Tips for Safety for Motorcycle Riders #3

Avoiding accidents: active safety.

Practise
For motorcyclists, their primary safety is by far the most important: when in a crash, a motorcycle rider can never be as "safe" as in a car (primary safety being the kind of safety that prevents an accident, while secondary safety keeps you safe in an accident). You'll have to work for that kind of safety!

As is illustrated by the percentage of 6.4% that still hasn't enough riding skills after 8 years of experience, you can see that you won't come there without working for it.

To practise means: ride regularly (very important!), and especially take some time, now and then, to practise braking and cornering with slalom cones or tin cans.

To Look and to Anticipate
Probably, the "soft" side of riding skills, looking, anticipating and paying attention, are not included in these figures. All in all, it is clear that your safety is almost entirely in you own hands!

The safety of others
There is an additional bonus as well: other people joining the traffic will benefit from your ability to avoid crashes, while pedestrians who are hit by a car don't benefit from the secondary saftey that keeps the driver safe while the pedestrian dies.

The extra attention that a motorcyclist is used to pay to the situation will probably keep these chickens alive as well.

Driving is a kind of team activity, but the team is not always very well spirited, nor is it a close knit team. Yet even so each of us must regard the needs of other road users as being as important as our own, since we all need to make journeys and that others have as much right to use the roads as we do. Being late for work is not a reason to endanger other people.

Primary safety
Enhancing your primary safety means:

watching your condition (and your motorcycle's)
look and know what you cannot see: anticipate
practice braking
practice swerving
create space

Site: lazymotorbike.eu