Let's Ride (18 page)

Don’t ever believe anyone’s turn signals. The person may be driving down the road totally oblivious to the fact that his or her turn signal is flashing. If he or she does plan to change lanes, he or she is more likely to not use the signals at all. The person changing lanes without signaling a lane change will probably be the life-threatening situation you encounter most often. It will happen with such frequency that you’ll soon be surprised when someone does signal a lane change and doesn’t pull into your lane while you are occupying it.

To prevent this you need to be completely aware of what everyone on the road is doing at all times. The best way to determine if a person is about to change lanes isn’t to watch his or her turn signal; it’s to watch his or her front tires. Before a car can change direction, its front tires have to turn. Where the front tires turn, the car will follow. If you see the tires turn toward your spot on the road, you have an extra split second to react, find a safe space, and move out of harm’s way.

Watching the front tires of cars is especially useful for alerting you when oncoming cars are about to make a left turn across your lane. This is an exceptionally dangerous situation. Unfortunately it’s also a common occurrence—I’ve been almost taken out by oncoming cars making unsignaled left turns in front of me more than all other near misses combined. To be fair to other drivers, motorcycles are hard to see in the best conditions; when they are coming right at you, they don’t present a very large profile and are even easier to miss. Factor in the 50 percent chance that the oncoming driver is distracted because his main squeeze is “sexting” him, and for all practical purposes you’re invisible.

Because of this you’ll likely have someone making a turn across your lane of traffic on a weekly basis. Sometimes it will be on a daily basis. And it won’t always happen at obvious intersections. Often the person will be turning into a driveway or a parking lot that you might not have seen. The other driver may even be making a U-turn. I lost a friend in December 2009 because a van made an unsignaled U-turn and pulled out just as he was passing by. And this man was as experienced a rider as I’ve ever known.

You can’t prevent this situation, but you can prepare for it, and, as I’ve mentioned, one of the best ways to do that is to watch the front tires of other vehicles. If a car is coming at you, watch its left front tire. Position yourself so that you’re as far away from the vehicle as possible, and ride in a place that will leave you room to get out of the way should you see the other vehicle’s left wheel start to turn in your direction.

Watching the front tires of other vehicles won’t make you invincible, but it will give you extra time to react to danger. If you are paying attention and notice the instant someone turns a front tire toward your lane, you’ll have an extra fraction of a second to react, and that fraction of a second could save your life. But this only helps if you’re aware of your surroundings. To be effective, your reaction will have to take into account every other numb-nuts driver on the road. You won’t be gaining much if you swerve to miss a car moving into your lane from the right and accidentally hit the car in the lane to your left.

You’ll also have to be aware of all the nonvehicular hazards. For example, when you’re riding along a line of parked cars, it’s just as likely that a dog or a child will run out from between the parked cars as it is that one of the parked cars will pull out in front of you. There’s no way to predict the behavior of an animal or a child; the best you can do is try to identify places where an animal or a child might possibly emerge onto a road. Be aware of your surroundings, cover your front brake lever, and be prepared to make an emergency stop the instant you see something moving into your path of travel.

Sometimes the nonmoving hazards can be as deadly as the moving ones. You need to be aware of road conditions that could lead to a loss of traction, like rain, dirt, leaves, railroad tracks, potholes, oil, antifreeze, ice, and sand or gravel buildup. Debris is especially dangerous when you encounter it in a curve. It tends to build up on the outside edge of a curve, so you need to give this area extra attention when you are scanning the road in a corner.

If there is debris in a corner, slow down to give yourself time to maneuver around it. If it takes you by surprise and there isn’t enough time to avoid it, don’t panic and hit the brakes. This will upset your chassis and increase the chances that you’ll lose traction and crash. Instead, maintain a steady speed through the corner. If you’ve slowed down to a safe speed before entering the corner, you should be all right. If you are going too fast and need to slow down in a corner, stand the bike up for a brief moment, brake, then immediately countersteer back into the corner. If you react quickly, you should be able to maintain control of your motorcycle, but if you stand the bike up and brake for more than a split second, there’s a good chance you’ll run off the road.

Even the paint on the road itself can be hazardous. The paint of the center stripe and at the edge of the road, or in a crosswalk, or warning of an approaching railroad crossing, or words such as
STOP
AHEAD
can get as slippery as mud or ice, especially when wet. If you have Speed Channel, watch a motorcycle road race in the rain some time. You’ll see that even the best riders in the world will crash the instant their tire hits some wet paint on the surface of the racetrack.

The paint doesn’t even have to be wet to be dangerous. Sometimes when the temperature gets high enough, the paint starts to melt and turn into a substance that resembles slippery wet vinyl. When your tire hits this, your whole bike can slide to one side or the other. If you’re not prepared or overreact, you can find yourself doing a face plant into the pavement. Always treat paint on pavement as a low-traction surface, especially when the weather has been wet or extremely hot.

MAKING YOURSELF VISIBLE

I
N ADDITION TO BEING
aware of your surroundings and the other drivers, you need to make other drivers aware of you. When another driver says he didn’t see the motorcyclist he just killed, he’s most likely telling the truth. Motorcycles are small vehicles compared with all the four-wheeled traffic on the road, and it’s easy for other drivers to miss seeing them.

Your job is to make that less easy. It helps to wear bright-colored clothing and helmets, or even wear vests and riding suits made of reflective high-visibility material. You might even want to consider getting a brightly colored motorcycle. I find that when I’m riding a brightly colored bike, say yellow or orange, I have a lot fewer situations where people make left turns in front of me than I do when I’m riding a black bike.

But I’m somewhat limited in what I can wear when it comes to reflective vests. I’m a member of a club, and one of the club’s bylaws is that I have to wear a garment prominently displaying that club’s insignia when I ride. Plus I like black motorcycles, so I start out with two strikes against me. Even so, there’s a lot I can do to make myself more visible when I’m riding, like riding with my high beam on during the day. This goes a long way toward getting the attention of other drivers.

I also make a point of always signaling my lane changes and turns early, giving other drivers time to notice my bike and see what I’m going to do next. When I change lanes, for example, once I’ve looked in my mirrors and determined that the lane I’m moving into is clear, I activate my turn signals early and sometimes even supplement the turn signal with a hand signal, just so there is no question about my intentions. I get stopped by the cops all the time (I think they watch too much television and believe everything they see). Often the cops will say they stopped me because I didn’t use my turn signal. When they say this, I know I’m dealing with a dishonest cop, because I
always
use my turn signal.

Another trick I’ve developed for making myself more visible is to give my brake pedal a light tap, even when I’m not slowing or stopping, just to make my brake light flash and get the attention of cars that may be behind me. And I’m not afraid to use my horn. I don’t give a damn about being polite when it comes to life-or-death situations, and if another driver doesn’t see me, my life is in danger. If it takes a blast from my horn to let the other driver know I’m there, then I’ll blast my horn.

One thing to remember: even if you think you’ve got the attention of another driver, don’t bet your life on it. The driver might be looking right at you—you may even think you’ve made eye contact with him or her—but in reality the person is looking right through you. Instead of seeing you, he or she could be looking at a cell-phone screen, reading a text message.

ZONES OF AWARENESS

T
O BE AWARE OF
what’s going on around you, scan your surroundings in a methodical way. Your eyes are your tools for getting information about what’s going on around you. To get the most out of them, you need to keep them moving all the time. Don’t let your eyes fixate on any one object for more than a fraction of a second. Once you’ve determined something isn’t a threat, move on to the next thing.

Scan all aspects of your surroundings, and don’t just focus on other traffic. Watch for animals, debris, and the condition of road surfaces. Keep your eyes open for piles of loose gravel or sand in corners, which can be as slippery as ice. Make sure you include your rearview mirror as part of the landscape you’re scanning, but also turn your head slightly to check your blind spots, especially when turning, stopping, or changing lanes (again, see the upcoming information about soft lane changes).

You need to pay more attention to some areas than others on a motorcycle. Imagine the region around your bike is the face of a clock. Because you are always traveling forward on a motorcycle, the area between eleven o’clock and one o’clock is the area from which danger will come at you most rapidly and most frequently, so this area should get the lion’s share of your time when scanning. Focus on your intended path. Concentrate on the area about twelve to fourteen seconds ahead of your bike, since you’ll need at least this much time to react in an emergency situation. Keep your eyes up. This will aim your vision ahead, where the greatest danger lies.

Watch for subtle clues, like a shadow on the road ahead. It might indicate some oil, fresh tar, or some other slippery surface that could cause you to lose traction and crash. Be aware of movement in the bushes on the edge of the road, which could be a sign that an animal is about to enter the road in front of you.

You need to make the area in front of you your primary focus, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore the other areas. You need to pay attention to what you see out of the corners of your eyes. A flash of movement might be a deer getting ready to jump out in front of you, or it might be a car pulling out of a driveway into your lane. Or that SUV barreling down on you in your rearview mirror might be driven by some texting fool who really doesn’t see you. Most danger will come at you from the front, but you need to be aware of all 360 degrees of your surroundings, from twelve o’clock back to twelve o’clock, especially at intersections.

INTERSECTIONS

I
NTERSECTIONS ARE THE MOST
dangerous places you can be on a motorcycle, because they are where other vehicles behave most unpredictably, but you can do a lot to minimize the danger. Remember, an intersection is anywhere that traffic can cross your lane of traffic. This means that driveways and other crossings are forms of intersections.

The most dangerous intersections are the odd ones where several roads converge at once. You’ll encounter these where multiple roads meet or where frontage roads run along a main road. The average car driver always seems to be confused to some degree; at complicated intersections, the degree of confusion spikes and people drive in an especially stupid manner because they don’t know what they are supposed to do.

Blind driveways and blind intersections have to run a close second to complicated intersections for degrees of danger, but they’re all dangerous. Following a few simple practices can make them less dangerous:

• Slow down when riding through any intersection. The more dangerous the type of intersection, the more you should slow down. Slowing down puts you in control of the situation by giving you more time to scan the intersection for potential dangers. The earlier you can detect possible danger, the more time you have to prepare to deal with it.
  
• Make certain an intersection is clear before you proceed through it. Be sure that the person in a stopped car isn’t just changing the CD in the stereo or applying makeup. If that is the case, the driver may finish doing whatever it is he or she is doing and pull into your lane just as you’re passing through the intersection.
  
• When passing through an intersection, be extra diligent about practicing the other safety techniques discussed elsewhere in this book: cover your front brake lever, watch the front tires of other vehicles, and position your bike so that you have the best visibility and are most visible, and so that you have the most safe space in which to maneuver.
  

When passing through an intersection while another vehicle is blocking your view, pay extra attention to possible left-turning vehicles that you might not see at first. If the vehicle blocking your view is in the left lane and you’re in the right lane, you can position yourself for the best view by riding on the far right side of your lane, positioning yourself as far away from potential left-turning vehicles as possible. If you’re following the vehicle, your best position might be on the far left side of the lane, where you’ll be most visible to the turning vehicle.

As you prepare to stop at an intersection, pay special attention to the vehicles behind you. Be even more careful if you’re stopping on a yellow light because a lot of people interpret a yellow light as a signal to floor it and drive like hell. That person may be looking at the light, or at traffic in the cross street, and might not even see you until he or she has run you down.