2Wheeltips

In Industry, we pay a great deal of attention to safety for many reasons. Companies that truly care about their employees want them to go home in the same condition as they started the day. It makes good business sense and it’s simply the right thing to do. For that reason, it’s important to understand safety statistics, measure and track them, analyze trends, and take corrective action when things are going the wrong way. What’s this have to do with motorcycle safety you maybe thinking, well actually a lot!!

Near misses and or close calls are a warning that you are on the path of a serious if not fatal incident. OSHA statistics say:

• for every 600 near misses, there are 30 accidents involving property damage.
  

• for every 30 accidents involving property damage there are 10 minor injuries (first-aid cases).

• for every 10 minor injuries there is one serious or fatal injury. So, if we are having many near misses, it gets our attention in a hurry because we are on a path that will eventually result in someone being seriously hurt or killed. What this means to you is, if you find yourself having near misses and or close calls on your bike, then you need to take serious stock of your riding skills, the environment you’re riding in, and or the decisions you’re making while riding, and take corrective actions before you become a statistic!

Let’s talk about “near misses” for a moment. A near miss is an incident when something goes wrong and something bad happens, but just because of chance, nobody gets hurt. In my work environment, let’s say a fork truck driver picks up a load on a broken pallet. He lifts the pallet to put it in a rack space 20 feet off the floor. The pallet breaks, the 1,500 lb. load falls, and, by chance, no one was close enough to be injured or killed by the falling load. A riding example might be, you pull up to a stop sign, you don’t feel like coming to a full stop as traffic is light, and the road looks clear, so you roll through the STOP sign and make your right hand turn but go wide into oncoming traffic. A car coming towards you (that was actually closer than you thought) luckily sees you in his lane and he slows down to let you get back into your right lane avoiding a head-on collision. In either incident, once the load falls or once you’re in the wrong lane, it’s simply a matter of chance what the outcome will be!! You’re no longer the master of your destiny, chance and happenstance are!! In other words, “do you feel lucky today?”

The same is true of dropping your bike. How you drop it, how fast you’re going, where you drop it, do you fall and how you fall all become a matter of chance because you no longer have control. Chance takes over and will ultimately determine the outcome.

For you new and learning riders, a great tool to help you track your performance and progress is to critique yourself on every ride. I can remember almost every one of my close calls; when I went wide, when I target fixated, when I lost my balance and struggled to keep the bike from falling etc., etc. I started keeping a log and I listed the things I thought I did well and also, the things that didn’t go so well. Following each ride, I tracked if things were improving or not. I know this sounds really anal, and maybe it is, but we’re not talking about a bad round of golf here and a few lost balls. We’re talking about making mistakes that at the wrong time and wrong place can seriously impact your life.

What I did was take an index card and logged the date, where I rode, how many hours and miles, and the positives and negatives in bullet points. (You could do this on a spread sheet on your computer if you prefer.) When the positives were exceeding the negatives, I felt I was making progress. When it was the other way around (and it was a lot in the early months), I would go back to the parking lot and practice or to a place where traffic was at a minimum (quiet suburban streets very early on Sunday mornings) and work at fixing the mistakes. This critique took all of maybe 10 minutes following each ride, certainly not a huge investment of time or effort, but extremely helpful in keeping a scorecard of my performance.

Thanks for taking the time to read my article and I hope you got something worthwhile out of it.

Ride safe, be safe, live long and prosper.