Two wheels, a few tradeoffs, and gas prices
blog.raed.dev
blog.raed.dev
My wife had a separate motorcycle accident on her Ninja 500r that she caused by turning left against oncoming traffic and getting T-boned. The car bumper hit her directly on the right foot, breaking most all the bones in her ankle, then flipping her over the hood and breaking her femur. She had to have bunch of bones in her foot fused, walks with a pronounced limp, and can't go to any event where she has to stand for more than 30 minutes at at time. We used to go to all kinds of rock concerts, now she has to skip the pit and is stuck in balcony seating.
Motorcycles can be convenient and a whole lot of fun, but do not underestimate the statistical likelihood of a life-changing accident, especially if you are in a position where you have dependents that you have financially and emotionally committed to. I have cats, they won't care if I eat it, so long as THEY get fed by someone.
Carry term life insurance and long term disability so you can support your dependents if killed or injured, which you should be doing regardless of the motorcycle if you have dependents.
A former neighbor died from slipping on his icy front steps. Again, carry proper insurance if you have dependents. You can die unexpectedly from things far less dangerous than motorcycles.
Existantials are always trivially true. But statistically:
> The lifetime odds of dying as a motorcyclist are roughly 1 in 726. While data specifically tracking "slipping on ice while walking" is rarely isolated on its own, it falls under the broader National Safety Council category for deaths by falls, which has a lifetime odds of 1 in 89.
However, if we compare reduced life expectancy:
> General lifetime falls reduce life expectancy significantly more across the whole population than motorcycle riding, but a motorcycle crash reduces a single rider's life expectancy far more severely.
> Riding a motorcycle poses a vastly higher immediate threat to your lifespan than the everyday risk of falling. On a per-hour basis, riding a motorcycle costs roughly 5 microlives per hour of operation (shaving 2.5 hours off your life expectancy for every hour you ride) because of high speeds and a lack of external frame protection. In contrast, the risk of general falling—despite including hazards like ladders, stairs, and slippery surfaces—costs the average person less than a small fraction of a single microlife per hour of daily movement. While falls ultimately claim more total lives because everyone is exposed to gravity daily, an individual actively trading riding time for walking time dramatically improves their statistical life expectancy by drastically lowering their microlife expenditure.
The relative danger of motorcycling was not my point.
My point was: Everyone's lifetime odds of dying are 1 in 1. You don't know what will get you but rest assured something certainly will. So, carry insurance if you have dependents.
This isn't morbid, BTW. It's incredibly freeing to know that your family will be financially okay in the unexpected event you are incapacitated or killed.
If you buy term life insurance that lasts while your dependents are minors, either you live the term and provide for them or you die early and provide for them.
I think we're talking past each other. I am going to call it here.
I consider myself lucky that I didn’t have a serious accident.
Because of what we would see, neither of us has ever ridden a motorcycle on the street.
Same. Used to do MX (Yamaha 250 2 strokes) when I was below 30 y/o, as well as off-road/dirt biking, but it's on the road that I got one terribly bad accident (flew over a car than ran a red light while I ran an orange one), with an XR 350, where I ended up unconscious and woke up without being able to see anything (freaking scary and I did last about an hour maybe? Don't remember but I woke up in the ambulance and only started seeing while at the hospital).
I also another crash as a passenger on a... Vespa. Insanely dumb crash.
Both times I escaped mostly unarmed (broke a thumb requiring surgery to put some kind of a nail in it and then remove it).
My brother got a terrible tank slapper at the absolute worst moment: usually you can accelerate to lift the front wheel to get rid of it but there were cars in front of him... He literally flew over his own bike (a Triumph Street Triple) without hitting anything: just due to the tank slapper. He thankfully stopped gliding before hitting the cars in front of him (and nearly got hit by his own bike).
I love bikes but I don't do any anymore and they do freaking scare me. As a father now they're actually my nightmare.
My brother bought a new Triumph (once more a Street Triple) and he's got a CBR 600RR for the track but I just quit motorbikes altogether.
> I have cats, they won't care if I eat it, so long as THEY get fed by someone.
Your wife and friends will care. Don't eat it. Glad your wife is OK: could have been worse.
I've also never been able to get anywhere close to 3l/100km. As soon as you move onto bigger displacement bikes, you're looking at around 6l/100km, which is comparable to a hybrid car that weights 5-6 times what the bike does! It's far from an extremely efficient mode of transportation given the significantly reduced utility.
Regardless, ride as long as you enjoy it, or until you have to recalculate the amount of risk you can afford!
It’s fun to ride motorcycles though.
> On a motorcycle, you’re in the environment instead of sealed off from it. Lavender above Grasse in June, a 5-degree temperature drop when the road cuts through a forest, leaning into corners with your whole body
Very romantic, but not very realistic. Most commuters need to show up for work in heat, rain, snow, etc.
>building homes next to jobs
This is almost certainly still "consuming less" in the US. You just cannot pack as much combined square footage + individual private outside space as most Americans are accustomed to next to all the jobs. (Without even getting into that people often change jobs, or have multiple household members working different jobs in different places.)
(This is where usually people say "well the non-generational-housing single-family-home is a dumb choice, or bad for mental health or society or whatever" but that would just take us back to debating about what sort of "consume less" is a "real" sacrifice or not.)
> public transportation
Here too I think that a 20-40 minute packed-standing bus or train car (as is the rush-hour case in cities where large numbers of people commute by public transit) is again "consuming less" than a vehicle that's essentially a private luxury pod (whether driving yourself, the car driving for you, or someone else driving you.)
Depends on how you define "next to": does (say) 5km count? Because you can get houses like these:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/70+Jackman+Ave+Toronto,+ON
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toron...
into neighbourhoods with densities where transit and cycling can practicable:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roncesvalles,_Toronto
You still have a (back)yard, and can have a garage (attached to a laneway).
Or perhaps something with less square footage (for more of a starter?):
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/125+Hampton+Ave,+Toronto,+...
As you can see from street view, lots of folks still own cars, but they go from being obligatory to optional for many activities.
That already exists, it's called a city. But cities are inevitably dirty, noisy and dangerous because they concentrate people by design, and many people, especially families, don't want to live in one.
Public transit has the same problems. Put many people in a small space and again you get something awful.
Too many close calls, and since giving it up lost five coworkers to accidents.
Still miss it all the time, but it's just not worth the risks. I don't even bicycle on public roads (in the US; I do in Japan) any longer due to too many close calls and several injuries in my social group.
But we also have much worse roads and people drive much more recklessly. But maybe this is risk compensation in action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation
- Dave Karlotski, "Season of the Bike"
At the end of the day, you can only control your own car, not the environment it's in.
Right now, I only have a big street bike with over 70 hp. But I remember from back in the day how much fun small engines are, so I’m thinking about getting something with 125cc or even 50cc again for riding around town. A Honda CB125F, Super Cub, Skyteam Skymax 125, or Mash Fifty. 125cc is more than enough! 50cc is really quite small, but it still gets you from A to B with plenty of fun, and you avoid the mandatory vehicle inspection that’s otherwise required here for all vehicles every two years.
It's because they feel you're creating a dangerous situation for everyone around you for your own convenience and disregard for others.
What they feel and what is reality can be two different things.
And the convenience is for other people as well: a motorcycle that is filtering is taking up one less 'slot' in the lane that can fit an extra car. The more people that get out of cars into other forms of transportation (motorcycle/scooter, bicycle, transit) allows the folks that "have" to take an automobile (car, van, truck) more space.
The whole point of our infrastructure is to move people (and goods) and not to move cars.
That’s supposing the motorcyclist would drive a car instead Bike are a bit more space efficient than cars but not by a fair margin, especially when parked because they don’t properly pack and piles up as much as bicycles. Public transport and walking are the best IMHO, you don’t even need to park.
$2500 for a vehicle which could most likely top out around 200 mph probably wasn't the smartest purchasing decision I've ever made. The only smart thing I ever did was there was always something suitably wrong with it I never took it out into the desert to see what the real top speed was.
My Fiat 500 has the same size engine and keeps me out of trouble. And around the same MPG...
I'd love an electric motorcycle to replace my previously owned motorcycle, though household rules say it can't happen until the kids are grown up, and for many of the same reasons as in TFA: environment, fun, etc.
One issue with electric motorcycles is that they are inherently disadvantaged by the fundamentally poor aerodynamics of motorcycles coupled with the fact that battery range doesn't scale down as well as it scales up - due to space constraints and fixed minimum weight overhead for inverters, etc.
This would be compounded because my use case would be longer distance pleasure rides, not daily commutes.
Not necessarily
https://www.craigvetter.com/index.html
Good web site to explore btw. Glad it's still up.
It's a moped-style bicycle that rides like a motorcycle and I HAVE NEVER OPERATED A MOTORCYCLE. Bicycle, yes. Motorcycle, no.
I'm going to have to find a large grassy area to practice riding on before this is useful. If I had it to do over, I'd pick something that's more bicycle than motorcycle. But I don't, so I just have to make do with what I did get.
Feel free to call me an idiot.
Commuting to work in peak hour, zipping past all the gridlocked traffic on the motorway (filtering is/was legal) and then cresting over the Auckland harbour bridge on a sunny day... Absolute bliss.
Except after 15 years I'm less convinced I'll own another motorcycle. Maybe I'll settle for an electric scooter instead.
Former motorcycle commuter here. The risks while commuting in a motorcycle in urban traffic (at least in the US), are significantly higher than riding for pleasure. I found that untenable after a while and resorted to the bus/train, and saved motorcycling for the weekend.
Everyone's tolerance is different of course, but after a week of lane splitting commuting I didn't feel like riding the backroads. It took the joy out of it for me.
I don't know what it's like in your city, but when I was riding my commute would be 20 minutes door-to-door versus driving/public transport that would easily take over an hour for the same journey. As someone who's perpetually late, that sort of time saving also skews your judgement of risk.
I rode 100K on Friday, fueled entirely by Coca Cola and gummy bears. Zero direct fossil fuel consumption! It also took 5 hours.
https://www.hejlfoundation.org/from-gas-tanks-to-gummy-bears...
If you’re not going so far, can an eMTB be even more practical?