Graydon wrote:
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.
After a few years of motorcycle use, you would be suprised how much of
that you _would_ pick up on. Kids running from between cars becomes
automatic avoidance. I have avoided loose loads, a disconnected trailer
and people throwing concrete blocks off an overpass. My best one was
turning across traffic one foggy day I suddenly decided to stop, for no
reason I could decide. Out of the fog, exceeding the limit, came a grey
car with no lights on. More than once, my wife has asked why I was
stopping - and then realised.
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.
The point is that the test, up to now, and therefore the training for
it, has been to avoid this situation. To now drop it in is less than
sensible. Undoubtedly training for, and taking, this test of skill is
going to cause people to fall off and damage machinery. It could easily
render a machine legally unroadworthy during the test. There is no
equivalent in other vehicular tests. My conclusion is that it is solely
designed to reduce the number of motorcyclists.
--
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