Potter wrote: ↑Thu Jun 03, 2021 2:50 am
You could say the same about pretty much every accident humans have in any capacity, when the H&S nerd comes in he can always point to stuff that might have prevented it. I knocked my own coffee over yesterday, pissed me right off and looking back I can see how it happened and how I could have avoided it, but I'll probably do it again before I die.
What is it with this constant wish motorcyclists have to trivialise things? I don't get it. Spilling a coffee is in no way analogous to riding a bike and crashing it. You wouldn't argue that balancing a fan heater on the edge of your bath was sensible, but we seem to want to find a way of reducing bike crashes to the same level as balancing a hot coffee on the bath when the fact is one can kill, the other is highly unlikely to.
This incident was a bloke stopped that didn't know where he was and was trying to follow directions on his phone
So quite like millions of other drivers... there will be someone in just about every street in every town in the country who doesn't know where they are and is trying to follow directions on the phone. Heck, I've been struggling to find my own way round local streets I've known since the 80s thanks to the COVID street closures and HS2!
he didn't give due care and attention to multiple risks
Read what I've written about workload. Read about the limited 'visual data' memory buffer that can only hold five or six pieces of visual information at one time and shuffles it along - first in, first out.
Casting "didn't try hard enough" blame doesn't explain the issues that cause these collisions... and that means WE never learn from them. Which is why your lad has just had a crash that every generation of biker has had, because the RIDER has never been given the means to understand why drivers make errors. We just carry on blaming them for not being perfect.
and moved from a static position near a school where loads of parked cars and school buses made it hard to see for both him and my lad.
Which means the rider has to slow down, try to get the best view to search for turning cars, try to find a position where he / she can be seen by the driver and be prepared to take evasive action if the driver still doesn't see the bike.
As I said - I'm not blaming your lad. Road safety generally and bike training specifically has failed riders on this point for a long time. Most trainers do their best to inject personal experience into the syllabus, but NOTHING in the DVSA's approach to bike training prepares riders to deal with the consequences of errors, whether they are the rider's or another road users. The emergency stop becomes a game of beating a radar gun and dodging cones rather than any kind of life-saving exercise. The Hazard Perception test is a game of pointing at the right object and hitting the mouse button at the right moment to score maximum points rather than trying to understand what could happen if the same situation developed in real life. The Highway Code teaches us that we can blame other people for getting it wrong and it's not our fault if that leads to a collision.
The police turn up and confirm that "it was the other guy's fault" for us after it happens. And post-crash the insurance companies then fight to establish blame.
No wonder it's so hard to understand the need to predict, then avoid errors.
And I will honestly tell you I wouldn't have been in a position to do any better when I was a new rider... I crashed my 125 returning it to the 500 mile service when a vehicle stopped unexpectedly in front of me when she didn't need to give way - I didn't hit it but I locked up the rear and fell off. Shortly after getting my 400-F, I smacked that into the back of a car that changed lanes without indicating. Three months later and three days after getting it back from the insurance rebuild with a complete new front end (tyre, wheel, brakes, forks) I crashed it on a wet road when a car stopped unexpectedly and I locked the front.
Every single crash was "the other guy's fault" wasn't it?
in fact, it wasn't till I was some months into my courier career that I began to understand that now, if I crashed, it wasn't just a case of someone else picking up the bill and me being inconvenienced by my missing bike and having to catch the bus to uni and missing out on the club rides, whilst dealing with the inevitable argument with the insurance company... no, this time, no bike - and potentially being injured - meant I didn't eat and couldn't pay the rent either.
And however much I yelled and shouted and swore at drivers, and had a good rant about them down the pub with my courier mates, it did absolute F*CK ALL to prevent the next driver from failing to spot me... and that being the case it was down to me to do the best I could to spot driver about to make the looked but failed to see error and then do something myself to avoid being in the place they were about to go. It didn't matter WHO made the error, the important bit was knowing that it COULD happen, and DOING something about it, not saying "the driver should have done better".
The car driver was a really nice bloke
And the vast majority of them are. The ones who caused me to crash were gutted to have done what they did (even if one woman's husband did get his solicitor to send the obligatory "you were speeding and my client couldn't avoid you" letter later). There are a few gits out there, just as there are a few bikers who DGAF about anyone who gets in their way. But most drivers who cause collisions didn't mean to put anyone at risk.
and I looked at it from both perspectives, I might (but probably not) have done what he did
And if he replayed that scenario 100 times he probably wouldn't have done what he did again, either. Most errors like this, though apparently catastrophic blunders, are actually trivial mistakes in themselves (even if the consequences aren't) and that's what makes them so hard to catch WHEN MAKING THEM... which is what renders the "should try harder" approach to road safety so utterly useless.
and I might have ended up the same way my lad did.
And so might I. We all - on both sides of a 'Two to Tangle' collision - get it wrong.
Sometimes shit happens. Feel free to navel gaze... my view on this stuff is that bumps and spills are part of riding a bike... as long as you don't die or suffer a permanent disability then I just accept it for what it is and move on.
And that's where we part company. This is not 'navel gazing'. This is trying to give you - and indirectly your lad - as well as anyone else who thinks "ride a bike, fall off" is an inevitable chain, 1) an insight into driver error, 2) an understanding of how those errors can impact us, and 3) what we can do about it.
We ride on a knife-edge on a bike. I mentioned elsewhere the crash that woke me up. It was a 'minor' spill - I wanted to get across a pedestrian crossing before a pedestrian stopped the traffic, and was caught by surprise when he didn't stop and wait for everything to stop but walked straight out and forced vehicles to come to a halt to avoid running him over. I locked the front and toppled off at walking pace. It barely hurt, did little damage to the bike...
...but as I hit the deck and rolled over onto my back, I had to watch a Routemaster's front wheel stopping about a metre before it crushed my head.
And that made me realise there is no such thing as an acceptable bike crash.
That's why I've spent ten years on the Science Of Being Seen project (
https://scienceofbeingseen.wordpress.com) which has gone nationwide with Biker Down, have three times been a 'keynote speaker' on the Shiny Side Up project, a radically different approach to rider safety in NZ, etc.
this is a bike forum and these discussions are all good
They are if they don't conclude:
"there was nothing I could do"
"it was the other guy's fault anyway"
and "shit just happens".
Yes, I've pleased he's survived, the bike's survived, and I hope he bounces straight back up and gets back on two wheels, and I would also "rather accidents didn't happen" but we have to go further than "try to avoid them"... we need to be taught HOW, WHERE, WHEN and WHY then happen and then HOW we can avoid them.
PM me an email addie and I'll email you a PDF of the Science Of Being Seen book. And if the forum would like me to, I'll happily organise an evening to give you the same SOBS talk I was delivering for Biker Down Kent till COVID intervened.
