On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 08:18:54PM +0100, mike wilson scripsit: > Graydon wrote: [snip] >> 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.
I'm not Frank, but I have been known to bicycle in downtown Toronto. I don't imagine that it's a whole lot different except for not being inherently slow. > 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. Sure. With long practise, you can get good at something. You're still not a Jedi; you can't spot things before they happen, and sometimes -- "rocks on the road" can mean interesting things on Hwy 11 up north of Superior, for example -- there's no way to avoid the event. [snip] >> 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. But you can't, always, and it's (from the viewpoint of this bicyclist and occasional driver) a dead-simple, basic thing. > 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. Care to explain why it's in any way challenging? > 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. Usually this sort of thing gets backing as an attempt to reduce the number of motorcyclists in emergency rooms. (If it was entirely up to emergency room doctors, motorcycles as a class of vehicle would be banned outright.) Without seeing the statistics on UK motorcycle accidents, I have no idea how good their justification is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's solid. My take on "no equivalent" is that the other tests should include it, and that it really ought not to be a known point; the better test is a surprise obstacle appearing at a set distance. -- 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.
