Your Survival Blog
How to Survive a Motorcycle Accident (part 1 of 2)
When I sat down to write this I had in mind a different topic — until I heard that my friend D. was in the hospital with multiple fractures following a wipeout on his motorcycle. He crashed into a guardrail on a mountain road, by the way. Guardrails are designed for enclosed vehicles ("cages", as motorcyclists call them), not for people on two-wheeled vehicles; collisions with guardrails often cause leg, spinal and head injuries to motorcyclists.
But he’s alive — and given the seriousness of the accident, not severely injured — so I wanted to write about why. Here are some ways to survive mishaps on your motorcycle:
Wear a helmet
This seems so obvious to safety advocates that it seems almost not worth mentioning, but a significant proportion of bikers still prefer to go bareheaded — a 2007 survey found that only 58% of US riders wore them regularly. Fifty-eight percent! (Hospital transplant centers are grateful to these people, whose vehicles they call “donorcycles”.)
Your helmet should cover your ears — no novelty or “pudding-bowl” helmets, please — and be legal for road use. If possible, buy a helmet approved by the Snell Memorial Foundation. One with eye protection is preferable; the best-known study of US motorcycle accidents, the “Hurt Report” (a wonderful title, though it was named for its primary author Harry Hurt), concluded that “seventy-three percent of the accident-involved motorcycle riders used no eye protection, and it is likely that the wind on the unprotected eyes contributed in impairment of vision which delayed hazard detection.”
One European study found that 9% of helmet wearers lost their helmets during the course of a crash, so make sure your helmet fits properly and is fastened correctly.
All the Gear, All the Time
This is so much a watchword in the motorcyclist community that they abbreviate it ATGATT. “All the gear” means helmet, gloves, jacket, pants, and boots. And “all the time” means just that — not “It’s hot and I’m just going to the store down the street, so it’ll be okay to wear shorts and flip-flops this once.” One friend admitted that he “started wearing proper riding pants when I read the words ‘road rash of the penis’ in a crash report. Owwww.....”
Body armor comes in several varieties, including “motorcycle leathers” and cordura nylon gear with armor padding. (A friend prefers the latter, since it’s more water-resistant than leather and can be worn over office clothing.)
Educate yourself
There is a motorcycle safety class in or near your community. Take it. In the United States, the Motorcycle Safety Foundation can tell you where; they offer both a “Basic Rider Course” (good for those who haven’t ridden for a while) and an “Experienced Rider Course” (for learning advanced accident and road-hazard avoidance techniques). A long-time rider says that “Retaking the ERC every few years is probably a good idea.”
Tricky techniques like countersteering (the highly counterintutiive maneuver of steering-left-to-turn-right, or vice versa) are covered in depth in these courses. So is using the front brake; says a friend: “back when I learned to ride and Reagan was President, there was a widely-held but very wrong notion that using the front brake would cause you to crash. So lots of riders never learned to use the front brake, and the front brake provides 80% or more of your stopping power in an emergency stop from normal road speeds. This, by the way, is an excellent example of why you should get professional riding instruction —because if you learn to ride from your ricky-racer buddy in a parking lot, you’ll pick up all of that person’s misinformation and bad habits.”
Oh, and get a license, even if your state/province/territory doesn’t require it. More than a quarter of all motorcyclists who died in the US in 2007 didn’t have one (compared to only 15% of drivers who died in passenger vehicles).
Maintain your motorcycle
Before you set out, check that your tires are well inflated and the brakes are still good. Studies have found that these are factors in only a small percentage of crashes, but do you want to be the exception?
Check your tires for nails and the like, too. The Hurt Report found that most mechanical-failure accidents involved punctures producing flat tires.
These are a few of the reasons my friend D., thank all that’s holy, is still alive. (And yes, you can do everything “right” and still die in a crash — but doing what you can to mitigate risk will go a long way toward preserving life and limb.)
For more on crashes and how to prevent them, see the second part of this article, which follows soon.
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Anybody can be assured that “Basic Rider Course” good for those who haven’t ridden for a while and an “Experienced Rider Course” for learning advanced accident and road-hazard avoidance techniques.
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Hey the easy way to avoid serious damage in a motorcycle crash is to mentally prepare yourself to lay your bike down in the event of a crash. When a motorcycle crash occurs it is unlikely that you will be able to change the direction of the motorcycle so laying your bike down will slow the motorcycle down faster.
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