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Comment by AndrewSwift | Hacker News Reader

I wondered once if it would be possible to ride a motorcycle safely if I drove carefully (everyone I know who rides has been in at least one serious accident).

I thought: I could look at the data, but I see so many motorcyclists driving dangerously that the data wouldn't teach me much.

So then I thought: I bet if I look at the accident rate for women riders it would be interesting.

I found that in the UK, male riders have seven times the accident rate of female riders.

So I guess how you ride does make a huge difference.

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Age is another differentiator. Take young men out of the equation and you get a much better picture.

Another interesting stat is that the majority of motorcycle crashes are single vehicle accidents, ie. the rider going down by themselves. While this can be equipment failure, in most cases this will be crashing due to riding too fast or above skill level.

So yes, riding very carefully at safe speeds and avoiding dangerous situations (I choose my routes to avoid situations where drivers are likely to be in their phone — mostly freeways and freeway-like streets in cities) will make bikes a lot more safe.

Some guy out for a cruise laying his bike down after things got a little more spicy than her was prepared for mid corner is a fundamentally different kind of accident than someone T-boning a left turning car and going over the handlebars in commuting traffic.

Texting and driving probably accounts for a lot of minor bumps in stop and go traffic that cause inconsequential damage and obviously no injury and isn't really relevant to someone who texts and drives into stopped traffic at highway speeds.

Treating those sorts of accidents that are categorically different in both cause and effect one homogenous statistical blob really rubs me the wrong way.

This sadly does not say anything because the kilometers driven is unknown in this statistic, right? So it could be that female drivers do not drive that many kilometers compared to males, which results in less accidents.

Also, is this accidents total men / women? Then it would not even take into account, that there are significant more male riders.

GP didn't specify, but IIRC vehicle incident rates are usually specified in terms of distance driven/ridden, so the stats they were looking at may have already taken that into account.

In my experience the number of female riders is so small, that from a statistical point of view it becomes almost irrelevant.

Women also tend to ride smaller bikes, for obvious reasons.

It was deaths/km ridden.

This would be better. Still does not take into account bigger and smaller bikes. I find it extremely difficult to judge that. From my experience, you are absolutely right. Men seem to take higher risk and some of them the consequences.

That’s the worst stat. By trip would be much better.

Motorcyclists on average ride less than 3,000 miles a year, cars are 4-6x that. 90% of accidents are within 10 miles of the riders home.

There are so many ways to die on a motorcycle that are outside of your control. Someone could not be paying attention, make a mistake, not see you, be drunk, etc.

I knew someone at a previous company that was here one day then gone the next due to a non-highway accident caused by someone else IIRC.

It's sort of like being friends with someone who plays low-chance russian roulette for fun in their free time.

This might sound overly fatalistic but... everyone is playing low-chance Russian roulette all the time. I know multiple people who've died of random health issues far sooner than they should have, tomorrow isn't promised for anybody. May as well do one of the most fun activities ever invented by humans in the meantime

It simply comes down to riding like everyone's out to get you. Another comment summed it up nicely by saying you essentially have to position yourself assuming no one has explicitly seen you.

I've done a decent amount of miles like that and I've barely had any close calls.

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