[dhgeyer]

I read through the article, but don't have time to analyze it right now, as I am too busy getting ready for my cross country motorcycle trip. I am now a small number of days away from being ready to leave. Excited? OH YEAH! But I digress.

What struck me about the article is that they, correctly I think, set forth and quantify a number of contributing factors to motorcycle accidents, injuries, and fatalities: Speeding, drinking, other cars turning left (the largest single cause of MC accidents), and so forth. They missed one huge one - training, although that is increasingly but not entirely reflected indirectly in the percentage of invalid licenses. And all the banners, and the final conclusion deals with helmet use only. It's the same old mantra. By their own statistics helmet use is effective only 37% of the time. If we could get people to get trained, stop drinking and taking stupid chances, and start respecting the most significant single danger of other drivers not seeing us, we could save a lot more lives.

The other side of the coin, of course, is training other drivers to start seeing us. This means making it part of driver education, and it also means vigorous prosecution of at fault drivers who cause injury or death to motorcyclists. The AMA has been campaigning for this for years now. As a very personal example, the young driver who pulled out in front of us 3 years ago, putting me in an impossible situation, and disabling my wife for the rest of her life, didn't even get a summons for failing to yield the right of way. We were on a heavily traveled US designated 2 lane highway, and she pulled out of a side road with a stop sign. She was absolutely 100% at fault, as admitted by her and her insurance company. And she caused serious, life-altering injury to a motorcycle passenger. And no summons. No legal consequences. Her parents' insurance premiums may go up, or they may not. As long as this continues to be the norm, and I think it pretty much is the norm, people are not going to have the motivation to pay attention and looking for us. The "Motorcycle are Everywhere" bumper stickers aren't going to do it, folks. The system needs teeth.

I also happen to believe that the present training program in the USA is totally inadequate to prevent accidents beyond the first 6 months or so. This has been documented somewhere. The problem is that virtually all US training programs are designed, and some are run by the Motorcycle Safety Foundation. The MSF is, just coincidentally, run by the exact same people who run the Motorcycle Industry Council, the industry trade group. It's exactly like putting a consortium of car companies in charge of giving out drivers' licenses to new drivers. Their real motivation is to get people licensed to drive, and thus buy cars, or in this case, motorcycles. If you analyze the MSF program, pretty much everything about it is geared to mass producing motorcycle licenses. Other countries don't follow this model, and their statistics are way less grim than ours. Changing this is going to be very hard, if not impossible, since the MSF heavily subsidizes the programs, which is very attractive to the states. Also, American culture being what it is, making it harder to get a motorcycle license, and then placing tiered restrictions on the licenses depending on experience level, would be a very hard sell.

I personally believe very strongly that more serious training for motorcyclists, tiered restrictions on size of bike based on experience, and eliminating the virtual open season on motorcyclists for other drivers would save an awful lot more lives than making people wear helmets.