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Proficient Motorcycling. David L. Hough
Читать онлайн.Название Proficient Motorcycling
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781935484677
Автор произведения David L. Hough
Жанр Сделай Сам
Издательство Ingram
Good riding gear protects against the weather and flying debris. Leather is the king in terms of abrasion resistance, but fabric suits with internal armor can provide excellent impact and abrasion protection, as well as water resistance.
Abrasion-resistant gear is a number-one priority to keep your skin away from the pavement, but impact pads in the knees, elbows, and shoulders will cushion the blows and reduce broken bones. Leg and arm injuries can be painful, but chest and head injuries are more likely to be critical or fatal. That’s why some riders wear a spine protector or upper body armor under their jackets.
The Helmet
The ultimate purpose of a helmet is to prevent brain injuries during an accident. You can crack your leg or your skull and survive, but scrambled brains will bring you to a permanent halt. One really important reason for protecting your brain is that the brain doesn’t heal itself the way other body tissue does. If you bang your head hard enough to black out for a few seconds, you’ve injured your brain. And a concussion can turn into epilepsy a year or two down the road. So if you intend to get back in the saddle after the big crash, consider the importance of keeping brain injuries to a minimum. Even a $50 helmet that’s DOT approved can provide excellent protection because it’s the crushable foam inside that protects the brain, not the outer shell.
You don’t really need a real helmet if you are clever enough and skillful enough to avoid crashes. What you wear is your business. But more than a few riders do crash, even when they didn’t expect to. It’s a bad joke to believe that a thin “party” lid with no impact liner will give you any protection when you go down.
If you find that a full-coverage helmet is claustrophobic or difficult to wear with eyeglasses, consider one of the flip-front styles.
There are lots of statistics on helmet use, and there have been way too many heated discussions about mandatory helmet laws—pro and con. I believe that what you wear while riding is your own business, but let’s be honest about the situation. A fake “party” lid with no internal crushable liner can’t provide any meaningful protection from sharp blows to the head. A DOT-approved helmet will provide reasonable brain protection in the typical street motorcycle crash. A full-coverage helmet can also provide jaw and face protection. According to a German study, the majority of helmet strikes in accidents are to the left and right chin areas. That’s something to think about if you have been wearing a shorty or three-quarter helmet.
I think I understand the risks pretty well. I have one helmet with a cracked shell right at forehead level, a result of a large stone roosted from a vehicle ahead. I’ve also been hit by various potentially injurious or messy objects, including June bugs, bees, small stones, straw, hail, and seagull poop. Personally, I never go motorcycling without a helmet. My favorite style is full coverage with a flip front.
I Didn’t See You
If you allow another motorist to knock you down, you’ll probably hear the same lame excuse: I didn’t see you. Sometimes an errant driver has looked down at the poor motorcyclist lying miserably crunched under a bent motorcycle and let slip, “Gosh, I didn’t see you. You were coming so fast, and you were wearing black leather, and besides, you didn’t have your headlight turned on.” Certainly there are occasions when the other driver really couldn’t see the motorcyclist, but many veteran motorcyclists have long had a sneaking suspicion that the excuse is mostly a cop-out. When a driver attempts a sudden left turn in front of a motorcyclist and knocks the bike down, do we expect them to say, “I saw you but I was in a hurry and I figured you’d get out of my way?”
This oft-repeated I-didn’t-see-you excuse has led some safety experts to believe that the problem is simply that motorcycles are inconspicuous in traffic. The solution, theoretically, is to be more conspicuous. The suggestions are to wear brightly colored riding gear, add a modulator that flashes the headlight, and maybe screw on a Yosemite Sam Back Off mud flap.
Most of the high-mileage riding friends I know roll their eyes at the conspicuity stuff. “Friends don’t let friends wear pink vests,” they would sneer. Perhaps the veterans have a more realistic understanding of the I-didn’t-see-you myth. Does the conspicuity stuff really work, or is it more of a magic talisman than a dependable safety device? (Magic talismans are supposed to ward off evil with no effort on the part of the wearer.) Conspicuity devices are based on the assumption that the other guy will get out of your way if he can only see you. The veterans know that avoiding collisions depends on being prepared to get out of the way of the other guy, whether he sees you or not.
Like it or not, there are some situations in which you have no escape path should another driver wander into your lane. It’s helpful to be conspicuous for the benefit of other drivers.
Inattentional Blindness
Psychology research has uncovered an interesting phenomenon that relates to the I-didn’t-see-you excuse. It seems that humans are subjected to so much incoming information that one part of the brain serves as sort of a subconscious mental “spam filter.” The filter passes on to the conscious part of the brain only information that corresponds to what the person is concerned about, or what the psychologists call attending to. If a driver is thinking about (attending to) buying a new car, the spam filter will pass along anything related to cars, including automobile dealerships and billboards with car ads. The flip side is that if the driver is not concerned about something (say, motorcycles), the spam filter may delete the image. So it really can be true that a driver looks right at you and sees you, but your image gets filtered out and never gets to the conscious part of the driver’s brain. That would explain how a driver might not comprehend a motorcyclist wearing a high-visibility jacket and the bike flashing its headlight—or, for that matter, a freight train with a flashing headlight and the air horns blaring.
Although this rider is highly skilled, he wears a conspicuity vest over his leathers to help capture the attention of other drivers. A retro-reflective conspicuity vest is especially useful for night riding, when the stripes light up brilliantly in the headlights of other vehicles.
In addition to the headlights, this motorcycle has amber clearance lights in the front of the mirror housings and extra driving lights in the fairing lowers. The array of lights really helps an oncoming driver comprehend the presence of the bike, and the width of the clearance lights provide a driver with clues to more accurately predict its approach speed.
Since we can’t control every situation, we often depend upon other motorists to not run us over, like it or not. Motorcycles are narrower and more difficult to see in traffic. Other motorists don’t always comprehend how rapidly a motorcycle is approaching because a single seven-inch diameter headlight doesn’t really give motorists a clue about your approach speed. So there is a case for motorcyclists to be a little more conspicuous for the benefit of those drivers on the road who are really trying to avoid collisions.
Most important, if you are still in the process of learning the tactics