Why ride safely? Riding is fun, a feeling of being free. It is a cheap way to travel and a great way to travel. If you enjoy something, don’t you want to keep doing it? This web site helps you do just that. If you don’t ride safely, you wont ride long. The experience of riding is life incarnate, being in the here and now. Learning to ride a motorcycle safely is the best training for life itself.
Who am I?
I grew up in New Zealand and joined the NZ Army as a psychologist but retired as a computer systems analyst. I then did a PhD and taught the “humanizing” of technology at a US University. One son rode for a while, then decided he could kill himself and stopped. One daughter considered riding in the US, but didn’t, as it seemed against the social grain. My wife trusts me enough to ride on the back, but nowadays prefers the comfort of my car, which is in practice her car. Without a motorcycle, I would need two cars and my garage only fits one.
My Credentials
My credentials to write this site are having ridden motorcycles for over forty years and still doing it. When I was young all my friends rode bikes, but one by one they gave up from fear or injury. With motorcycles, many begin but few continue. Sounds simple right, just keep riding? Doing it for a lifetime is not so simple! Being still alive is my main credential.
People say motorcycles are inherently dangerous. In the US, they are 2% of vehicles but 5% of fatalities. In 2004, 4,008 motorcycle riders died compared to 37,304 car occupants, which per vehicle is about 30 times more. But consider another statistic. I have ridden for forty years not only without dying but without serious accident. And not just on sunny days but in all sorts of conditions: bad weather, busy traffic, night times, and over bad roads. You might say that’s just one case, but its not. Every ride is a thousand events and every year is a thousand rides. If riding is inherently dangerous, my number should have been up long ago. And I am not alone. So I say, riding is not dangerous unless you make it so. This site, for what it is worth, represents a lifetime of motorcycle experiences. In my experience, riding a motorcycle safely is possible.
The ideas written here are based on life, but strange as it seems, I could not just write down what I “knew”. Experienced riders sometimes move left or right, or change lanes, or slow down or speed up. Why? To find out I had to actually ride, and then, at that moment, think “Why did I do that?” I had to “translate” from actions to words, which was like translating from one language to another. When you read this site, you have to translate the other way. The words have no value unless you put them into practice.
