#129 Following Distance and Me

All Rights Reserved © 2014 Thomas W. Day

A couple of years ago, there was a young person who took the Basic Rider Course and debated every safety point in the course: helmets and other protective gear, speed, skill development, and traffic management and awareness. Everything we had to say was pointless “safety geek crap.” One morning, I read about that person's death on the highway; unprotected by any reasonable gear, tailgating, capped off by an inability to avoid an obstacle. I recognized the picture in the paper.
In April, on the road home from New Mexico, I got another reminder of how precarious life on a motorcycle can be; from the relative safety of our motorhome. Before we left our last campsite of the winter, after five months on the road, I did my usual equipment inspection, knocked off the items on the RV’s shutdown checklist, and we headed north toward Des Moines on I35. We stopped in Des Moines for fuel and breakfast and I checked the tires for heat (my lazy man’s tire pressure inspection) at the filling station and took a pressure measurement after breakfast. Less than 2 miles north of Des Moines, the RV started swerving and I heard the unmistakable sound of tire failure. Looking out the rear view mirror, I saw what looked like a fully inflated tire rolling down the center of the freeway behind us. I figured the bike trailer had fried a bearing and tossed a wheel. 250 miles from home, after an 8,500 mile winter. Great, we’re going to be spending a day waiting for AAA to find a repair shop willing to accept their highly “discounted service rates.”

When I got the RV semi-safely parked on the shoulder of the freeway and calmed my wife down, I discovered it wasn’t the trailer tire but the right rear RV tire that had failed. In 50 years of driving everything from heavily loaded band vans and buses to service vans and pickups to the usual assortment of family cars, I’ve never seen a tire failure like this one: the tread completely separated from the sidewalls. It just shucked itself off of the wheel and went on its merry way through heavy northbound freeway traffic. Luckily, it didn't hit anyone and no one hit it while it was in motion.
The part that spit off wasn’t heavy, maybe 20 pounds at most, but it was whole and would have made an incredibly difficult-to-absorb object for a motorcycle. Fortunately, it happened on a blustery late March Monday morning, so the usual crowd of Sunday “motorcyclists” were back in their cages and nobody else managed to get tangled up in the tire, either. I found a hole in the traffic and went to pull the shell of the tire from the middle of the road, when a semi clipped it and tossed it against the center island’s guard cables. A few feet higher and the tire would have ended up causing a freak-out in the southbound lane.

What if you had been on a motorcycle following an RV travelling at 60mph on a 70mph freeway? You’re impatient because you’re a typical occasional biker, so you follow closely because you think that will hurry the RV driver along. I, the RV driver, can’t see you at all so you are in no way part of my driving calculations. At 60mph, you are travelling 88 feet per second or, if you are impatient and running up behind me at 70mph you are zipping along at 102 feet per second. Let’s pretend you are a skilled rider, just not a smart skilled rider (a stretch, I know). You’re humping my RV and trailer at about 75 feet, it takes you a second to recognize the object flying your direction and you hit it at full speed. Whatever happens next is completely out of your control.

If we repaint that scenario with you possessing a bit of common sense or good fortune, we'll assume you are 150 feet behind the trailer when the tire comes flying over the wheel well. You still use up that second figuring out what’s about to happen and you nail the brakes, wrapping the tire up between your front wheel and your bike’s frame. Again, whatever happens next is completely out of your control.

On the rare chance that you paid some attention in your last safety class, maybe you’re actually calculating your following distance based on your speed. You gave yourself the recommended four seconds, or 360 to 400 feet, of safe margin and after blowing that first second of reaction time, you have two to three seconds to decide what to do and to get it done. You resist the panic reaction to nail the brakes, make your best guess where the tire is going to go, and swerve to avoid it. Honestly, you could still be in trouble, but once you swerve away from the tire’s path you can still scrub off a lot of speed in the couple of seconds left before the tire arrives at your point of intersection. That could be the difference between getting killed or maimed and just needing to change your underwear.

So, the next time you get all carried away with yourself and feel uppity about your right to speed down the highway unimpeded, you might want to think about where that kind of attitude would put you in the scenario I just described. I know I’ll be thinking about it every time I’m anywhere near an RV or truck. There is a reason those vehicles need high-capacity, high pressure tires and that reason is why you see the carcasses of tires from those vehicles littered all over the highway. The MSF's four seconds of "immediate path" margin is cutting it pretty close when you have a sudden decision to make.

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#130 Sliding to A Stop

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Thomas W. Day

I was exploring some of the dirt roads between St. Paul and Taylors Falls on a Saturday morning this past fall, when I had the occasion to come to a couple of emergency stops. The first time was after a short series of 15mph turns on a paved farm road, I was barely out of one of the turns when a large deer wandered into the road and stopped to observe my on-coming motorcycle. He was in the middle of my lane and, since a truck was coming the other direction, the only evasive maneuver available to me was a quick stop. I've read several reviews of my WR250X that implied that the brakes are "weak" or "mushy." I beg to differ. Maybe for a racer's tastes those descriptions are apt, but for my weekend warrior playbike purposes the WR stops just fine.

And it did.

A few years back, I managed to execute a similar maneuver at night on a mostly-empty highway on my 650 V-Strom. For the most part, that incident had a happy ending, too, other than getting me gore-coated when an opposite-direction pickup splattered the deer all over his truck, emptying the contents of the deer's bowels all over me in the process. That incident taught me not to admire the luck and skill of an emergency braking maneuver for more than it takes to pick a safe path around the deer and get the hell out of there.

One of the best things about being a motorcycle instructor is that I have to demonstrate quick stops a few times every week and think about braking technique often enough to be able to explain and do it half-well. Too bad there wasn't anyone around to see this demo. I squared the bike up and laid into the brakes right up to the front wheel's limit of traction. I might have slid the back tire a little bit, but not much. The deer wandered off of the road, after getting his day's entertainment out of my emergency, the truck roared past without making any sort of adjustment, and I got the hell out of there and went back to playing around on the backroads.

A few miles further from that encounter-of-the-hoofed-kind, this time on a gravel farm road, I crested a hill and discovered a freakin' herd of deer parading across the road; big ones, middle sized ones, and at least a half-dozen little bitty Hell spawn Bambis.  This time, I was moving a bit faster and hauling the bike down to stop took a bit more concentration. The road was slightly damp, covered with loose gravel and small rocks, and provided reasonable traction. No harm no foul or fawn.

After the four-hoofed crowd meandered from the road and I got back on the trail, I thought about how my two four-hoof experiences could have ended and how a police investigator might have evaluated the "evidence." When I read police reports of crashes, one of the bits of "evidence" they seem to use is the skid distance left by crashed vehicles. Supposedly, this is some sort of indication of how fast the vehicle was traveling. Using that useless data point, if I had hit the deer the cops would have claimed I "made no effort to stop." No skid marks, no braking? Seriously? I thought about this for a while after the last stop. On wet gravel just over a hill and no sliding and the bike came to a quick stop a good distance before any of the hoofed rats or me were in danger. So, no evidence left for the highway forensic "experts" to interpret and that would tell them what about my riding ability, attempt to avoid the collision, or anything else?

A while back, there was a news report about an off-duty cop who ran into a kid in a residential neighborhood  after "laying the bike down" in an attempt to avoid the collision. I see that kind of language in local police crash reports, too. We talk about this silly stuff in motorcycle safety classes all the time. Anyone who believes that sliding on polished metal provides a better coefficient of friction than rubber probably shouldn't be playing with motorcycles. The only time I have ever seen a sideways motorcycle stop more effectively than one still operated rubber-side-down has been in soft, deep sand or sloppy mud. Often, that tactic results in a spectacular flying machine stomping the crap out of the helpless rider. Stopping or slowing quickly in either one of those situations usually involves flying over the bars and some unpleasant impact activities, followed by a completely out-of-control motorcycle doing whatever physics and luck dictate. Pavement requires some kind of sticky material for traction. Conveniently, tires are made of sticky materials. Bodywork, chrome and painted bits are considerably less sticky. 

"Lay 'er down" logic ranks up there with the "Loud Pipes Save Lives" insanity. The argument defies logic, physics, mechanical engineering, experience, reality, and statistical evidence. Motorcyclists know that dropping the bike is an out-of-control panic maneuver, usually due to inappropriate rear brake use. Bikers never get good enough to know the difference. If you don't know which kind of rider you are, you are not a motorcyclist.

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Measuring Facts

“One of motorcycling’s few saving graces is the disconnect between how dangerous the activity is and how safe the practicioners feel. I’m not well-travelled, so I tend to believe this is an American (USA, not Canada or Mexico.) trait. It could be just a human thing, though. Generally, it’s safe to say that don’t get humans. One of the ways that people make those disconnects is by putting “belief” over facts. When confronted with the data that demonstrates riding (per mile travelled) in rural and small town areas is more dangerous than urban travel, especially freeway travel, riders will simply argue(?), “I don’t believe that.” While they are pretending to be skeptical, they are simply being foolish when the data doesn’t support their delusions.

I ran head-on into that argument a few days ago with my neighbor, a generally reasonably intelligent and creative guy who mostly hangs out with idiots because he works for an agricultural construction company. In a spectacular demonstration of the old saying, “lay down with dogs, wake up with fleas,” my neighbor was off on a rant about how nervous Donny Trump made him, but that he couldn’t vote for Clinton because “She’s gonna take away my guns.”

I suggested that I’d heard that bullshit argument for the last 40 years of national elections and Presidents JFK, Johnson, Carter, and Obama have not only not taken away anywhere near “all his guns” but Bush I was the one President to actually make a shot at anything resembling gun control, which Reagan supported. His response was, “I don’t believe that. Look at what Obama did to the price of ammo, right after his election.”

As much as I respect my neighbor’s intelligence, he isn’t a reader and doesn’t do much research on anything but construction projects. Like most people, he isn’t likely to be killed by curiousity. I suggested a couple of websites, The Truth about Guns "Why Is Ammunition So Expensive?" and an article I’d read in the Motley Fool’s investment blog, “The NRA Reveals Who's to Blame for Ammo Shortage: You.” The main reason ammo is in short supply and expensive is that gun nuts are buying and hoarding the supply. It’s actually one of the rare times that supply-and-demand is applicable. I ended with, “Even the NRA’s website conforms that.”

His response was a laugh and, “I still don’t believe that.” He followed with an argument that satistics “don’t prove anything” and that anyone can lie with numbers.

And so it goes.

We went back to talking about safe topics, but I went away wondering how many people quickly justify their prejudice, irrational economic decisions, and generally nutty behavior with “I don’t believe that.” I bet a lot.

MMM recently published one of my less-temperate rants, Safe Motorcycling? One of my points in that essay was, “Our mortality-and-morbidity-per-mile statistics are the grossest evidence possible that motorcycling is as risky an activity as rock climbing, hang gliding, scuba diving or deep free-diving, X-games-everything, or being in a combat zone (‘Top safety chiefs across the military have identified motorcycles as the No. 1 safety concern off the battlefield.’ NPR Report, U.S. Military Combats Rising Motorcycle Fatalities, 2009).” In case you’ve convinced youself that I’m the only one who thinks motorcycles are dangerous, a few years back AOL News published ”The 7 Deadly Hobbies: Pastimes Your Insurer Hates.” Motorcycling, for no rational reason, was #6 with overwhelmingly the most deaths over hang gliding, civilian pilot, mountain climbing, sky diving, recreational boating, and scuba diving. The military still ranks motorcycles and the #1 non-war-related cause of death for US service people. The only thing that seems to affect motorcycle mortality and morbidity numbers in a positive way is the decline in motorcycle popularity. Now that the Boomer mid-life-crisis rush is over, motorcycle sales in the US continue to be stagnant. Suzuki got rid of or lost about 20% of its dealers post-Great Recession and Hardly is still struggling to find non-bluehair customers. I would imagine the same goes for Polaris and the rest of the Japanese manufacturers.

Of course, there are motorcycle dealers and riders who will say, “I don’t believe that.” They’ll argue that anyone can make up sales and miles-ridden statistics and that the motorcycle world and future is rich and rosy. Denying the risk, the economics, and the other factors that are making motorcycles and motorcycling a vanishing activity probably won’t be a great defense for the industry.

Piling on the Bullshit

Damn it, when I saw this title “THE PERFECT MOTORCYCLE: KNOW YOURSELF TO KNOW YOUR BIKE” on CycleWorld.com, I really hoped for something semi-intelligent.  When you flaunt around words like “perfect” the expectation is that you will actually put some effort into the discussion. Unless the discussion is being led by Kevin Cameron there isn’t much hope that my expectations will be even attempted on Cycle World. This article fell far below the already low bar set by the motorcycle rag industry.

Idiot advice like this is exactly why I wrote the “When You Need A Faster Bike” column for MMM, "Pick perfect power. From a safety standpoint, the amount of power you need depends on your riding. For my money, 800cc and up lets you beat city traffic, claim-jump any freeway lane anytime, and execute quick passes on the highway." What a load of bullshit. First, as RideApart.com said in their “11 Reasons Why You Don’t Want A Liter Bike” column, "Literbikes aren’t any faster than a 600." Who cares if your top speed is 200mph, if you are really trying to “execute quick passes on the highway?” A 600cc four will do 160mph and get there within a few fractions of a second as quickly as a liter bike and, most likely, exactly as quickly as a 750cc or the non-existent 800cc from Cycle World’s bullshit recommendation. Even better, 99% of American riders who are incapable of using any part of a liter bike’s throttle competently won’t end up sliding down the freeway on their ass when they wheelie-over their big bike pretending to be Rossi.

The half-assed effort put into justifying the advice, “Choose a bike whose skills match your own” was more than embarrassing. My advice for Cycle World, avoid the word “perfect” until you buy a dictionary and thesaurus. Stick with “half-assed” and “mediocre,” words you so aptly typify.

#120 That Is Not A Helmet

http://www.amazon.com/Geezer-with-A-Grudge/dp/B007RPQJ24

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Thomas W. Day

Everybody is getting on the "motorcyclists ought to be wearing helmets" bandwagon. MPR did a segment a few weeks about about the burst of motorcycle deaths in early 2013 and how few of the dead and buried were wearing "helmets." One of the local television noise generators repeated that theme and "moderated" the common sense recommendation by interviewing someone from ABATE spewing their tired "everyone just needs to look out for us" and "training is the answer" song and dance. For once,

ABATE and AAA were on the same page in that spring death-match propaganda blitz. They both quoted the same statistic that reported "wearing a helmet in a crash reduces the risk of death by 35 percent and the risk of brain injury by 67 percent." ABATE added the word "only" to each of those numbers, attempting to prove that helmets didn't really do much toward making motorcycles less suicidal. Sometimes, I'm not sure whose side those guys are on.

AAA's front section AAAAdvice article ("Motorcycle Helmets Save Lives") included the picture at right. I see that as a failure to communicate. That silly looking lid is not a helmet. It barely qualifies as a hardhat. It's possible that useless baseball cap might provide some protection if a cup of crushed ice were dropped from a second story window and it landed squarely on top of the rider's head. Not likely, but possible. The chances that a pudding bowl helmet will save your life, your consciousness, or your pretty face is pretty predictable, though.


It should be pretty obvious that a beanie helmet is good for about 20% of the impact that will coming your way when you hit the asphalt. If we wanted to be overly-optimistic, we could add the 19.3% of the forehead hits to the protected area, but I do not feel that is realistic. For example, Mr. AAA Douchebag's helmet at left makes a special effort to show his shiny forehead so that his admiring fellow douchebags will know who he is. That exposed area and the edge of the helmet above it provides plenty of leverage for the sliding surface to pull the helmet up and, possibly, away from that critical and fragile area of the skull. At least Mr AAA Douchebag has a 3/4 helmet on his pointy head.

Gay little biker beanies (Don't get your panties in a wad, girlymen. I mean "happy" or "festive.") like the thing at left are pretty much useless as protection 80% of time when a helmet hits the road. Unless you can figure out how to slide down the road on the top of your head (without grinding through the cheap plastic this sort of cheeseball helmet is made from), you might as well be wearing a bicycle helmet (another useless piece of mal-designed "protective gear"). This kind of hat is a designer statement, like high-heeled red shoes. It is not armor. Obviously, biker beanies automatically go with biker face (see douchebag at left, again) and there would be no point in spending all those hours in front of the mirror practicing your biker face if you were going to wear a real helmet and be a real motorcyclist. How would anyone know how serious you are if they can't see your scowl?

I have no idea what percentage of helmet wearers are wearing this kind of crap, but when I see the words "Harley Davidson," "motorcycle death," and "was wearing a helmet" in the same news report, I automatically assume this silly shit is what the cops included in their crash report as a "helmet." If I haven't made myself clear by now, I do not consider anything of the sort even close to a motorcycle helmet. The sound of blubbering, poorly-tuned tractor motors naturally ties to either no helmet or awful helmets and . . . death by motorcycle. On the rare occasion I see a hippobike rider wearing a real, full-face helmet, it always causes me to do a double, or triple, take. Exposing my natural prejudices to the air of honest admission, it also automatically forces me to re-evaluate all of my preconceived notions about Harley owners. "If the guy is wearing real gear, is it possible his bike is not garage candy? Probably. Can I imagine that he rides it to work and for general transportation? Probably. Damn. Now where do I pigeon-hole this dude?"

I realize that nobody dresses to impress me. I don't even try to impress me. But I suspect I'm not the only motorcyclist who has a similar check-list. Even more important, you should know that your designer hat is not a real helmet and it will more than likely be useless in a crash. You might imagine that you're not going to crash and won't need a real helmet, anyway. I suspect those dead folks the media clowns were talking about this spring didn't plan on dying, either. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.

Subjects I Avoid

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Thomas W. Day

I grew up with the advice, “Never mention politics or religion, in polite conversation.” I didn't follow that advice, but I heard it a lot. My father and I did a solidly poor job of even honoring the spirit; and our relationship pretty much proved how valid that guidance could have been. For most of my life, being who I am seems to reflexively cause that polite rule to be abused. Something about me appears to inspire the most degenerate, least informed, nosiest and noisiest, least sober, least credible evangelists into a doomed attempt to “spread the word” at the expense of my peace and quiet. (Trust me, I’ve heard the spiel—and have been hearing it since I was a child—and no matter who you are, who you represent, what god(s) you follow, what key you’re going to sing in, or what line you’re going to take, I’ve been there and heard it.)

So, today’s experience at the library was just one in a long line of related bad experiences that have made me want to move to my Montana retirement mansion (at right) and keep a loaded shotgun by the door for greeting all visitors. I do play to fire a couple of warning shots to the head to get your attention, so be ready to duck if you show up unannounced. On the way out the door and back to my bike, a guy ran me down to ask where I’d bought my official MMM jacket. You can’t get there from here, but I aimed him at Bob’s Cycle Supply for the next best thing. He argued that they didn’t carry it although I’d been there earlier in the week and they were still in stock at that time. Trying to politely escape (my first and often repeated mistake), I pulled off the jacket to show him the brand and model label and kept trying to get to the bike. I reminded him that the MMM portion of the jacket was custom and, probably, unavailable.

When I mentioned that the jacket’s denim cover is pretty worthless but that the armor in the jacket wasn’t bad, he said “Road rash is like military patches. It shows who you are and where you’ve been.”

I disagreed (compounding my above mistakes) by saying “Neither says much, since the military gives away that stuff in Cracker Jack boxes and you can buy impressive-looking patches and pins at most Army/Navy stores or pawn shops and bicycle, skateboard,  or falling-down-concrete-stairs scars look pretty much like motorcycle rash unless you’ve ground off a limb.”

That inspired a long, boring story of his career in the Air Force (my least favorite of a list of least favorite government agencies) [My father-in-law was a Korea Air Farce "warrior" and what I mostly learned from him was that if you are married to an Air Farcer you should avoid as much physical contact as possible. They get the clap more often than squirrels get nuts.] and his simultaneous experience in some sort of military biker gang. From there, he slid into a story of hitting a deer and surviving mostly unscratched. His “armor” in that incident was having spent a few moments praying over his motorcycle before leaving the bar for home. The deer hit his bike (a big Yamaha V-Star of some sort), bent some fender bits, and left some fur on a side case but he and the deer survived without serious injury. Therefore, praying worked. I should have kept moving, but I had to tell him that my more-pious-than-anyone-I-know brother had a similar dust-up with a deer and he ended up with a busted up ankle that has plagued him for the last five years (the deer didn’t survive). Knowing my brother, there was plenty of praying going on before he left my parents’ house for home and even if the praying wasn’t done over his motorcycle, it was done as well as that ritual can be performed. I remain unconvinced that the library dude added anything meaningful beyond what my parents and brother could do. The idea that his angel was more focused than my brother’s is simply ludicrous. That inspired a lecture about believing vs. something I couldn't identify, probably due to my heretical nature.

Still trying to get to my bike, strap my gear on, and escape without more comment than necessary. He made some comment about all the gear I was wearing (not that close to AGAT, but a lot closer than his street clothes). I let that one pass, but did make a less-than-respectful comment about pudding bowl helmets. Surprise! That was the only kind of helmet he owns. More conversation to ignore as I plugged my ears and pulled on my helmet. Before the ear plugs sealed up, he expressed surprise that it took me so little effort to put on the helmet.

"It's just a hat, dude."

As best I could tell, the one-sided conversation swung from ranting about helmet laws to being pissed off about the "safety Nazis," but I had the sense to ignore that bait and fired up the WR. As I struggled to back the bike out of the parking space while he attempted to strategically position himself in my way, I caught snippets of unwanted information about his engineering career, his plan to dominate the three-string guitar market (He was not a player, but had read something about cheap guitars getting trendy.), and an offer to co-write something about something. I escaped cleanly, without have exchanged names or other useful information.

When I got home and told my wife about the experience, she marveled at how hard it is for me to get away from salespeople and talkative drunks. "Must be genetic," I replied. I always had way too much trouble getting away from my family and the same sort of conversations.

"No," she said. "I think you're just dumb."

Possibly. When pressed against this kind of wall, I usually look to my hero, Mark Twain, for an explanation. The best I could find was, “I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's.” Pretty much the same thing my wife said.