Practical Advice for Riding Motorcycles Safely on the Road
June 3, 2010 – As summer arrives so does peak motorcycling season across the United States. And with gas prices hitting record highs in recent years and remaining around the $3 per gallon level, motorcycles have become more practical and popular.
Some 5.37 million registered motorcycles traveled a combined 9.54 billion miles in the United States in 2003, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics. And 147,703 commuters regularly used motorcycles to go to and from work, traveling a combined 1.5 million miles each day.
With the increase in motorcycle usage has come a corresponding rise in motorcycle fatality rates. Since 1997, the annual number of motorcyclist fatalities rose seven consecutive years and 89 percent total from 1998 through 2004, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Annual motorcyclist fatalities previously had declined from 1995 through 1997, bottoming out a historically low 2,116 deaths in 1997. But the number of fatalities nearly doubled to 4,008 in 2004, the most recent year for which information is available.
With motorcycle use and fatalities on the rise, Insurance-Website has compiled some practical motorcycle safety tips to help keep you safe and lessen the odds of becoming part of the rising trend of motorcyclist fatalities in the United States. But we won’t go into the basics of helmet use and other standard safety procedures repetitively written about elsewhere other than to say with so many first-time motorcyclists making the mistake of thinking high-powered, aggressively engineered 600cc-class sport bikes are “beginner bikes,” the need for some level of helmet law use becomes more imperative over time. But for helmet laws, too many kids wouldn’t bother to purchase even the most basic safety gear.
We will assume you have standard motorcycle safety gear, riding experience and quite possibly have completed a motorcycle safety course. We’ll even assume you don’t do the one thing most common among motorcycle accidents – drinking alcohol before riding. Instead, we provide suggestions for standard safety measures honed through years of riding experience in nearly all kinds of weather and on nearly all kinds of road surfaces.
Whenever riding a motorcycle, the only friend you have out there is another motorcyclist or a police officer – and sometimes not even then. The vast majority of drivers have a skill set much lower than that of an experienced, seasoned motorcyclist, and too many are distracted by cell phone conversations, the sending and receiving of text messages, kids arguing or other external stimuli. An experienced motorcyclist knows to keep his or her eyes moving, scanning the immediate area for any potential dangers and identifying likely trouble before it happens. When you get good enough, you can tell what other drivers will do before even they know simply by the way they operate their vehicles.
At all times, it’s best to assume the worst will happen and be prepared to react accordingly. That means assuming a car approaching the roadway from a drive will pull out at the absolute last second or an unleashed dog being walked along the roadway will sprint out in front of you. Establishing eye contact helps you know if the driver sees you, but more importantly, keeping an eye on the front wheels will tell you if that vehicle is moving and in which direction.
When traveling in traffic, a good motorcyclist never stays in the blind spot of other vehicles. Motorcycles are relatively small, and anything on four wheels has a significant advantage in a collision. Instead, you have to use the advantages a motorcycle has – greater quickness and smaller size – against the slower, larger vehicles. Whenever possible, try to be at the head of traffic when waiting at a stoplight without splitting lanes. When the light turns green, double check to ensure no other traffic is coming – or you very likely will die. If you ride often enough, sooner or later, someone will run a red light. Ensuring the coast is clear before entering the intersection. But when you know it is safe to proceed, it’s time to use your superior quickness to put slower, larger traffic several lengths behind you without violating speed limits, leaving you with an open pocket in which to travel with a clear view in all directions. Whenever possible, you want to find an open pocket and stick to it. Racing from one group of vehicles to the next only increases the odds of being killed.
To avoid being struck by an oncoming vehicle, motorcyclists should stick to the outside part of the road further away from the center line – especially when riding uphill or going around a blind corner. Many oncoming vehicles tend to drift across the center line for any number of reasons. In such cases, a motorcycle has a distinct advantage over larger vehicles that couldn’t possibly get out of the way in time to avoid a potentially deadly head-on collision.
While sticking to the outside part of the lane can spare you a head-on collision, it’s important to know other obstacles might pop up and be prepared to react accordingly – whether it’s a dead deer in the roadway, a tighter-than-anticipated turning radius, vehicles pulling out of blind drives, sand and gravel, bicyclists, farm implements or other objects. Maintaining a safe speed and not accelerating beyond your brakes’ ability to stop safely while negotiating a blind roadway will save your hind end several times over the lifetime of a seasoned motorcyclist. You just never know when you will have to make a sudden, evasive maneuver, or come to a sudden halt.
And when it comes to vehicle safety – particularly in deer-populated, rural areas, an old adage rings true: “Loud pipes save lives!” That doesn’t mean running a motorcycle with no baffles and an exhaust so loud it proves highly disturbing to your neighbors, causes hearing damage and puts you at risk of being ticketed by the police. But if you can’t hear your motorcycle running, it’s too quiet. Motorcycle exhaust pipes should be loud enough to capture the attention of nearby motorists and any roadside animals – particularly deer and other large creatures fully capable of killing unwary motorcyclists.
Whether it’s a vehicle backing out of a parking space or a freeway-bound driver blindly switching lanes, many times, it’s the sound of louder pipes letting motorists know you are near them. And when wild animals, such as deer, hear a motorcycle equipped with a sufficiently loud exhaust approaching, their primary instinct more often than not is to run for cover and away from the road. When deer opt for the roadway instead of the cover of nearby woods, motorcyclists need to slow down without panicking and rapidly flash your lights and honk your horn. A deer will stare down an approaching light – unless it is flashing and accompanied by a rapidly honking horn.
While these tips by no way are exhaustive, they are based on decades of riding experience and designed to provide a little more insight into motorcycle safety than you would get from a standard motorcycle safety course. And while abiding by them won’t assure you of avoiding an accident, they will lessen your chances of becoming the victim of the unexpected while enjoying one of the most economical and fun forms of personal transportation.