Tony Raven said:Chris Malcolm wrote:
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:That convinced me to lie still and wait for the
ambulance rather than struggle to my feet and find my poor motorcycle,
which usually comes off a lot worse than me in these incidents.
Quoted message said:You make habit of doing that?
Well, if you mean stagger to one's feet, dazed and injured, to care
for the probably worse injured motorcycle, lots of motorcyclists do do
that, silly as it seems in retrospect. I suspect it comes of having a
strong personal relationship with the motorcycle, and having been very
recently knocked on the head.
But you might mean do I make a habit of having accidents. I used to
when I was a young fool. The incident I have described took place
because I was taking what I then and most other motorists still
consider to be acceptable risks, such things as assuming there is
nothing nasty round a blind bend, everyone relevant has seen you and
isn't going to do anything stupid, nobody is going to steam blindly
through the just-green light while you're running the just-red, etc..
In that unpleasant accident I did nothing technically wrong. I was
caught out by the combination of a bus driver and a van driver going
in opposite directions both of whom claimed not to have seen me, and
who both planned to overtake other vehicles while passing one another
without allowing for the space between which I was occupying.
In fact I suspect they both did see me, but both assumed that the
other wouldn't have been silly enough to start overtaking at the same
time, and once it had happened, they thought "oh well, the bloody
biker will simply have to get out of the way". As bikers frequently
can, in ways which are both mysterious and often scary to drivers. But
not always.
I thought about accidents a lot while I was in hospital, and decided
that rather than take the dinosaur Big Armour approach to traffic
hazards, I would take the mammalian strategy of being small, agile,
and intelligent, i.e., I would stick to motorcycles, and become an
extremely paranoid defensive rider who would not rely on "acceptable
risks" and other folk not doing stupid things, having seen me, etc..
The re-education wasn't easy, and slowed me down a lot at first until
I had established new skills and strategies, but I've never had an
accident in the 35 two-wheeled years since, if you don't count falling
over at slow speeds on very slithery stuff, which I sometimes do on a
pedal bike as well as a motorcycle. Before The Scary Accident, I used
to have an accident about once a year on a motorcycle, and once every
two years on a bicycle. And I didn't take them seriously because they
weren't serious and Weren't My Fault.
It's a fine point in the philosophy of traffic accidents which many
have failed to spot, that it is possible for an accident to both
Someone Else's Fault and nevertheless Avoidable By You. Many folk
assume that "Avoidable By Me" implies "My Fault", which is a point
they will not concede on principle, the well-established principle
that "I'm a pretty good driver, me". It is also not true that
avoiding the possible folly of others involves travelling around in
craven fear at pedestrian speeds. You do need to learn new skills,
which if you haven't got them do make it seem impossible. But if
bicycles were invented for the first time today, nobody would believe
that not only could most people learn to ride them, but actually ride
them safely in traffic.
--
Chris Malcolm [email hidden] +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]
