After years of persistent negotiation, my 19 year old son finally convinced me to get a couple motorcycles. We got a Kawasaki KLX 250S and a Suzuki DRZ 400S. Wow, I forgot how fun motorcycles are! Now my 21 year old son wants to ride too so I am considering a third bike. But is this really a smart thing to get myself and my boys into? Are we taking too much risk of dying? There are plenty of other fun things to do. Should we use more safety gear?
So as I have been pondering my responsibilities as a parent I have been looking at statistics. I have seen a lot of risk of death statistics which of course are for motorcycle riders as a whole. They include very skilled, experienced and conservative riders and they include unskilled, inexperienced lunatics ripping around with no helmets. We are not very skilled or experienced, but we are conservative and we do wear helmets. Or at least I am and my boys are when they are with me.
So I have seen statistics showing the risk of death riding a motorcycle as being about 18 times the risk of death in a car. But how does that break-down among various rider profiles? When they scrape some lunatic of the pavement he is not marked in the lunatic category. The statistics do not differentiate.
But I have got to believe that you should at least be able to cut your risk in half by using safety gear, taking a rider safety course and riding conservatively. Motorcycles attract a lot of lunatics. I was one when I had a motorcycle when I was a kid. My kids are much more responsible than I was when I was their age. Or if not, they are doing a really good job of hiding their lunacy from me.
So let's say my guess is right and I can cut my risk of death in half by developing my skills and riding conservatively. Now we are looking at about 9 times the risk of death on a motorcycle vs in a car. That, according to the statistics I have seen is about the same as the risk of death riding a bicycle on the road.
Fair rationale? You might argue that it is not fair to remove the lunatics from the motorcycle statistics and compare them to unadjusted bicycle statistics. Perhaps. But I would argue that motorcycles attract a lot more lunatics than bicycles so removing the lunatics would have greater impact on motorcycle statistics than bicycles. And, I would argue that motorcycles provide a greater opportunity to be proactively safer.
So anyway, my argument is that the risk death for a "safe" motorcycle rider is similar to the risk of death for bicycle rider. Valid or delusional?
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