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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

> They were all careful riders too, the incidents being caused by distracted / aggressive drivers.

I'm not sure how true that is, even when the cause is distracted/aggressive drivers, unless the drivers actually hunted them and collided with them on purpose. Defensive driving is a thing for motorcycle drivers too, and if you take care you'll avoid even distracted/aggressive drivers too.

With that said, it of course isn't risk free, I think in my country (Spain, lots of motorcycles in/around the cities/towns), just about 60% of those who drive motorcycles have never been in any accident ever[0], and that's including very dumb ("average") people so if you're more careful than the average driver, I'm sure you could get those odds to stack in your favor.

- [0] https://www.dgt.es/export/sites/web-DGT/.galleries/downloads... Table 59. "ACCIDENTALIDAD"

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> I'm not sure how true that is, even when the cause is distracted/aggressive drivers

Very.

It's possible to make no mistake and still lose.

My wife got hit-and-run when bicycling to work and she's exceeding careful and defensive in her riding.

Her carefulness is probably what allowed her to catch a glimpse of the car in the corner of her eye and swerve at the last minute to not be caught head-on by the car and sent flying hundreds of meters away.

She's "lucky" to even have made it, suffering debilitating neck pain every day and night, abated only by roughly a half through invasive surgery, a pain she will have to endure for the rest of her life which at the current rate of life expectancy is the next fifty years.

Meanwhile the distracted and hurried driver who didn't bother to check around their A pillar blind spot drove away scot-free.

That's one example. I have many such stories of cyclist and biker friends alike, many of which don't ever ride between lanes.

> It's possible to make no mistake and still lose.

Sure, no doubt about that. But again, if people (60% of the riders in my case) manage to never be in an accident, and that's including a wide range of people, then surely the odds are greater of never being in an accident if you're careful.

Still, sucks she had that experience. But it's important to realize that for every accident, there are thousands of people riding every day without a single accident in their life. But of course it's harder to think about that when you had someone in a accident and that person is close to you, I understand that.

I don't think anyone's disputing that being careful increases your odds of avoiding accidents.

Instead what I wanted to call out is that even if infinitely careful and drive defensively without fail you can still get into an accident, and you don't need to be hunted down or intentionally collided into+.

Ultimately at a large enough scale it's all about odds, and it takes but one occurrence to go from "I've been fine so far" to "my life is upended".

And like all statistical things, with a low enough sample size you're going to get an unbalanced result one way or the other.

+ On that note I wish drivers were made aware of CBDR

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_bearing,_decreasing...

> Instead what I wanted to call out is that even if infinitely careful and drive defensively without fail you can still get into an accident, and you don't need to be hunted down or intentionally collided into+.

And again, seems to be massively different depending on the country. Locally, ~60% of motorcycle drivers claim to never have been in any accident, and that's including even careless people, so surely the claims of "even careful motorbike drivers will be in a accident" are over-exaggerated.

> (60% of the riders in my case)

60% of the riders still alive?

I won't ruin the surprise for you, go ahead and read the source I put :)

If she was obscured by an A-pillar she was likely riding too far to the side of the road.

There's a reason that we have safety classes, and it's that being safe is emphatically not intuitive.

You're much, much safer on the center wheel track.

I don't mean to be rude or accuse anyone, it's just that this kind of blind confidence gives everyone the wrong ideas.

> If she was obscured by an A-pillar she was likely riding too far to the side of the road. [...] You're much, much safer on the center wheel track.

I won't spend time detailing the whole situation but you could not be further from what happened.

The situation is extremely clear cut: someone speeding around a turn and running over another who had both the green light and right of way, impacting in a way that cannot possibly be ignored, then crossing two red lights is 100% responsible.

It's precisely good safety practices that _saved_ her life.

What if the mistake was riding a bicycle? You don't seem to be coming at this from the perspective of someone who is really thinking about safety.

Sorry to be callous about it. You're understandably angry. It's one thing to say you accept the risks of a risky behavior, and yet another to declare nothing could have been done.

It’s absolutely sick that we think of cycling as being dangerous and risk seeking behaviour.

I’m coming from a part of the world that doesn’t needlessly look down on cycling (its common for nearly everyone to cycle in Copenhagen/Malmö) and the idea that people should become drivers because its safer is a total tragedy of the commons and would not hold much weight here - the cities would be crushed under the necessary weight of roads and cars.

Other parts of the world need to get some more cars off the road by making safer infrastructure, it’s ridiculous.

There's no judgement. It is dangerous, as the grandparent's story illustrates, regardless of what anyone thinks about it. If your kid's life is on the line, and you absolutely have to get the answer right, and you cannot unilaterally effect public policy, what do you need to do?

> It's one thing to say you accept the risks of a risky behavior, and yet another to declare nothing could have been done.

By that metric you end up doing exactly nothing (UK data):

- riding a bike for 20 mi / 32 km: 1 micromort

- walking for 17 mi / 27 km: 1 micromort

- riding a motorbike for 6 mi / 10k: 1 micromort

- taking a sit on a chair: 1.3 micromort

- taking a bath: 0.3 micromort

- night in hospital: 75 micromort

Yes, walking is actually worse per unit of distance. I hope you don't sit on chairs too much, nor routinely enjoy taking baths.

> If your kid's life is on the line

Oh but would you even take the risk of having one?

- Giving birth (micromort): Sweden 50 , UK 80, USA 170

Even if you're an incredibly skilled and careful rider, there are a multitude of accident types that are just completely out of your control. If you hit a diesel spill on a roundabout, the outcome is pure fate. Defensive riding only gets you so far - staying at home is the only realistic way to defend against the possibility that the driver in the next lane will spill his coffee and swerve into your path, or a driver waiting at a junction will abruptly pull out in front of you because he wasn't looking.

At least as importantly, the consequences of accidents are vastly magnified for motorcyclists. I know of people who have died in relatively low-speed crashes because they were unlucky enough to slide straight into a piece of road furniture or land head-first on a kerb. If you look at the accident statistics, a large proportion of fatalities and serious injuries involve low-powered motorcycles travelling at ordinary speeds on ordinary urban roads.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...

You can greatly reduce pull out crashes by "presenting" when you see waiting cars, a defensive riding technique that more or less means driving in an S so that you can be noticed.

There's a surprising amount of agency involved in crashes. Learn blind spots and stay out of them, don't ride on the side of the road, only do things cars can't do when you're 200% sure the car you're passing won't swerve/turn/overtake. This includes accelerating like a hypercar, which many motorcycles can do.

> driver in the next lane will spill his coffee and swerve into your path

You can significantly reduce that risk by simply staying away from others and avoiding situations with a large speed differential. If the lane next to you is going 20mph, don't go 40+ next to them.

There are a lot of these things you can do, that most people don't because "it's not their responsibility".

Risk is a product of likelihood and potential seriousness of consequences. The reason I consider motorbikes too risky is that the potential seriousness of consequences is extremely high if you're going at any reasonable speed.

And to flip the presentation of your stat around, that means 40% of motorbike riders have been in an accident. That sounds really high to me given the potential consequences!

The seriousness of consequences is very high, but the chance of getting them is reasonable if you're well trained.

Consider that: most motorcyclists are there to have fun, so might have high risk behaviours, most motorcyclists are extraordinarily poorly trained, and it's a very high skill cap vehicle that requires ample training even for braking and evasive actions.

Also consider that it's a very small vehicle and those evasive actions have a high likelihood of squeezing through and avoiding almost any crash, and that the rider is often not even part of the crash they just slide to a stop.

> And to flip the presentation of your stat around, that means 40% of motorbike riders have been in an accident. That sounds really high to me given the potential consequences!

It sounds scary because it involves every type of accident, even minor ones. Useful to think about how many cars have ever been in accidents too, which should be around the same. The problem with motorcycle accidents is the fatality rates, just as you say, not the percentage of minor+major accidents.

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