Good post, Dennis! Too many people just think in terms of overall accident/death rates w/o "peeling the onion" to determine the underlying contributing factors. Motorcycling will never be as safe as driving, but there's a lot of common-sense precautions you can take to greatly improve your odds of having a long, injury-free riding career.

 

Exactly! Stats. are nice, but they don't mean much if the details to their correlation are omitted.

 

TRC2,


I'm struggled with the inverse of your dilema for a few months. I roadrace motorcycles as a hobby and quit riding bikes on the street because my will is weak. No matter how hard I try I can't restrain my desire to drag knee and spin the rear wheel. For my safety and for the safety of others I sold my street bike years ago.

I'm now about a month out from having an S2000 in the garage simply becasue I think it will help SAFELY feed some of the day to day MUST...SPIN... MOTOR...FAST craze that I've been missing the past few years.

Any bonehead can crack the throttle to the stops on a bike. It's when you need to slow it down and get it turned in that things get tricky.

When you first start riding, your instincs are your enemy on a bike. The safe thing to do is often something that seems, on the surface, dangerous and vice versa. If you're just looking for a little boy-racer fun buy the car. Bikes are way more interesting (I think) but if you're thinking you can take your driving skills and translate them into riding skills you are going to hurt yourself. In short, if you buy the bike be prepared to spend a good deal of time with it at a moderate pace. I also highly recommend a track school to anyone looking to stretch their current skills envelope.