US Road Fatalities 2001-09 mapped with OpenStreetMap

For sure, if sitting in a chrome armchair floating across the slowly-changing landscape is your thing, rather than actually riding... :-P

Harley rider here. I'm with you. I like to be able to look around a little bit rather than be forced to watch for sudden turns all the time.

I did have a ninja zx6r for a few years, and it was a lot of fun. And I did prefer the curvy roads with that bike. Rides were short and intense, like a roller coaster.

But if I'm going on a 500 mile ride, I don't want it to be a roller coaster. Or even a 50 mile ride for that matter.

I hear you man. For me, a 4-5 hour ride on the highway on some beautiful country is better than a week's vacation. Some good noise-isolating headphones (I had a loud bike), relaxing music, and some nice breaks at cheap gas stations for a drink here & there --- that's just perfect.

The manufacturers haven't produced small bikes for a while, other than dirt bikes. There's only a handful of small street bikes being produced, like the Ninja 250 and the Night Hawk.

I'd recommend a 125cc for learning basic roadcraft too, particularly if you aren't riding in the US. But the US is highly car-oriented, with a lot of big wide roads and impatient people driving automatics. It's not necessarily easy to go safely from A to B on a bike that has a hard time exceeding 55mph and takes its time getting there. So I think a starting out on a bigger bike makes sense in the US. Not that it's less dangerous than it used to be; rather, that the alternative, annoying the drivers behind and around you, is even worse.

I rode a 125cc scooter for over a year before I got a 125cc geared bike, and rode that for about 6 months before I got an ER6f (the same thing as the Ninja 650r), and my current scooter is an SH300. There are lots of things you learn about on a smaller bike, particularly in the city: observations, road positioning, hazards. Pedestrians, cyclists and cars emerging from gaps in traffic without warning. Truckers stopping to let a pretty girl cross the road while you're going down the inside bus lane, and of course you can neither see over nor through a truck. In the city, you learn to be acutely suspicious of gaps forming and avoid riding close to stopped cars, whether parked or not.

But many of these things are either specific to big city navigation and filtering, or you would learn in a car in any case. In a typical American city, you don't have the kind of filtering you see in London, much less somewhere like Taipei, and you can take for granted that the guy considering getting a bike can drive and probably has for many years.

Furthermore, there's a whole other level of learning that only happens when you're on a big bike. A 125cc geared bike is so incredibly light - it's almost like a bicycle - that you have no worries about dropping it when stopping using poor technique - braking with the front while turning, for example. And it has so little torque you'll never notice a cold rear tire slipping out on an aggressive corner, because outside of gravel on the road or wet manhole covers, it'll never happen. Not to say it can't be fun. I had plenty of launch practice: hi-rev clutch-slipping to clutchless shifting, eking out every scrap of acceleration I could. But it's not long before the stuff you're learning isn't transferable to a big bike.

So I think it depends on how much road experience you have, where you're riding, and what kind of riding you plan on doing (cities favour smaller bikes). A modern 250 or 500 probably would make a better beginner's bike. But 500cc bikes are pretty rare these days, and while 250cc are just on the edge of enough power, I don't think you'd want to have one for more than a few months, unless you're using it as an alternative to a scooter in the city.

What happened is basically a 650 twin or 600 single makes half the power of a 600 four (and with a more friendly torque curve), so they are offered up as a compromise- 'It's not as tame as a EX250, but at least it's not a ZX6R'.

As a bonus, they are honestly very solid balanced bikes you could ride your whole riding career. The EX250's have notable shortcomings if you will only own one bike, for many years. I certainly advise starting on a smaller bike and upgrading, but many people obstinately refuse that course. I'm not sure if they are afraid of losing money in the process, or if it's an ego thing.

A Ninja 650r is not a Ninja like a ZX-R. It has the Ninja name in the US, but it is not a supersport bike; it's a sport tourer. It's a parallel twin, and is actually less aggressive to ride than the Suzuki SV650 - it doesn't even have clip-on handlebars. It has an upright seating position, not crouched over. At 70bhp it's got lower power than most of the detuned 600cc inline-4 standards.

Personally, I don't like dual-purpose bikes. I think they're too tall, and I never have need nor desire to go off-road in the least; for me, sport-touring is optimal. I think dual-purpose bikes are a bit like urban 4x4s: most never go off-road, and when they do, they're not actually very good at it. But of course this is a personal preference.

A second vote for the BMW 1200 GS, reliable, easy to maintain, handles well, great tourer.

I'd recommend a Ducati Monster 620 Dark, circa 2004 - 2006. It offers an incredibly wide torque curve so traffic isn't a chore, very low center of gravity saddle, relatively upright riding position, naked bike for more interest at lower speeds, and a very easy but engaging ride. All this in a package that won't "eat your soul", but instead offers classic beautiful Italian machine lines. Price is right too.

That said, I now ride an MV Agusta F4 Brutale, which seems to offer sport bike performance without the soul eating. There's never, ever, an urge to ride wheelies downtown to show off your uber Ninja neon green decals.

Temporary citizenship? Is this some idiom I'm not familiar with?

I'm going to disagree with you, somewhat.

I see increasing numbers of riders with high-visibility gear. I've always been a fan, so I'm happy to see it. However, I've noticed that, more often than not, very little of the jacket/pants are actually visible when the rider is on the move. The helmet and shoulders are the most visible in oncoming traffic, and all too often the shoulders will be some darker color, meant to contrast with the high-viz torso and arms!

High-viz gear will unquestionably help with traffic to your sides and behind you, but I think a high-viz helmet is significantly more valuable than a jacket, and a modulated (flashing) headlight is more valuable than either, from the front.

I'm of the opinion that learning solid skills and practicing them regularly will contribute far more to healthy and longevity than gear alone. By skills, I mean more than just stopping and turning, I also mean the ability to read traffic and maintain focused awareness of absolutely everything around you.

By the way, my favorite piece of gear is my one-piece Aerostich Roadcrafter. Some elements of the design are getting outdated, but I'm literally able to put it on or take it off in under ten seconds, and the one-piece design means I always wear full protection. I would choose a different two-piece for touring, but for everyday riding, the Roadcrafter is hard to beat.

To contribute to the part about skin ripping away- when your speed is great enough, and thereby the friction and the heat... your skin does something called "sheeting".

That is to say, it just comes off in sheets, like how you take off your t-shirt.

Fun, huh?

Absolutely, especially in the river.

You've never seen third/second avenue with a green light at 14th street. Traffic rockets through there, except during rush hour.

Pedestrian and bicycle fatalities outnumber car occupant fatalities in Manhattan for this reason.

I saw a billboard last time I drove through NYC, explaining why the speed limit is 35 rather than 45. It basically said that if a car hits a pedestrian going 35, the pedestrian will probably live, but if a car hits a pedestrian going 45, the pedestrian will probably die.

A car can kill a pedestrian/bicyclist/motorcyclist at surprisingly low speeds. It's almost impossible to kill someone in a car at under 25 MPH or so (unless they drive off a cliff or something), but pedestrians can be killed by cars going as slowly as 10 MPH (they get knocked off their feet and hit their heads, usually). I read a very interesting paper by the NTSB or IIHS about that, but can't find it now.

Your New York hate is just adorable - and belongs back on Reddit, not here.

I spent a weekend in Chicago and saw more pedestrians in near-death situations than in the rest of my life, cumulative. Where on Earth does that come from?

Unless there's a drop of rain on the road, then all bets are off and everyone drives 80 miles an hour less than the speed limit.

Something I've noticed in Canada - is each province despises the drivers of the province to their east. So BC complains about Alberta, Alberta about Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan about Manitoba... and so on. Seems the same thing happens west to east down there too.

This is a horrifying thought. The west coast drivers in Colorado are absolutely horrid, I guess it's a good thing we don't have many New Yorkers then ;).

I live in Manhattan, grew up in the Midwest, went to college in the South, and have accumulated a couple thousand miles of driving in southern California.

While New York drivers are definitely aggressive, accelerating and braking quickly and making sharp, relatively high-G turns, they are also generally polite, focused, good drivers. They let people in when they need to be let in, they take turns when they need to take turns, they don't run lights, they don't tailgate at high speed, they (usually) use their signals, and they are defensive about pedestrians. They have to be this way to survive the traffic conditions in Manhattan and its freeways: if you don't stay on your game, you get into an accident really quickly. If you get over the aggressive aspect, I think they're some of the better drivers I've encountered.

Southern California, by contrast, always drives me insane. Drivers there just don't seem to think about the implications of what they're doing: they tailgate at 80 MPH, they won't let you in if they don't have to, they definitely won't yield to pedestrians if there's not a stark reason to. I've even seen a collection of cars on I-105 honk maniacally while weaving all over and nearly smashing a poor car that had a blow-out rather than make room for him to get off the road and other drivers to navigate around, even though there was plenty of time to see what was going on, slow down, and work around him. The nearest equivalent I've seen in New York, where a car was stalled out on the FDR (a comically narrow three-lane highway down the east side of Manhattan), had cars slowing down and letting traffic cleanly merge around the disabled automobile.

I don't know why there's such a stark difference. I suspect it has to do with a mixture of west coast drivers driving more, and therefore feeling more comfortable in their cars, combined with wider roads, higher speed limits, and fewer pedestrians. But I think both that New York drivers get a bad rap, and at least southern Californian drivers get an overly good score, when people discuss west- v. east-coast drivers.