Motorcycling: Road Hazards

We have been to quite a few funerals this month, and while it is always a sad event, it does give you a chance to meet members of your extended family who you might not have met before. The last time, many people seem to have heard of Mary Ann's scooter, and were asking us questions about it. And because some of the questions were kind of thought provoking I decided to do a write up.

First question: What about pot holes on a scooter with 13 inch wheels that is also capable of 140 kilometers per hour speed. This is a better response than what I gave verbally.

You do need to avoid potholes, more than you would in a car, and maybe more than a motorcycle with regular sized wheels. But on a two wheeled vehicle, you are always checking out the road surface, as that is one of your greatest hazards. Potholes are only one of the hazards, so is debris in the road: tire treads, big rocks, train tracks, streetcar tracks, gravel, leaves, ice, water puddles, dead animals, and oil puddles. In fact there are so many things to watch out for that I am always scanning the road surface. I swerve around anything suspicious even just a stain on the road. And I try to do this while also paying attention to traffic. But I never ever talk on the phone while riding, and rarely even attempt to talk to my passenger so at least I'm not too distracted.

A motorcycle or scooter is a single track vehicle, cutting in half your chance of hitting a pothole. Also your eyes are lined up on the track, meaning you don't need to sacrifice any mental brain power to compute the path of an off centre wheel. And don't fool yourself, even if you are doing it unconsciously, your brain has to work, and work harder to compute the path of the tire that is not lined up with the eye. Also helping you is a high viewpoint, and a vehicle that is quite good at dodging around, if you practice. And since I try to miss everything on the road, I do get a fair amount of practice. Also, with such a narrow vehicle you can move around quite a lot without sideswiping a car next to you.

If you do hit a pothole or other road hazard, in spite of all your efforts, surprisingly the scooter is usually not damaged unless it is a real big hazard, and those may damage cars too. Anyway, just because you hit a pothole you are not necessarily going to crash. The motorcycle or scooter has a fair amount of stability, and unless you are thrown off, will likely keep going. Many two wheeled vehicles have kept going even without the driver.

I had one incident in my first year of motorcycling that permanently tuned me in to road hazards. I was riding my Honda 175 on a bush road in Sierra Leone, probably at about 70 kph, when I hit a big rock sticking about six inches out of the road. I don't remember exactly what the rock looked like, but I do remember what happened to the motorcycle and me. The front wheel went over and bounced up in the air a bit, then came down just when the rear wheel hit the rock. For some reason the rear suspension could not absorb the hit, and so the back of the bike went high up in the air, and so did I because the seat is right over the rear wheel. The bike rode along with only the front wheel touching the ground. I was no longer sitting on the seat, in fact the only contact I had with the bike was my hands on the handlebars, where I was just about upside down, doing some kind of handstand like a stunt rider. I came really close to going right over the front, but I hovered there for what seemed like a minute, then I fell back down onto the seat of the bike. I pulled over to the side of the road and stopped to catch my breath and figure out what was going on. The rim of the wheel was dented in. I actually don't remember if the tire was flat right then, but later on I had to patch the tube, so maybe it caused a slow leak. I was an impressionable 21 years old at the time, and I learned something valuable from my lucky break.

The Picture: I photoshopped two of my pictures together from Sierra Leone. I'm in the rainy season, but the rest of the road is in the dry season.