In these days of disinformation and wild conspiracy theories that so many people are eager to believe, I have become more literal-minded than ever. (And it was already sort of an inside joke among my wife and others close to me about how literal I am.) If something isn’t demonstrably true, based on solid facts, not conjecture or opinion, I won’t believe it.
When it comes to motorcycle riding in general and surviving on the street in particular, however, there are a couple of exceptions. There are two statements in motorcycling, one common and one rare (for related reasons), that my overly literal brain knows are not really true, but I act like they are, because that creates an attitude that helps keep me alive on the road.
Here are two things I pretend are true.
Everyone in a car is trying to kill you
This is one you’ve probably heard before. It’s common advice. Ride like everyone in a car around you is trying to kill you.
Obviously, not everyone in a car is really trying to kill you, or you wouldn’t last long. But a little paranoia can be useful. Photo by Spurgeon Dunbar.
It’s not true, of course. No motorcycle riding career would last more than five minutes if it were literally true. The first car driver to see you would swerve into you head-on and that would be the end of it.
It is useful, however, to treat every other road user as a threat, even though the vast majority of them aren’t. Think about it. You’ve ridden down a two-lane road and passed an oncoming car in the other lane thousands or a million times. You barely give them a glance and they’re on their way, you’re on yours, out of each other’s lives. It’s easy to assume every passing car will be that kind of non-event.
But if you inject a dose of paranoia and think, “That person could try to kill me,” then you might be less complacent. You may do something as small and simple as changing your lane position as a car approaches. When I’m riding, I’m constantly adjusting my lane position between the left or right wheel track, depending on where the most immediate threat might be. Say I’m on a country road surrounded by woods. I’ll be in the left wheel track of my lane, giving me a slight extra buffer in case an animal emerges from the woods. But if I see a car oncoming, I’ll shift temporarily to the right wheel track. Probably 9,999 times out of 10,000, it won’t matter. But if one time the oncoming driver is trying to write a text on his phone and drifts across the center line, that little lane shift could make the difference in how I spend the rest of my life. Or if I have a rest of my life.
True, if I really believed everyone in a car is trying to kill me, the only logical response would be to give up riding. One of our readers at Common Tread put it a better way: Assume everyone in a car is not trying not to kill you. That’s still more extreme than reality, because most people are trying not to kill you. But it’s a better way to think of it.
However you phrase it, treating everyone as a threat leads to you prepare for the unexpected, make tiny adjustments in your riding that cost nothing but could have big benefits, and keep looking for escape routes in case the worst happens. That’s why I decide to believe it, even though it’s not true.
Every motorcycle crash can be avoided
You’ll commonly hear the “everyone in a car is trying to kill you” phrase, because it fits into the all-too-common us-versus-them mindset. You’ll rarely hear the saying “every motorcycle crash can be avoided,” because if or when we do crash, our egos would much rather put the blame on someone else, not on ourselves.
Ride like every crash is avoidable, so if it happens, it’s your fault. Photo by Cpl. Carson Gramley.
I first heard it said by Lawrence Grodsky, the founder of Stayin’ Safe Motorcycle Training and author for many years of the column of the same name in Rider magazine. Years ago, Larry died after he hit a deer while riding through Texas on a motorcycle, and maybe after being hit by a car. Even though Larry was the safest and most hyperaware motorcyclist I’ve ever met, there was one fateful crash he didn’t avoid, calling into question his own saying in the cruelest way.
Eric Trow, who took over teaching the Stayin’ Safe course after Larry’s death, modified the saying slightly. He says that 99 percent of crashes can be avoided.
When I first heard Larry say all crashes could be avoided, my literal-minded brain rebelled. What if there’s an oncoming semi on the two-lane road with no shoulders and a car behind it pulls out to pass when you’re 50 feet away at 55 mph? I could imagine dozens of such unavoidable scenarios.
But after I thought about it longer, I came to decide two things: The essential truth is that almost all motorcycle crashes can be avoided, and you should ride as if they all can be avoided.
If we adopt that mindset, we put the responsibility for our safety on us, not on some stranger. If a car pulls out in front of me, it’s tempting to utter some obscenity about cagers trying to kill me. If I crash into that car, it’s at least some comfort to my ego to say “There was nothing I could do.”
But there’s almost always something we can do to improve our odds. When I approached that intersection, did I scan for potential threats? Did I notice if the car was edging forward, foreshadowing an impatient driver? Was I thinking of “what if” scenarios and planning an escape route if the car did pull out? Did I slow down because of the threat or shift my lane position to give me a bigger buffer? Did I have the brake lever covered because I was in a high-risk zone?
So I ride as if it’s my responsibility to avoid every crash because it pushes me to be a more aware rider instead of just hoping I’m not a helpless victim of circumstances.
These two sayings may be the “fake news” of motorcycling, but in this case, there are benefits to acting as if they’re true.
