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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.
Because of what we would see, neither of us has ever ridden a motorcycle on the street.
I consider myself lucky that I didn’t have a serious accident.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
It's because they feel you're creating a dangerous situation for everyone around you for your own convenience and disregard for others.
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.
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.
- Dave Karlotski, "Season of the Bike"
https://the751.com/1998/06/15/season-of-the-bike/
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 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...
$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...