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Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Motorcycles and Safety
I have a long…ish commute every day. Okay, it’s not that long, but it’s boring and I don’t like driving it. It’s about 30 miles away, and it can take me anywhere from half an hour to forty-five minutes to get to work depending on how traffic is treating me on a given day. It seems like at least once a week, sometimes as often as once every day I drive to work, there’s some motorcyclist doing something… stupid.
Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing whatsoever about motorcycles. I’m happy for people who enjoy riding them even though I have absolutely no interest in riding one myself. It isn’t people who ride motorcycles in general I have problems with.
The ones who are troublesome are the ones who think they own the road. Just like anyone in a car who thinks that they’re more important than everyone else on the road, the people on bikes are creating dangerous situations as I try to safely drive to work. Last week, I saw someone on a bike with no helmet or any other protective gear that I could spot. This isn’t too unusual, and I wouldn’t really make a big deal of it if he had been riding safely and respectfully of the other people on the highway. He wasn’t, though. He decided he didn’t want to deal with the traffic which had slowed to about 5 mph below the speed limit (really slow, right?). He zoomed into the emergency lane and drove down it for a good half mile, then wove in and out of the cars until I couldn’t see him anymore. I presume his behavior continued as he drove down. I saw him drive in between two cars who were driving in their own lanes. Nobody in this scenario was doing anything out of the ordinary – just this guy on a motorcycle decided he had more important places to be and used his bike to his advantage.
That’s just one example of the crap that I’ve seen driving to work. (Interestingly, it mostly happens when I’m on my way to work, between 7 and 7:40AM on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday every week – I rarely see it on my way home.) I see this all the time and as I’m mentally calling these people jerks, or worse depending on my mood that day, I have to wonder what it is that motivates them to do things like that. If I were on a vehicle such as a motorcycle, full well knowing that there are other vehicles on the road which weigh thousands of pounds and won’t be able to stop as quickly as my bike could, I don’t think I would want to be swerving in front of vehicles or going in between the lanes to get farther up in the lane. I guess I’m also a little more safety minded, too. I’d be wearing a helmet, for sure, and at least long pants and sleeves. I mean, one more layer between me and the pavement, right?
I imagine most people with motorcycles understand the risks and know that there are options out there to keep them safe. Why, then, wouldn’t they employ these things? In a collision, the car has the advantage. It’s bigger and has a ton of safety features built in – airbags, seat belts, crumple zones, etc. I can’t imagine many situations in which a motorcycle would survive intact, and the rider is also likely to suffer some high levels of injury from such a collision. The fact is that there are a lot more cars on the road, and they are bigger, heavier, and are a direct enemy of the motorcycle when it comes to collision.
Seeing these people act so recklessly irritates me. It’s disrespectful to the people using the roads as they’re supposed to, following traffic laws and giving reasonable distance to their fellow drivers. When these people blatantly disregard the law in this manner, they’re putting themselves at risk and spitting in the face of those who do abide by the law and try (mostly) to follow speed limits and don’t do things like driving around other cars in the emergency lanes to get places sooner. I am not wishing for someone to get hurt. I want people to be safe. I just really wish that some of these people riding these motorcycles wanted the same thing.
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