91–100 of 104 posts
Found my friend that died in 2002, though it only reported his death and not his fiancee's as well. What a sad nitpick! :(
Maybe the fiancee's icon is placed under their icon?
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Friends don't let friends ride Kawasakis, especially Ninjas. My pet theory is that each motorcycle has a use or personality, and after riding it for a while your behaviour ends up matching the personality of the bike. BMW tourers make you want to ride the curves from coast to coast, but do so safely. They don't mind a bit of speed, but are also content to cruise at legal limits. Harleys want you to cruise the straigh…
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…
Dual purpose bikes are indeed harder to approach - the 1200GS Adventure I own is a huge tall and bulky machine. It took me a long time to get into them, and I started out with the smaller 650 GS series. They are however remarkably easy to ride, and to do so in almost any condition. They make great commuter bikes as you are much higher and generally have great luggage capacity and robustness for the occasional spill. However you are essentially right - they are not as good as a pure-purpose bike for a particular application. You can dial in your degree of off and on roadability. KTM does the best hard core adventure series, while take your pick for the soft roaders of dubious merit. If you do get into it then BMW run excellent (though rare) off road courses. We all had our bikes, mine a 1200GS, fully airborne on several occasion on my course. And there's a really scary photo from that same course on my eponymous blog header.
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I emphasize that enough - riding after any alcohol is temporary citizenship. But aside from not drinking or rising like an idiot the biggest thing we motorcyclists can do to increase our safety is to wear a high visibility jacket. It creates a noticeable difference in the percentage of other road users that see you, which addresses the major cause of accidents. Protective gear is a last resort - it's better to avoid…
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…
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Highway / motorway riding is excruciatingly boring, even in the absence of speed limits. I've ridden from London to Kiel in Germany and back a couple of times, via France and Luxembourg, and found it infinitely preferable to avoid motorways, even though it takes 3 days rather than one (long) day per leg. Doing 200km/h+ gets old really fast when you're going in a straight line. If you've got speed limits and intend on…
It's funny that you recommend a twin 650 or mono 600 as a starter bike. Not so long ago, these would be considered big boy bikes, suicidal for a beginner. I wonder what changed, the simple availability of bigger bikes or the improvement of bike safety ? As for me, I'd recommend a tiny 250cc or even 125cc for a starter. A year or two later, you can always get a bigger one safely.
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.
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Highway / motorway riding is excruciatingly boring, even in the absence of speed limits. I've ridden from London to Kiel in Germany and back a couple of times, via France and Luxembourg, and found it infinitely preferable to avoid motorways, even though it takes 3 days rather than one (long) day per leg. Doing 200km/h+ gets old really fast when you're going in a straight line. If you've got speed limits and intend on…
Friends don't let friends ride Kawasakis, especially Ninjas. My pet theory is that each motorcycle has a use or personality, and after riding it for a while your behaviour ends up matching the personality of the bike. BMW tourers make you want to ride the curves from coast to coast, but do so safely. They don't mind a bit of speed, but are also content to cruise at legal limits. Harleys want you to cruise the straigh…
Not quite sure yet how this influences my recent urge to start riding motorcycles. There seems to be a (near) 1:2 ratio between motorcycle and vehicle fatalities. I already knew motorcycle riders were 5 times more likely to get in accidents, and those accidents were 35 times more likely to result in very serious injury. In my life so far I've been in one small fender bender. This does confirm some of the self-imposed…
I ride a motorcycle. They say if you're a lifetime rider, odds are you are going to get in one major crash in your lifetime. Both my uncles, several neighbors, and my grandfather have been in wrecks (none lethal, thank god), but everyone of them knows someone who died in a motorcycle accident it seems. I dumped my bike once, nothing serious, but I'm still overly cautious while riding. My big suggestion is to act as i…
As for cars breaking the law- don't act like they are about to, but don't trust them. Don't be surprised when they DO screw up, and have a plan.
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Something like 70% of single-vehicle motorcycle collisions involve alcohol, so that's the big one to avoid. Here are my tips, from 17 years of riding and commuting by motorcycle: * Avoid alcohol before riding (edit: personally, I never ride within six hours of consuming any alcohol). * Wear high-quality, full-body protective gear. * Avoid rush hour when possible, particularly evening rush hour when drivers are tired,…
Yes, wear protective gear. Always Go outside and have a good look at the surface of the road. Remember when you were a kid, how much it hurt if you were running and fell and skinned your knees? Now imagine running flat out and diving face first onto the road - feel the asphalt tearing your legs and arms Now imagine the same thing, but this time you're travelling at 30mph The difference between having large amounts of…
That is to say, it just comes off in sheets, like how you take off your t-shirt.
Fun, huh?
This is an interesting dataset -- too bad it's such a boring map. Two ways it could be improved: 1. Allow filtering by year, by type of death. 2. Allow data to be compared (deaths by state, by type, by year) in a non-map based form. I'm sure there are more...
It is strange, three people I knew from my college died on a very small motorcycle with a very small curb on the road(two young girls and one boy, no helmet). I could not believe it, it made no sense for three people to die on such a small danger(I have seen MBT riders so much times do things x10000 more dangerous).
Four young men and women from my village also died as they return from a Spanish fiesta on the night.
In the North of Spain and Portugal non official "rallies" are the first cause of dead on young people.
What is strange is that until looking at this map, I strangely believed those accidents were "special", but it seems there are not.