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Article: Why do Advanced Training? Why would anyone with a full motorcycle licence want to
shell out their hard-earned cash to improve their motorcycle riding skills,
especially when it's not a legal requirement in the If you are a motorcyclist, consider the following:
Let's think about some of these. We all know the statistics
- by any measure motorcyclists are many times more likely than other road users
to be killed or seriously injured in road traffic accidents. If you've had an
accident, don't just think, "Was it my fault or the other person's?"
Think, "How could I have avoided it?" and "What can I learn from
it?" On this latter question, try applying this to any near misses you've
had. Let's face it, we all make mistakes and a lot of the time we can get away
with it. The value in these is to learn from them, before we learn by bitter
experience.  Figures reproduced with permission from Road Casualties Great Britain:2004 © Crown Copyright What's even better, is to avoid the near misses by correcting poor riding that leads to them. Take a look at the accident triangle above. This cites accident statistics for motorcyclists during 2004 (currently the latest available detailed figures). Consider this: for every fatal accident there are many more involving serious injury; there are even more minor accidents where people are slightly injured; for every minor accident there are many near misses. We don't have official figures for non-injury bike accidents where damage occurs to the bike or for near misses in terms of motorcycle use on the road. However, in other areas where statistics are available (such as industrial accidents) near misses tend to be in the region of 300 to 600 times as prevalent as serious injuries and fatal accidents combined. Translated into biking terms this would mean in the region of 2-4 million near misses. And for every near miss there are lots of examples of poor riding (and driving by other road users) which combine together to create the near miss, or in the worst case a fatal accident. Whilst there may be one principal cause, most accidents are the result of several mistakes coinciding together. Remove just one of those mistakes and it could turn a fatal accident into a minor one, a near miss, or best of all, no incident at all. We can't control the mistakes of other people, but we can control the way we behave when we're out riding. If we can learn from others who've been trained to a higher standard, learned how to identify unsafe traits in how we ride and how to correct them, we may be able to avoid all of the above pitfalls (no guarantees - just significantly improved risk management). Let's take an all too common example
on UK roads. You are travelling on an urban road when you encounter a
queue up ahead. So you decide to filter past on the off-side of the
queue. Perfectly legal and acceptable in the UK if done properly.
Except
that instead of taking it at a steady 10-15 mph you continue on at 30
mph. You see that the road ahead of the queue is clear, encouraging you
to proceed, because you are nearly past the hold-up. However, you fail
to notice the junction to the right. You also fail to notice that the
car at the front of the queue is indicating to turn right into the
junction. Not so surprising, because instead of being positioned
towards the crown of the road as required by the Highway Code, the car
is in the middle of the left-hand side of the road, so off-set from the
queue so that its indicators are hidden from view until the very last
moment. You fail to notice that there is a break in the on-coming
traffic, giving the car an opportunity to carry out their intended
manouevre. The car driver presumes that they have right of way, hasn't
considered the possibility of a bike filtering past, fails to look in
their wing mirror or turn their head, so is completely unaware that you
are rapidly approaching from behind. They see that their window of
opportunity to turn is soon closing due to the presence of an on-coming
car, so they briskly pull away, turning straight across your path. By
the time you spot the danger, you are going too fast and it is far too
late to brake. You unavoidably hit the car side-on. As your bike
comes to a sudden stop, your forward momentum carries you over the top
of the car. You break both wrists and legs as they hit your bike's
handlebars on the way through - that much is pretty inevitable.
However, it's when you land the other side that lady luck really takes
over. If you land in a fortunate (!) manner, your shoulder will take
the brunt of the impact with the ground and you may break a
collar-bone. Aternatively your head may touch down first, coming to a
sudden stop while the rest of your body catapults over. Your neck is
broken at the first or second vertebra and you either die instantly,
are permanently paralysed and have to feed through a straw for the rest
of your life with 24 hours-a-day care, or are left in a persistent
vegetative state. I leave it to you to decide which of these options is
the least desirable for yourself and your loved-ones.
The point of labouring this example is that this one accident is a catalogue of in the region of 10 errors, some by yourself and some by the car driver, all combining into a fatal or at least life-changing event. UK legal precedent puts you as the rider as the principal guilty party, but in the circumstances that is academic. You can't control the actions of the driver, but if you had adjusted your actions in any of a number of ways the whole incident could have been avoided: keeping your speed differential down between yourself and traffic you are filtering past; scanning the scene ahead to determine the reason for the queue and planning your avoidance strategy (the best being to find a gap to get back into the queue of the traffic behind the turning car, or if not to stop behind the car and wait for it to turn before proceeding); most important of all, NEVER overtaking on the approach to a junction. This is one of the most common motorcycling accidents, yet it is COMPLETELY AVOIDABLE by YOU, the rider. Other accidents are much more categorically the other road-user's fault, but that does not mean that they are unavoidable. And while we're on the subject of the accident triangle, here's another thought. For many of us the way we ride is influenced by how safe we feel. What makes us feel safe on the road? If you've recently had an accident you may not feel very safe and your confidence may be low, so you may well ride more cautiously for a while. But after a while if you have no accidents and get away with any near misses, you can get lulled into a false sense of security. It may have been because you've been lucky rather than because you've been riding safely. Think about the category "Examples of bad riding habits" in the triangle. You may have them, but if they don't coincide with other factors to result in an accident, you may not realise it, so you go on riding badly. Until one day our luck gives out. Don't wait until you learn from bitter experience or it's too late to learn anything more at all - let someone with the right experience and training observe your riding and help you improve to become safer. One of the biggest issues that rider training groups and the police face is rider attitudes. In today's post-modern society, reason seems to have taken a back seat, with many riders seeking to experience the thrills of riding to the utmost, with little consideration for their own safety, the safety of other road-users or for the negative perceptions of motorcyclists they foster in the non-biking public. Such riders often have over-inflated ideas of their riding skills, so consider advanced training to be unnecessary, have scant regard for the law and highway code and consider the police an enemy to be thwarted at every opportunity. Other road-users are an obstruction on the road which really belongs to them. The speed limit is the speed that they can get up to in the space available. Invariably they will be riding the sports bike with the current highest recorded horse-power or top speed available and then will tune it some more. (I'm not saying all sports-bike riders or riders with tuned bikes are like this - there are lots of perfectly responsible ones.) They probably only come out of the woodwork on sunny Sunday afternoons. They may have honed their riding on several track days such that they are pretty quick on a circuit. However, the hazards on a race track are far fewer than on the public roads. Now I'm a great fan of track days (take a look at the Picture page on this website). You can learn a great deal about bike control and push closer to the limits of your bike's and your own capabilities in a relatively safe environment. It can be an incredible confidence builder. However, tracks don't usually have lamp posts, junctions, traffic lights, white lines, overbanding, inspection covers and most important - traffic coming the other way.You are far less likely to encounter an unannounced and untreated deisel spill on a track. Put simply, the skills you need on the roads are very different from and in some respects more complex than those for the race track. Other riders are extremely safety conscious, so much so that they lack confidence. They may use the performance of their bikes on the straights - after all, lots of horses at the twist of a wrist can be extremely intoxicating. But when they approach a bend they brake hard, wobble round the bend and start all over again. What they lack is smoothness. The problem is, the less smooth you are, the more you upset the handling of your bike through hard braking or jerky use of the throttle, especially when cranked over round a bend. This gives the feeling of being out of control, which erodes your confidence even further. It's a downward spiral. Also, you lose momentum going through bends and get overtaken by all the faster riders coming out of them - more negative reinforcement of your confidence. In recent years the otherwise improving accident statistics
for bikers in the The UK DSA bike test covers basic riding skills. However, as with passing your driving test, you only really start learning properly when you've consigned your L-plates to the dustbin. If you've recently passed your test, you may be short on experience, but you can enhance your skills and become safer, before you learn through bitter experience! At the other end of the spectrum are people who have been riding for years and never seen the need for further training. Sure, these people may have become more skilful at handling their machines, but it's so easy for them to get into bad habits and if no-one points them out to them, these become ingrained and very difficult to dislodge. Add to this a dose of over-confidence and only luck keeps them from the A&E department. Advanced riding techniques start with GOOD OBSERVATION. Observing all of the hazards on the road - in front, from behind (in both cases in both the near and far distance), to the sides and beneath your wheels - enables you to develop a constantly evolving RIDING PLAN to make safe progress. The earlier you identify the hazards, the more time you give yourself to act appropriately and the more smoothly you will ride. The better you anticipate and assess the hazards ahead and the more smoothly you ride, the faster you will be - YES REALLY! And the more confident you will be and the more you will enjoy your riding. There are classroom 'theory' lessons you can go to which teach you these things in more detail. However, once you've done this (or even without it) by far the best way to learn is to do it on the road, with a skilled instructor observing you and giving feedback to help you improve your riding. It's amazing what half a day or one day can do - and you get to spend a lot of that time riding your bike on the road - isn't that what biking is all about? So, advanced motorcycle training really is a good idea. No,
it's not mandatory in the © fastfish 2007 |
