrapment and fall under the ponderous feet of an elephant.

Motorcycling isn't like that. You can armor up, take a safety course ten times a summer, plug along with traffic whizzing by you as if you were in a molasses-based dimension, and you can still get killed or maimed if your luck doesn't hold. Two wheels are unstable and motorcycles are as rare an occurrence in traffic as unicorns. A tire blows, a wheel bearing seizes, a cager is distracted by a life-changing text message, a tree falls in front of you, and down you go. The reason people ride motorcycles is to get away from the bitch telling us to hang on to the handrails.

Bertrand Russell said, "A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short."

Not being bright enough to know that motorcycles are dangerous isn't an improvement from being swarmed in a web of caution. Get on a bicycle in your shorts and flip-flops and take a spill at 5mph, just to test the road rash worthiness of your skin. Crashing sucks and can kill you in full gear. In your birthday suit you're guaranteed to be hamburger. Personally, I've managed to find plenty of adventure inside my helmet and armored gear. You might as well shoot me now as drag me onto that damn elephant, though.

October 2010

Another Lane Splitting Argument

Not gonna happen here, but it should:


While lane splitting is practical, necessary, economical, reasonable and safe, there aren't enough motorcycles on the road in the US (even CA or the rest of the west coast) to make legislation worthwhile. Like the foolish "Start Seeing Motorcycles" campaign, there needs to be a lot more motorcycles on the road before anyone will care about making motorcycle commuting more efficient. Who cares how easy and efficient it could be for people commuting on unicorns or Pegasus? There is no such thing, so passing laws to make life easier for imaginary transportation systems is silly. Likewise, with 0.001% of the traffic on the road being motorcycles, who cares if we get there faster?

I disagree with their position on riding with a finger or two on the front brake. Braking is the right response only occasionally and can be catastrophically the wrong move more often than not. Preparing yourself for the wrong move with poor technique is a dumb idea.

Ironic, Ain't It?

"There’s a new special license plate promoting motorcycle safety available starting today! ABATE of Minnesota designed and sponsored the new motorcycle awareness license plate. The plates cost $10 and there is an annual $10 contribution that will go toward motorcycle safety education and training programs.

Plates are available for purchase at deputy registrar offices: http://ow.ly/D0KB30huk1R"

That bastion of anti-helmet, anti-government, anti-anything that might make motorcycling safer and more responsible, ABATE, convinced the dimwitted Minnesota legislature to create a "Start Seeing Motorcycles" (and Unicorns) special license plate and the character on the plate could not look less like an ABATE member.

Assigning Blame, Taking Responsibility

A blast from my past called this weekend, wanting to talk about his summer’s misfortunes. We’ll call him “P” to protect his ego and our relationship. In early August (2019), P was sailing down a country two-lane, minding his own business, and assuming that Minnesota country roads are, somehow, safer than urban freeways and byways. (Statistics consistently demonstrate that this is a motorcyclists’ delusion. In 2018, for example,31 of 57 or 54% of the state’s motorcycle fatalities were in areas with populations under 10,000 and the majority, 22, were in rural, unpopulated areas. 913 motorcyclists were injured that year and 49% of that total were injured on those same low population roads.) 2 motorcyclists were killed and 102 were injured in the state’s over-250,000 cities; the Twin Cities, in fact. P, oblivious to the hazard of country roads, was riding somewhere between 55 and 65mph on a sparsely-populated stretch of the road, when a pickup pulled into his lane, partially shielded by a downed tree next to the driveway the pickup was exiting from. Mayhem resulted and P ended up with a multitudinous-fractured femur, a broken back, and a separated shoulder.

Fortunately for P, he was wearing actual motorcycle gear including a full-face helmet and armored jacket. As he said, “I didn’t spill a drop of blood.” Unfortunately for P, he has a long recovery ahead of him and he is not fond of physical therapy. He’s been here before. Several year ago, he was riding in fairly congested traffic and, bored with the pace of movement, he was occupied trying to read the call sign of a passing small airplane when he struck the stopped car in front of him. He flew over the car and, while he was airborne, he decided, “I don’t want to hear Tom lecturing me about not wearing a helmet while I recover from this” and he shielded his head with his arms just before tumbling into a ditch. The end result of that crash was a severely massacred pelvis from which he has yet to fully recover. To his credit, P took total responsibility for both that crash and his less-than-complete recovery. He also started wearing a full-face helmet and, at least, an armored jacket when he rode. A life-long Harley guy with a long history of spectacular crashes, the bike he crashed on the last two times was a big BMW touring bike.

I’ve ridden with P, maybe twice, but definitely once. We met at a small town a few miles from his place, for a Fourth of July fireworks show. Afterwards, for whatever reason, we decided to go back to his house before I headed back home. Both of our spouses were riding passenger on that trip. P immediately took off in the dark, on familiar country roads, putting some distance between us. I made a half-hearted effort to keep him in sight, but I do not ride fast, ever, with a passenger and since I knew where we were going I was not particularly upset to make most of the trip “unguided.” Since then, he’s often reminded me of that incident and of the fact that he was a “lot faster” than me on those mostly-gravel country roads. I do my racing, when I do it, on closed courses and I am never impressed with people who imagine racing on public roads is something to brag about. My wife would make short work of me if I ever play-raced with her on the bike.

Like many motorcyclists and bikers, P’s problem is that he imagines that he is seen, because he is a big guy riding a “big bike.”  While P’s BMW didn’t have loud pipes, P has ridden bikes with minimal muffling for most of his life and always deluded himself into thinking physics is his friend when it comes to sound and defensive riding, he suffers the false idea that people are looking for motorcycles. Even in a fairly motorcycle-friendly state like Minnesota, there aren’t enough motorcycles on the road any given day for a typical cager to have any reason to be watching for them. When we don’t amount to 0.001% of the total traffic on good days, asking drivers to “Start Looking for Motorcycles” is as silly as asking them to watch out for unicorns. Bicycles, pedestrians, old men on power wheelchairs, and kids on tricycles are far more likely things to be looking out for than motorcycles; especially motorcycles approaching a blind intersection (or driveway) at 60-65mph.

This is exactly the kind of situation where motorcyclists have to be watching out for everyone else. Even if, as in P’s case, the cager gets the blame for the crash, P might still be crippled-for-life or dead . . . but in the right. The price for being right is higher than I want to pay. To be clear, I am not afraid of being dead, but I practically terrified of being maimed and crippled. During the brief period when the MSF’s Basic Rider Course actually talked about risk management, I used to tell my motorcycle students that any crash short of a tree falling on you or a tornado blowing you to Kansas was the motorcyclist’s fault for not anticipating and avoiding the situation. If you think everyone else is looking out for, or responsible for, your safety, you will be disappointed and, probably, hurt or killed.