New Rider help - would love your thoughts / suggestions

Slowing down on the street is always a good idea it's a bitch to be the slow one, but you usually live to ride another day...I'm all about that, pain and death can *uck*ng wait!...but to actually put this into practice...i think below is the best option.

most of the riders i saw street in the bay area are now dirt bike junkies.

Mystery school?

I never learned to ride dirt, just climbed hills...that's what you do when you can't ride! I did however learn all the controls while i was riding dirt before i even went street riding.. many years as a kid riding street bikes in the dirt!

They can get an actual "feel" for what you are trying to pass along at slower speeds. I really should get a dirt bike...need to learn how to be comfortable sliding while casually looking back at my "competition"...hahaha.

far safer to start in the dirt, then move to the street...i never learned to slide, but i did learn the controls where no other distractions could take away what was left of my attention (k. code!). maybe some riding in some really sandy dunes and stuff like that. sounds like fun anyway...let me borrow yer dertbike.

 

No

 

care to elaborate?

 

This is for a new rider?

Waiting at a traffic light? That's not the place to do things like that.

Waiting for people to catch up? Shouldn't have got that far ahead of them.

Although this would presume Tim set out - together - with a group and then took off on his own? Then why ride with a group in the first place?

Tim may be a good track rider ... but he didn't understand the road. As he found out ... failing at that has consequences.

"Tim’s riding or his mental state or his bike’s condition didn’t contribute to as much..." That part is true. It would appear (as depicted) Tim's mind was still on the track not the road.

Would a new rider be able to pick all this out? Racing or road/street riding ... two different things.

JMO

O = Observation

 

Seems like a really long way of saying there are two kinds of crashes: Rider error and road conditions/environment.

Some of the info - IMO - is extraneous for new riders. The difference between +/-1 lb of tire pressure or +/- a gallon of gas in your tank is irrelevant to a new rider, and I think trying to explain these very fine points to them hinders learning, rather than helping it.

New riders should just be focusing on making sure their bike is within manf. specs, and then focus on what they as a rider can do/not do to the bike to make them better riders. Intermediate/Experienced riders can benefit from a discussion about rebound settings, tire pressure, bike weight distribution, etc., but by definition it's moot for a new rider.

 

+1

This.

Basics ... stick to the basics. The street is a dangerous place to ride. If that is where you're gonna ride ... make sure your bike is geared for the street. Make sure the rider is geared - that means mentally too - for the street. Basic shit.

 

OK, here we go again. :scratchea

i was on a ride with one other friend ( not a group ride ). Being normal(ish) riding distance apart we dropped down hwy 141 bypass to the T intersection with hwy 14. i stopped at the stop sign. there was a few cars heading west on hwy 14 that i could have pulled out in front of but that would have made my friend react quickly ( too quickly to enter the highway safely imo ). He made the assumption there was time and was looking left at the traffic & when he looked forward again he noticed i had stopped. he fixated i believe and hit me an the rear left side putting my bike on the ground in a split second.

20/20: could i have been watching my mirrors ? i guess, but to what end.
were was i going to go ? onto the highway ? sometimes things just happen & happen so quickly.

tim

 

Choose your riding partners wisely? :mrgreen:

 

You asked, so I want to try and give you some constructive criticism. Please don't take it the wrong way... I think you can get to where you want to be with these articles; here's a few points to help you out:

It's kind of hard to glean anything useful from that article. The title is "New Rider's Guide to the Two Types of Bike Crashes, and How to Start Avoiding Them," but one of the two types of crashes, according to the article, is "unavoidable." The reader is already confused and your credibility instantly in question.

Besides the organizational challenges in the article, there's no real substance... the reader is told, in tedious and redundant language, what does or doesn't cause a crash, but is left with no useful information on how to avoid crashing.

The only real tool offered is avoiding what you call "Suicide Reactions," which, by the way, seems like content coming awfully close to a certain published author's concept of "Survival Reactions." (I think that's what the author called them, anyway.) I'm sure you've read the book. You seem like the kind of guy that reads a lot of "How to Ride a Motorcycle" books. You might want to cite the author as a source and give him some credit to avoid a plagiarism issue. If I were the author, I'd consider what you'd written to be (badly done) plagiarism. Either give him credit, or toss it out.

For example, say something like "In Keith Code's book 'Twist of the Wrist,' he describes 'Survival Reactions' as involuntary reactions that can cause a crash, etc etc etc ..." I don't think you intentionally stole his idea, but you did steal it.

The article is littered with pointless fluff, which also gets in the way of your message.

"By no means am I suggesting those other items didn’t contribute – BUT the topic I am focusing on is this: unavoidable situations are by definition unavoidable. Judgment errors can be minimized by reading and riding and learning tons of tiny bits of info about riding – but that is going to come through years of practice and study. Right now however, YOU can DRAMATICALLY improve your chance of surviving your next motorcycle ride by UNDERSTANDING this one secret!"

I thought you were talking about the avoidable crashes... and then suddenly "But the topic I am focusing on is this: unavoidable situations are by definition unavoidable..."

And what does that even mean?

You also CAPITALIZE too many words and use too many exclamation points!

Sorry, it's a pet peeve of mine. Try going easy on the exclamation points.

If you want to be effective in this venture of writing "How to Ride a Motorcycle" articles, pick up a copy of Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style," and follow the rules in that book for composition, especially the rule "Omit Needless Words." As an example, I would change the second part of your title from "How to Start Avoiding Them" to "How to Avoid Them." Tighten the language.

Second, try getting some form of organisation into your articles; find a topic with a definite purpose or point to it and organised the article around that purpose. Outlines work well for some people; I'm a fan of bubble graphs, personally. Whatever works.

Make sure you have something to say, something meaningful. And make sure you say it! Your article began with a well-intentioned title and quickly lost focus.

 

Here are some of my opinions. I hope they make sense, it's 4am and they're probably not as organized as I'd like them to be. I think Galen made some good points about your technical writing skills. I can't really critique that stuff, so this is mostly about content.

First, I don't think there are unavoidable crashes. I think there are crashes that are "nearly impossible" to avoid, but on some level, I think every crash is avoidable. After all, you could always stay home instead of riding. If I had to make two categories of crashes, I would categorize them as "easily avoidable" and "nearly impossible to avoid". I would also emphasize that the "easily avoidable" crashes occur much, much more frequently. The "nearly impossible" to avoid crashes are almost once in a lifetime occcurences, like getting struck by lightning or something.

I don't think Tim's accident was a good example. I think Tim's accident was an "easily avoided" accident. "Difficult to avoid" crashes are like deer running in front of you, birds flying into you, tree limbs falling into your path as you ride, etc. Mother nature is the most unpredictable thing motorcyclists face. People are very easy to predict in comparison. Getting rear ended happens all the time!

I would really shorten the section on the difficult to avoid crashes. I would change the story to a rider riding the speed limit, who is scanning the road ahead for hazards, and despite his or her attentiveness and riding ability, gets struck by a deer that jumps into the road. Simple. You don't really need to go into a long bio on the rider, just emphasize that they were doing the right thing - not speeding, and scanning ahead for hazards.

The avoidable crashes should be quite thorough. I'm not a fan of talking about survival reactions. Survival reactions are what they are and you can't prevent a newbie from having them. You can only make them aware that they exist. I don't even like the name "survival reactions". When someone sees debris on the road and chops the throttle, I don't call that a survival reacion, I call it panicking. That's much simpler. Everyone knows what "panic" means. There's no reason to give it another name! What do you not want to do when you're riding? You don't want to panic! It's too simple. I have a great amount of respect for Keith Code's teaching, but I think he over complicated a simple concept. Also, if you use the word "panic", nobody will criticize you for renaming Keith Code's term.

So, in the "avoidable crash" section, I would just dumb it down to "riders most often crash because they panic." Then I would go on about the strategies I suggest to avoid panicking while riding.

Hope something in there helps.

 

so, your example of unavoidable, is totally avoidable, a chain snapping, is unavoidable, a tire blowing out, is unavoidable, not watching behind you and letting someone get close enough to hit you, is totally avoidable.

and as always, you're plagiarizing other peoples published works.

buy copies of keith code, hand it out to all your students or whatever you care to call them, have em read it then go over the drills. whoever is dumb enough to pay for this ought to at least get proper teaching out of it.

 

i have truely pondered this many times...

the statement of covering your clutch in gear and watching your mirrors makes good theory but an explaination in practice is very limited.

in all my years of riding, i will state this as a fact:

two friends out for a ride, riding in staggered formation will always come side by side at a stop sign.

tim

 

i dont cover my clutch unless someones coming up behind me while i'm stopped, and then i'll cover it until they are stopped behind me. does no one look in their mirrors anymore? there's no explanation needed, it's called look in your mirrors, that's what they're for. be mindful of your surroundings, getting hit on your motorcycle is almost always avoidable if one is paying attention.

also your fact is wrong. i've been tire bumped or killswitched many times coming to a stop riding with friends

 

i find it fascinating how our brain processes driving data. it's pretty simple going down the road and someone is following us... we can gauge the distance just as we can maintain a distance from the person we are following, coming to a stop however things really change. from the lead rider/driver perspective: we hit the brakes first, thus causing the following vehicle to get closer until their reaction to brake occurs.

now, it doesn't take long from when we first start to brake to be able to tell the following vehicle does the same, and at this point you have a couple options. If the vehicle does brake and then maintains a steady distance then we assume all is good, they see us & the stop sign/signal, if not then your excape route would be used.

i have a few times in my life had that oh shit moment were you brake and quickly start to wonder about the other guy... in traffic i always leave room in front of me to move forward just in case. if your still rolling it's easier but getting a bike moving to completely clear the path i think is next to impossible.

my issue was that all the signs were good. he was in left mirror which put him in the left tire track ( i was in the right tire track as we were going to turn right ) and was slowing. he was at a rolling stop speed and looked up the road to check traffic. his judgement was that he had time to get in front of the oncoming cars and started his turn and roll on the gas before looking back to the right, he assumed i would have taken off also. he was wrong. this happened very quickly, and he hit me going at the most 10 mph.

avoidable ? i have yet to hear what i could have done different.


tim
opcorn:

 

Except for the knock on Code's "survival reactions" I agree with everything written here. I think the biggest problem new riders have is that they get themselves in over their head before they realize its happening. Riding a motorcycle isn't all that difficult, and the more comfortable you get, the faster you tend to ride. The problem arises when you encounter something unexpected....a corner is a lot tighter than you thought, there's illegal gravel at the apex of a turn, a car suddenly pulls out from the side of the road, etc. This is when the panic/survival reactions tend to pop up. No matter what a new rider does to prepare, handling these situations for the first time is going to be a challenge. Personally, I think the best way to prepare is to (1.) teach them about the hazards they are likely to encounter and (2), encourage the new rider to visualize these hazards and employ the skills necessary to safely negotiate them.

 

you let him get too close, plain and simple. it sucks, it happens, it's not your fault, but its avoidable. anything that moves on the road is going to kill you, so don't let em near you. or, avoidable by setting pre-ride rules. or, by riding alone. i hope you slapped your friend for riding like an idiot and not looking where he was going. maybe he was in your blind spot and in your situation there's nothing you could have done. like i said, almost all, are avoidable. my answer to you would be to not get into that situation.