Dodging a Bullet: Assumptions of Safety & Extreme Defensive Riding

We had a tough week at work.  A colleague, the kind of guy who you assume will outlast you because he does everything right, was killed last weekend in a motor vehicle 'accident'.  I put accident in quotes because it's not really an accident when the other driver blows through a stop sign while speeding and kills you and your wife (and himself).

You'd be right to say I'm a bit angry about this, but I'm also rather desperately looking for a reason for it.  That things can happen for no reason bothers me, but they do.  They did nothing wrong.  They were driving home after dropping their son off at university.  They were driving in an SUV with a five star safety rating.  I want there to be a reason (the guy who hit them was drunk, distracted, somehow incompetent), but I fear there is none; there is no reason why they are dead other than the most basic one: motor vehicles are inherently dangerous and a number of people who operate them aren't able to do so well enough to ensure your safety.

If we are going to let pretty much anyone strap themselves into a metal box powered by exploding gases and shoot themselves down roads at high speed, we have to accept that there is an inherent risk, no matter how capable they may be, of death.  Whenever you get into any kind of motor vehicle you accept this risk, or you don't get into the vehicle.  

It's generally understood that getting on a motorbike makes this calculus so obvious that people can't help but tell you (over and over) how dangerous it is.  Those same people will go out and buy five star rated SUVs thinking they've beaten the odds.  Those big vehicles mean you'll always come out of a minor incident, and if you find yourself in a lot of minor incidents then I suppose they make sense.  Better to spend the money on a bigger vehicle rather than making efforts to reduce your inability.  Driver training courses are significantly cheaper than operating a large vehicle, but pride prevents most people from considering them.  We end up in an arms race with the most distracted, incapable drivers operating larger and larger vehicles for their own safety.

I've been trying to suss out government safety statistics.  I have a feeling that people who have taken motorcycle safety training have fewer accidents than the general public.  The kind of defensive driving presented to new motorcycle riders is foreign to most drivers in cages who don't respect the dangerous position they are placing themselves in.  I suspect that there would be way fewer accidents if everyone had to ride a motorbike for the first year of their license.  Exposure gives you a healthy respect for the dangerous mechanics of operating a motor vehicle at high speed.

Were I in my mini-van with my wife and son, I would have probably driven into this disaster just as that colleague of mine did.  Were I on my motorbike, I'd approach that intersection with the same everyone-is-trying-to-kill-me attitude that I've adopted since my initial motorbike training course.  On a bike I'd have sworn at the idiot who ran the stop sign after braking hard to avoid him.  In an insulated motor vehicle, remote from the world around me, I'd have assumed I was safely following the laws of the road until it didn't matter any more.

Followup:  just to make things weirder, this past week I died in a car accident (same name, similar age, lived about 100kms west of me) and a guy who started teaching at the same time I did and is a year younger than me also passed.  Maybe this is just what getting older feels like, you see others around you dropping out of life and can't help but wonder why you're still here.

Squids

I came across this term today while looking up gear.  It was funny to see it tied to a major manufacturer of motorcycle gear at the top of a Google search.  Being a keen new motorcyclist I looked it up.  You can't look like you know anything about bikes if you don't know the lingo.  Fortunately Urban Dictionary had a thorough explanation.

One of the things that knocked me off getting a motorcycle was a 'squid' killing himself outside my work one day.  He was late and he threw his GSX-R through a just-turned-red light at better than twice the speed limit.  He went over the hood of a car turning left onto the road in front of him and died on impact with the road.  His helmet wasn't done up and flew off on first impact leaving him to skid down the road helmetless in a tshirt for sixty feet.  Seeing this all happen first hand put me off riding for a long time.

When I think now about motorcycling I think of it as a meditative and conscious activity. The people I've met doing it are the antithesis of squids.  Many seem to have a poet's soul and a technician's considered approach to their riding.  In many ways I feel like I've found my tribe when I talk to other motorcyclists.  That a squid did something that stupid twenty years ago and robbed me of what I'm enjoying now so much is a source of irritation.  These idiots have a disproportionate effect on how non-riders see motorcyclists.

That the internet gives this idiotic motorcycle subculture such a hard time makes me happy...

"Squid Shopping"

http://www.bikebandit.com/community/articles/how-not-to-be-a-squid

training ignorance & fear out of your bikecraft

I've been trying to find a comparison about the relative dangers of motorcycling that didn't devolve into anecdote and hyperbole, I couldn't find one on the internet (the home of anecdote and hyperbole).  After reading all sorts of people who knew someone who died on a motorbike, or were hit by a car 'that came out of nowhere' (cars don't come out of nowhere, they're very big and weigh thousands of pounds), I'm left shaking my head.

I know a guy who died on a motorcycle.  He was late for work and ran a red light at over 100km/hr and ended up going over the hood of a nice, old couple's car who were turning left into the lane in front of him.  Along with a pile of other people I ran across our work parking lot and got there just in time to see him die.  Not to speak ill of the dead but this guy was a yahoo, and his accident was all about his idiocy and had virtually nothing to do with his motorcycling.  Had he run the same light in a Mustang he would have ended up killing three people, two of them completely innocent, as it was he traumatized them. 

Online you'll find many anecdotes about how dangerous it is 'out there'.  There was the guy who went on at length about how a muffler fell off the car in front of him and he couldn't avoid it; he hasn't been back on a bike since.  I suppose that muffler came out of nowhere too.  I wonder how close behind the car buddy was when that muffler took him off his bike.

In many cases those ex-bikers say that training doesn't help, the only thing that does help is a cage of your own.  A life lived in fear is a life half lived, and there are a lot of people hiding in cages living half lives on the interwebs.  The emotionality and ignorance on display is distressing.  How can you do a thing well when your stories clearly demonstrate ignorance around how to operate a motorbike effectively?  I wonder if any of the people who knew that yahoo I worked with are the ones now saying how dangerous motorcycling is.

Extreme defensive driving, if you're not thinking about
all of this approaching an intersection,
you're not doing it right

Having taken some training I plan on taking much more because it really does help.  If you're serious about your bikecraft you will continue to seek out ways to improve, otherwise you aren't taking the task seriously.  Training isn't just about how to make a bike go, it's also some of the most intensive defensive driver training you'll ever experience, and I've done a lot of advanced driver training.  

Anyone who wants to pin the dangers of motorbiking on everyone else on the road feels helpless, training goes some way to mitigate that, though afterward you're never able to say, "it came out of nowhere!" or, "it wasn't my fault!"  When you finally get to the bottom of the extreme defensive mindset you need on a bike everything is your responsibility, including responding to the poor driving of other people.  If you're not willing or able to shoulder that responsibility you shouldn't be on a bike.

In addition to the dismissive attitude toward training, the other theme that develops as you read the anecdotal former rider or friend of a dead friend online is the anger.  People who have have a hate on for riding and are now evangelizing against it were angry when they rode, frequently telling stories of how they were shouting at four wheeled offenders, incredibly upset by being run off the road, angry at how poorly everyone else uses the road.  They've never shaken this anger, it's a part of who they are and they still spout it online.  You have to wonder how blind that anger made them when they rode.

Another benefit of training and then advanced training is that rather than approach a situation with an emotive response, you tend to be clinical.  Anyone who has taken martial arts understands how this works.  The untrained fight in ignorance, throwing haymakers and making a wondrous mess of it all.  They typically attempt to overcome their ignorance and inexperience by fighting emotionally.  A true student of anything is clinical because they approach their craft with an eye to constant improvement.  They don't thrash around in anger, they analyze and improve.  An emotional mindset seldom leads to skills improvement.

The angry biker is a dilettante, someone posing, looking for social status with no interest in improving their bikecraft.  You can't learn if you're angry.

When riding a motorcycle in an angry, blaming way you are attempting to cover your ignorance with loud emotionality.  Don't be ignorant and upset, become skilled and clinical, and always have an eye toward improving your craft.  Riding a motorcycle well is a deeply immersive experience, you're doing a difficult, dangerous thing, and doing it well should be a great source of pride.  When you're lost in your bikecraft you are attentive, meditative, alert and alive in the truest sense of the word.  I don't imagine any of the naysayers on the internet care, but this is an important place to find yourself.

 All rights reserved by JamesAddis

Interweb hyperbole... 

http://www.straight.com/life/motorcycle-safety-study-has-some-eye-openers

http://ridingsafely.com/ridingsafely1.html

http://ask.metafilter.com/44065/Exactly-how-dangerous-are-motorcycles

http://motorcycleaccidentlawyerpa.com/motorcycle-vs-car-accident-statistics/

http://www.nerdgraph.com/motorcycles-vs-cars-road-safety/

http://rideapart.com/2013/12/things-more-dangerous-than-riding-a-motorcycle/

Do bikers ignore reality?

I recently saw this on the Science Channel's Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman.  I really enjoy the show, but I've gotta call you on this one Morgan.

Let's look at some of the statistics given:

For the UK:  motorcycles make up less than 1% of motor vehicles on the road but they are 14% of total deaths/serious injuries. 

Considering that bikers have no cage around them to mitigate their own poor driving habits I'm surprised that they are only 14% of serious accidents.  There is no doubt that if in an accident bikers are more likely to be injured; bikes don't have fender benders.  

Riding well demands a level of defensive awareness foreign to most drivers.  A good rider is attentive to the threats around them and deeply engaged in the operation of their vehicle beyond what most people are capable of.  The only time I came close to that level of intensity driving was in a shifter cart in Japan and during track training at Shannonville.  Day to day driving is a simple, safer operation by comparison, but does that mean it's better?

A motorbike rider doesn't get on a bike to test fate or ignore statistics, bikers know how dangerous what they are doing is.  There is a difference between doing something that is bad for you (smoking, etc) and developing a complex skill in a challenging environment.  Like other athletes or sportsmen, the motorcyclist is developing their craft in an unforgiving environment.  To say that they are ignoring the reality of statistics is reduction to the point of absurdity.  Not to mention that statistics themselves aren't reality, but a vague mathematical representation of it.  If there is a reality it isn't to be found in a human abstraction.

Is biking more dangerous?  No doubt, but this reality episode is choosing to selectively chose their realities.  Chasing all motorcyclists onto four wheels because it's safer isn't really safer.  Why don't they take into account how dangerous it is to drive a massive SUV that is actively destroying the ecosystem we live in with its atrocious waste of resources?  Or mention the political and financial instability caused by big oil and OPEC?  If there were less people driving around in three ton tanks there would be fewer severe accidents.  You can do a lot more damage in a 5000 lb vehicle doing eighty miles per hour than you could ever do on a bike.  The reductive reality given in the show seems designed to cater to mediocrity.

If we want to be really Malthusian about it, making sure everyone survives every accident no matter how many they cause might appeal to SUV drivers, but for the rest of us keeping them alive to do it again (and again) is a disaster.  

Biking demands competence and punishes you harshly for not having it.  If you want mediocrity go drive a car, if you want incompetence go drive as big a vehicle as you can find.  You can hit as many things as you want and if you have enough money, you can burn a hole in the world while doing it in a massive SUV that pretty much guarantees your safety.

US stats: motorcyclists are 37x more likely to die in a crash

This is an exceptionally worthless statistic, of course you're more likely to die in an accident if you're on a bike.  If you were in a motor vehicle collision would you rather be on a motorcycle or in a Smartcar, a Hummer or a Sherman tank?  That tank would offer you the greatest level of protection if you were in an accident, but would be cripplingly wasteful.

Once again, there are other degrees of damage being done in the complex activity of human beings burning fossil fuels to transport themselves.  This past summer I did about four thousand kilometers on the bike.  I didn't die, I didn't come close to having an accident and I did it all at about 60mpg.  That's a reality I'm not ignoring.

Why do people continue to take this risk?

If reality is what we think it is I want mine to reward competence and punish incompetence.  

I don't believe that longevity is the point of human existence, I believe that we should all seek to improve ourselves by any means available, even and especially if that means putting ourselves at risk in order to do so.

I think we should strive to improve ourselves through the activities that we pursue and that should involve putting some aspect of yourself on the line in order to make the feedback meaningful.  Learning that matters can only be gained through sacrifice and risk.

I'm not ignoring reality when I get on a bike, I'm facing it in a way that most cage drivers never will.