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Comment by selfhifive | Hacker News Reader

Places where cars and motorcycles/scooters arrived at the same time have more people using motorcycles/scooters.

They're cheaper, more fuel efficient, and easier to park.

And where there's weather to support that. Motorcycles are death traps in places that have winter.

To be fair, so are automobiles. Stopping distance in wintry conditions can go up by an order of magnitude. 4WD/AWD does little if anything to ameliorate that, though some drivers seem to believe it does, based on my observation. Would you rather be crashed into by someone who thinks their 5000 lb pickup or SUV makes them invincible, or a kid on a moped? At least the moped operator has some skin in the game.

No it's not even close. 20x more likely to die per mile driven.

I think their point is that while motorcycles are deadly for their riders, cars are still deadly, just not for the occupants.

I know what you're saying, but I think I take issue with "death traps".

In my younger, poorer years, I had only a motorcycle (and before that a 10-speed bicycle ... if that dates me) to get to work and community college in the middle of a Kansas winter.

I rode very, very slowly. And spilled once or twice (at low speeds). The highways were of course out of the question (but I avoided the freeway regardless of the weather).

But, yeah, I might have been about the only person out there on a bike/motorcycle in the worst of the blizzard.

20x more deadly per mile driven, all-weather, is a death trap.

What would that statistic look like if we removed the demographic that specifically purchases high powered motorcycles to drive in a risky manner?

Not a motorcyclist, but the classic study on motorcycle accidents found that motorists were responsible for 2/3 of crashes[1]. It's clear that there are plenty of reckless riders gunning for a Darwin Award, but overall what makes motorcycles dangerous is not their riders.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurt_Report

Your point is well taken, but there is some agency on the part of motorcyclists in not getting killed. I wear a white helmet, neon green onsie, and a high-viz airbag vest when I ride. I also won't ride impaired. I also make sure to take at least one safety training course per year. I am fastidious about following distances. I am constantly scanning for situations where drivers are likely to commit an error. I leave my bike in gear at stoplights and watch my rearview mirrors. I give myself an escape path.

Most of these things help me avoid killing myself on my bike, but they also reduce my risk of getting killed by others. The idea that there is a bimodal distribution of riders is pretty apparent to me. EDIT: There are likely many "car at fault" crashes where the motorcyclist, though legally in the right, could have avoided the crash.

That said, hell yeah motorcycles are dangerous even for this safety obsessed nerd. Further, I agree they are not a solution for everyone. My bike stays parked if I think I could encounter freezing road conditions. I love riding, but my bicycle is far more practical as transportation than my motorcycle is.

Cars would also look a lot safer if you didn’t look at the top slice of riskiest drivers. Apples to apples.

We haven't seen many electric motorbikes yet, though ebikes (bicycles) are taking off. It'd be interesting to see how the two merge (fast/powerful ebike vs electric motorcycle).

To me the main concerns are:

- Commodity vs personal: taxis, trains and hire-bikes are convenient from a shared-ownership perspective, but inconvenient in that you can better customise the experience of having you own vehicle.

- luggage & shelter: a bike / motorbike limits how much luggage you can carry. Also, a car is a much nicer environment that motorcycle leathers in all-weather; It's also easier to get in/out of a car than it is to change clothes.

I wonder if some of this can be improved by mere infrastructure: better dedicated roads highways for certain types of vehicle, better (secure) parking, city storage facilities for commuters etc.

I think inherent safety issues will keep ebikes classified as-is. A fast human humans can sprint 30km/h, and our skulls and skin can mostly survive a fall at that speed. Every ebike is limited to that speed because that's the safe speed. 40km/h doesn't feel much faster when you're doing it, but a fall at that speed is an order of magnitude more likely to need hospitalization.

I expect something between a velomobile and a tuktuk could be engineered to protect a rider from a fall, but where would you drive it? It wouldn't be safe to share a road with trucks, and but it would be a danger to cyclists.

Edit: We have the tech to do it right now--the homebrew combo of bafang motor and phaserunner controller can turn a mountain bike into a suicide machine. It would be a sensible upgrade for a dutch-style cargo bike though. Keep it locked under 30kph and you could take little kids on a grocery run. (Where city trail infrastructure exists.)

Where are you talking about? I love riding motorcycles, but I've also been to Bali and Vietnam and I do not want to live in that kind of traffic environment.

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