On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 04:10:40PM +0100, mike wilson scripsit: > ---- William Robb <[email protected]> wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- From: "mike wilson" > > > Could end up as the closest thing to perpetual motion we have > > > seen: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8067672.stm > > > > Good Lord, if you can't do that, you shouldn't be on a bike. > > The whole point of motorcycle training here is to inculcate > anticipation in the rider. Ideally, you shouldn't be in the situation > where you have to swerve. Vehicle control is taught in a test needed > before you can actually ride on the road.
Many things cannot be anticipated; the truck in front starting to shed its load of topsoil, for example. Or the boat coming off the trailer. Or the unfortunate soul falling off the overpass. (Guy drove his pickup off an overpass on to the highway beneath a couple-three years back in Toronto. Missing the instantaneous truck was apparently non-trivial, but several folks managed.) Small kids running from between the parked cars. > Also, there is no avoidance maneouvre in the (much easier) car test. > If a test is causing crashes, for whatever reason, it's a bad test in > my book. It sounds like it's causing *falls*. In a sensible world, you train under worse conditions than you expect to actually encounter, and do things more difficult than you expect the task to regularly require. Otherwise you're not going to perform well when something unusually bad happens. I can't believe that the manoeuvre is either inherently difficult (one does that one on a bicycle, too, often; frequently to miss the nasties like storm drains along the edge of the road) or that having to know how to do it in the rain on the Isle of the Mighty is an unreasonable expectation. Also, 50 km/hr is _residential street speed_ around here; the posted maximum for exactly the kind of place where small children suddenly appearing in the road from between parked cars is a real hazard. If you want to argue that some of these people have no business taking the test, or that the driving standards should include an equivalent manoeuvre, sure, I'd go for that. But a lot of the point of this sort of test is to keep people without some minimum standard of competence off the road. -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
