Category: Behaviour

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29. Avoiding diesel and other slippery spills

Unusually this is an area where things genuinely have improved for motorcyclists. Improvements in commercial vehicle design, tighter fleet maintenance standards, and just possibly a faster clean-up of reported spills mean that streaks of diesel on roundabouts and bends are now far less common than they were in my courier days, even in the early part of my instructing career. Police collision data has long suggested that fuel spills are blamed for more crashes than they actually cause, and reduced exposure has only reinforced that trend. However, this does not mean slippery contaminants have disappeared altogether. We still need the same level of anticipation, observation, and margin — if anything, newer riders are likely to be less aware of the issue than those of us with a long backstory of dodging diesel. And it’s always worth remembering that ANY liquid will have less traction that the dry or uncontaminated tarmac.

Avoiding diesel and other slippery spills

My first introduction to the slippery nature of fuels spilled on the road came soon after I’d taken my 125 up to London. I stopped at a pedestrian crossing, three bikes came flying past me, turned right and promptly formation-crashed. As I pulled away, the 125 span the back wheel. Even that early on in my riding career I knew that wasn’t quite right and took the corner rather more slowly than the other bikes. A truck was parked halfway up the hill with a split tank and some fireman throwing bags of sand around it. The slick reached right down the hill to where the bikes had crashed. That was a while ago, and on purely observational evidence, it seems to me that fuel spills are much less common than when I was a courier. Moreover, evidence from police accident investigations suggests that despite the popular belief that oil and diesel cause bike crashes, the real crash numbers are low. That might be why in a long discussion on the problems of diesel on one of my favourite forums most of the correspondents had mates “who have crashed on diesel”, yet surprisingly few actually put up their hands and said “I’ve crashed on it myself”.

Nevertheless, it’s as well to be on the alert. As with all hazards, the first thing to consider is where we might find it, secondly how to spot it, and thirdly and to have some idea of what to do if we do spot ANY oil, diesel or petrol spill – they are ALL slippery.

Where might we find diesel and petrol (it’s slippery too) spilled on the road? The obvious answer is where vans, trucks and buses start with full tanks. And that means ports, industrial estates and bus depots, particularly in the morning. Leaving aside the random spills from a split tank, or from the van that had taken off its sump on high kerb round a traffic-calming ‘pinch point’ (it didn’t get far but left quite a slick for half a mile), keep an eye open where vehicles change direction – corners, junctions and particularly roundabouts are likely problem areas.

Combine a roundabout with exits marked INDUSTRIAL ESTATE and we should be on alert. Back when I was a trainer in Lydd, my homeward route took me round the Ashford ring road, which has a dozen industrial estates round it. Just as I was slowing for a right turn at one of the roundabouts, a guy on an R1 flew past signalling right as well. Knee out, he vanished around the back of the island but never reappeared. Going round rather more cautiously, I avoided the big streak of diesel and stopped to lend a hand. Rider unhurt but bike rather sad, having flipped over after sliding into the kerb. I left him arranging a van ride home. If we’re apply the ‘stop in the distance we can see to be clear’ rule, don’t forget it applies to road surface too.

Another good rule-of-thumb is that diesel spotted on one corner will probably reappear on the next. Another courier followed me carefully round one left-hander leading out of one London square as we both avoided the diesel. He overtook me, and promptly crashed on the left-hander leading into the next square just few hundred metres further on. As I stopped to help him untangle the bike from the railings, he said: “I didn’t expect diesel on that bend too”.

Err, right. So where did you expect it?

Most spills either come from overflows on over-filled tanks (much rarer now) or when drivers forget to put the filler cap on. Don’t laugh – I forgot to put the bike filler cap on once, because the tank bag covered it. A lapful of fuel reminded me, but the driver won’t know. The fuel is likely to be be spilled outwards so look for it on the outside of the lane – near the centre line on a left-hander or the kerb on a right-hander. But don’t forget a oncoming vehicle could slosh it our side of the centre line on a right-hander too.

Watching the surface is one reason for not trailing a vehicle ahead too close. If we see temporary slippery road signs or even police SLOW triangles, take care – it could be a spillage or even accident ahead, and there may well be a slippery cocktail of detergent, diesel, engine oil and antifreeze on the road.

See if you can spot the spill. In the rain, oil produces the familiar rainbow effect. It looks scary because the rain washes the oil right over the road, but in fact the rainbow effect is produced by a layer just one molecule thick. A single drop of oil can produce a big circular rainbow patch. It’s slippery but not lethal – the tyres will cut down to the surface. But if we see the rainbow right across the road, then it’s a bigger spill. Try to see which way the rainbow’s being washed – the source is probably in the other direction and that’s the area to keep clear of.

Unfortunately, in the dry, there’s no warning rainbow. The best advice I can give you is that fresh oil and diesel is very wet-looking and very shiny. It’s looks like ‘very wet water’ for want of a better description. A big diesel spill in the dry can often be smelled. So use your nose. A dulled black streak is almost certainly an old spill, and unlikely to be particularly slippery. But it’s worth knowing that if it rains, old spills can be ‘reactivated’, particularly by a short shower after a long dry spell.

Don’t forget petrol can also be spilled. It’s just as slippery as diesel but harder to see – it looks like water. Whenever possible, keep clear of any unusual wet-looking patches.

Interestingly, in that forum discussion, there was little useful advice, beyond declarations that “it’ll will have you off if you hit it” statements.

Ideally, we do want to stay off it if possible. It’s just a matter of having the speed and lean angle in hand to change line and direction. But sometimes we simply have cross a spill. It’s straightforward enough if we can avoid leaning and braking (the usual instinct) as we cross it, and instead keep the bike as upright as possible. For that reason if I find a spill mid-corner, I tend to steer INSIDE it, even if that means sacrificing my view round the bend. Why? I may have to cross it. If I’m on the inside, I can pick the machine up and cross it upright, before leaning over again back on clean tarmac. But if I’m on the outside and need to cross it, I actually need to increase my lean angle. Not a good plan. And don’t forget that the tyres will take a moment to clean off – don’t bang the bike straight over on its side, but ease it over.

Look ahead, think ahead, plan ahead, and oil and diesel should be no more than a minor – if potentially dangerous – irritant.

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28. “Don’t search for safety, identify risky — then avoid it”

I’ve actually retitled this particular article since it reinforces the central idea — that riders should stop chasing an abstract notion of “safety” and instead understand “risk in context” — because It reinforces personal responsibility and judgement, aligns with how riders actually make decisions — moment by moment, under imperfect information, and most importantly it avoids the false promise implied by “safety”. Safety is defined as absence of risk and there’s no such thing on the road. Understanding risk, rather than searching for an ill-defined notion of “safety”, remains the key to surviving real-world riding.

“Don’t search for safety, identify risky — then avoid it”

When delivering my Survival Skills advanced motorcycle riding courses, one of the concepts I ensure that is covered in depth is risk, and its relationship to safety. Why focus on risk when it’s so much more usual to hear motorcycle training and road safety experts talk about ‘safety’? There’s a good reason for this. It’s because safety is defined as the ‘absence of risk’. So given that it is impossible to ride without risk, it’s only by understanding risk that we can begin to appreciate whether particular manoeuvres are actually relatively low or relatively high risk. Once we know that, then it’s possible to begin to manage risk and thus attempt to make our riding as safe as possible.

So let’s start by define what we mean by ‘risk’ a bit more clearly? We can say something like:

‘Risk = the chance something might happen X the impact on us when it happens’

It may be a simple explanation but it makes it easier to understand how a hazard might affect us. For example, you’d probably agree that most metal access covers are potentially slippery. But does that mean they ALWAYS pose a risk?

Follow some riders and you’d be forgiven for thinking they’d been treated with teflon as they weave left and right to avoid them in the dry, but if the metal surface is relatively small and flush with the surface, and we are neither cornering, braking or accelerating, then what’s the problem? We can ride over them with no fear of a loss of grip, and we can focus on other issues, such as taking a line that avoids getting close to oncoming vehicles. Even when wet, a small access cover is unlikely to result in anything more serious than a slight twitch even when leaned over. Running over it might be a better decision than shaving past an HGV coming the other way. But what if the metal plate is big? What if it’s just where we’re planning to hit the brakes, to avoid an emerging car? What if we’re carrying serious lean through a corner? And it’s wet too? Now we have a more serious problem.

What I’m getting at is we need to anticipate whether the hazard poses a threat in the context in which we are about to meet it.

One useful place to develop an understanding of risk is to examine the ‘killed and seriously injured’ statistics. If you do that, you’ll discover there are three common crashes:

  • at junctions

  • on corners

  • during overtakes

Then we can drill down further to find out more about the risks of each location.

For example, if we look at crashes at or near junctions involving motorcycles, we find that in an URBAN environment most collisions happen when another vehicle pulls out from a side road, and turns across the motorcycle’s path. Although these incidents are very common (so the risk of a COLLISION is high), the fatality rate is low UNLESS the rider is exceeding the speed limit – then the fatality rate sky-rockets.

But there’s a second collision to consider – when an oncoming vehicle turns right turns across the rider’s path. The risk OF the collision is low (there aren’t very many) but the risk FROM the crash is high (it’s a much bigger impact and far more likely to be fatal).

But once out of town, where speeds are higher, both types of collision are likely to have serious consequences, simply because the speeds are higher.

And in the same way we can find other high-risk activities. If we crash on a corner, we’re more likely to survive if we fall off on a right-hander (in the UK), but on a left-hander we cross the centre line and the resulting collision is often fatal. Overtaking is almost certainly the most dangerous of all biking activities, because there is so much that can go wrong. Not too many years ago, a highly qualified motorcycle instructor told me that “done right, overtaking is perfectly safe”. Hopefully, you read that and asked yourself “is that really true?”. The answer, of course, is that however well-planned and executed, NO overtake can ever be ‘perfectly safe’. We can try to manage the risks as best we can, but there is one element in an overtake over which we have no control whatsoever…

…and that’s the other humans in the mix. We can be trying to do everything ‘right’ and the unpredictable actions of another human can still put us at risk.

So to sum up… to ASSESS risk, we must recognise the potential for any particular activity to go wrong. To MANAGE risk, we have to know our options, and whether we have alternatives open to us. In the case of an overtake, I could simply not attempt it – that would manage the risk pretty effectively. And when deciding whether or not I need to ride over that manhole cover mid-corner, there’s another solution – I could SLOW DOWN! It’s easier to recover from a slide when we’re more upright.

It’s amazing how long it takes riders to actually remember that slowing down is nearly always an effective risk management option.

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24. Trusting to Luck, Awareness of Hazards, and Risk Assessment and Risk Management

This was a very early post, written before I’d fully investigated concepts like the ladder of learning and later work on the concept of insight training, and risk homeostasis allows us to sharpen it and correct a few early assumptions. My central argument — that riders mistake statistical survival for skill-based safety — is entirely consistent with modern safety psychology. In fact, it aligns very closely with the phenomena known as:

:: Normalisation of deviance
:: Outcome bias
:: Risk compensation / risk homeostasis

The fact that familiarity dulls risk perception is now well established in behavioural science. Repeated exposure without consequence reduces perceived risk even when objective risk is unchanged. My observation that “they stop planning ahead and trust to luck again” is arguably the most important line in the article, and modern thinking has reinforced it rather than undermined it. The ‘six levels’ I mapped out fit well with models I discovered later:

Levels 1–3 → unconscious incompetence / conscious incompetence
Level 4 → rule-based competence
Levels 5–6 → insight-based, anticipatory control

Since this was first written, our understanding of why riders fail to manage risk effectively has moved on. It is now clearer that the problem is not simply a loss of skill, but a shift in thinking. Riders do not consciously decide to take more risk; instead, familiarity quietly reshapes their expectations. When nothing goes wrong, we unconsciously downgrade hazards from “threat” to “routine”, and begin to interpret safe outcomes as evidence of our own competence rather than statistical good fortune. This is closely related to what psychologists call risk compensation: improvements in skill or experience are often “spent” on riding faster, overtaking more often, or accepting smaller margins, leaving overall risk unchanged. The critical difference between riders who continue to progress and those who stagnate is not technical ability, but whether they maintain a habit of questioning their assumptions — actively challenging the belief that because something has always worked before, it will continue to do so next time.

Trusting to Luck, Awareness of Hazards, and Risk Assessment and Risk Management

Risk is a funny concept. It’s always there in our lives, whatever we do, to a greater or lesser extent. The odd thing is that whilst we are sometimes very aware of risk, at other times we tend to forget all about it. Witness the number of people who step backwards off cliffs taking selfies. We also have a skewed perception of what is actually dangerous and what isn’t. Take flying as an example. Compared with driving, which is far more likely to kill us, flying is statistically safer. But most people don’t fly very often, so never really get used to it and we’re also in someone else’s hands and the situation is almost totally out of our control. So how does risk play a part in our riding decisions? What skews our concept of risk?

More than anything else, what interferes with accurate risk assessment is familiarity. The more often we encounter a risk, yet nothing goes wrong, the less we see it AS a risk. If we drive or ride on a regular basis, in situations we are familiar with, we generate such a level of familiarity and a sensation of ‘ordinariness’, we begin to lose awareness of the risks. Worse, we begin to believe we are in control of the risks.

But is that actually the fact? We should be aware of another factor that could be keeping us safe.

And that’s statistics. Crashing badly is rare event.

What do I mean? You’ll probably have heard that the risk of being killed on a motorcycle or scooter is around 30 to 40 times higher than if we’re in a car. And you probably know there are (very approximately) around 350 fatal motorcycle crashes in the UK each year, and that serious injuries (equally approximately) total around 3500.

But those numbers need context.

There are somewhere between 1 and 2 million active motorcyclists who ride several billion miles each year.

So for you and me, when we look at motorcycling on an individual basis, the chance of having a fatal accident in any one year is tiny. The UK is one of the safest places on earth to ride a motorcycle.

I originally wrote this article under the misapprehension – like most people in the advanced riding community, and in road safety generally – that it is good skills that keep us safe. I wrote about how I thought road users including motorcyclists go through a sequence of developmental stages of hazard perception, risk awareness and risk management:

Level 1) we aren’t even aware danger exists
Level 2) we see a hazard but don’t understand how it poses a risk
Level 3) we see a hazard, recognise it poses a risk but don’t know how to deal with it
Level 4) we see a hazard, recognise it poses a risk, and react by taking appropriate avoiding action
Level 5) we see a hazard, recognise it poses a risk, and respond by proactively reducing the risk
Level 6) we anticipate a hazard, and act to eliminate the risk before it can develop

I described those levels in terms of how a rider might respond in the most common collision scenario – the SMIDSY crash involving a driver emerging from a junction on the left.

1) we aren’t even aware danger exists
How would a rider at this level of development rider respond if a car started to emerge from the side turning? Simple answer – having failed to recognise the scenario as a hazard, the rider will be caught completely by SURPRISE! by the emerging car. There will be no planned response to the hazard. The outcome is entirely in the lap of the gods.

2) we see a hazard but don’t understand how it poses a risk
How would this rider respond to an emerging car? The rider may have realised that cars emerge from side turnings, but assumes that as the bike has right of way, the car driver will see the bike and wait. The rider will still be caught completely by SURPRISE! by the emerging car, there will be no planned response and the outcome is still with the gods.

3) we see a hazard, recognise it poses a risk but don’t know how to deal with it
Perhaps the rider has learned from some previous incidents but what missing now is any form of planned response. Maybe the rider develops excessive caution (perhaps avoiding ‘dangerous’ roads), slows down excessively ‘just in case’, or maybe crashes taking evastic action. The rider is no longer taken by SURPRISE! but there’s no planned strategy to get out of trouble.

4) we see a hazard, recognise it poses a risk, and react by taking appropriate avoiding action
Now the rider is capable of basic defensive riding and collision avoidance. This is essentially the level aimed at by basic training. The rider will detect the emerging car, and go into a routine to deal with the problem – perhaps slowing down and sounding the horn, whilst being ready to make an effective emergency stop or swerve.

5) we see a hazard, recognise it poses a risk, and respond by proactively reducing the risk
This is essentially the level aimed at by advanced training. Having spotted the junction ahead, the rider will respond PRO-ACTIVELY by slowing to reduce stopping distance, changing position to open up lines-of-sight and introduce a ‘safety space’ before the driver even begins to create a threat by starting to emerge. The essential step is to move from being a reactive rider (who responds AFTER the threat develops) to a pro-active rider (who takes preemptive steps to reduce risk) by constantly asking the “what if…?” question and having a “then this…!” answer ready. This stage is often marked by an attitudinal change. Rather than relying on the other driver to see and respond to the bike (“I have right-of-way”, “the driver should look harder for bikes”) the rider now begins to understand that “it takes two to tangle” – if the driver’s error sets up the POTENTIAL for a collision, the biker still has to ride into it to COMPLETE the collision. After a scary experience, this rider will probably ask “what else could I have done to avoid the situation?”

6) we anticipate a hazard, and act to eliminate the risk before it can develop
This is the next level where the rider has developed ‘insight’, and is the level Survival Skills advanced rider training courses aim to reach. We don’t have to wait until we see a junction. We can anticipate that ANY BLIND AREA – or ‘Surprise Horizon’ – could be concealing a vehicle about to emerge into our path, and we anticipate we haven’t been seen, and take appropriate steps – change of speed, change of line, ‘setting-up’ the brakes – before we even see a vehicle. Or pehaps we see a car still APPROACHING a junction and we consider strategies such as a slight increase in speed to get clear of the junction before the car gets there. And should emergency action still be needed, we are not just ready to brake hard or swerve but have already identified possible escape routes.

With my old CBT instructor hat on, novice riders on CBT are usually in Level 1, particularly if they have car experience because the lessons learned on four wheels do not apply to two.

So where does motorcycle training take us? In theory, a rider with a CBT certificate should be up at Level 4, but in reality, they’re far more likely to hover between 2 (blind faith) and 3 (luck) because there’s too much to cover on CBT to develop anything like proper defensive riding.

Donning my old Direct Access hat, riders at Level 2 would accumulate ‘serious’ faults on the bike test, and riders at Level 3 would pick up minor ‘driving’ faults. So my aim was to get riders to at least Level 4 where they could react reliably to most hazards and get a clean sheet. But if I had time and the trainee was receptive enough, I’d begin to introduce Level 5 thinking where they started to understand how to ‘get their retaliation in first’ by being pro-active in attempting to distance themselves from harm.

And with my post-test headgear in place, I’d definitely want to see Level 5 and preferably Level 6 thinking going on.

What if we don’t take post-test training? Given time and some ‘learning-by-experience’ forced on the rider by a couple of crashes in the ‘School of Hard Knocks’, it is possible to climb to Level 5. There are some very competent motorcyclists out there who have never taken post-test training. We just have to be self-critical and willing to advance.

But even if we do take higher training, there’s no guarantee it will stick. When I wrote the original version of this article, I noted that “unfortunately having passed beyond the sight of the trainer and examiner, many riders slip back to Level 3.” I was thinking in terms of basic training, but I’ve seen it can apply to riders with advanced experience too.

You’ll remember that I said back at the beginning that I originally wrote this article under the misapprehension that it is good skills that keep us safe, so at the time I’d thought this was just the natural erosion of skills and learning that happens as the memories of our training slip further into the distance. That has an effect, of course, but I’d actually hit on the really significant problem when I concluded:

“They stop planning ahead and trust to luck again.”

Why do we do this? It’s that skewing of risk that results from familiarity. The more often we encounter a risk, yet nothing goes wrong, the less we see it. Go back to the KSI stats. Out of those 350 fatal crashes every year, something under 100 happen at junctions. Let’s just make that absolutely clear. With over one million riders covering several billion miles annually, and passing uncounted junctions every single day, in the course of a year just 100 fatalities happen at junctions. The vast majority of us pass junctions perfectly safely all year long. And because things so rarely go wrong it’s easy to begin to believe that it’s our own abilities keeping us safe when the fact is it’s statistics doing the job. Without being aware of it, we are ‘trusting to luck’. And the same issue arises with every other activity on a motorcycle including the two other big killers – cornering crashes and overtaking incidents.

A former police instructor once told me that

“Done right, overtaking is perfectly safe”.

Of course it’s not. There’s always risk. It’s only when we constantly ask ourselves “what if this goes wrong?” that we are in a position to manage risk effectively. The more vivid our imagination, the more likely we are to have a realistic perception of risk. The better our technique, the less risk SHOULD be involved…

…but what if we simply use our skills to take more overtakes? What if we use them to make technically tricky passes? Haven’t we just upped the risk whilst pretending that we’re managing that risk effectively?

We think it’s our skill preventing a crash when in fact, the dice just haven’t rolled the wrong way…

…yet.

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22. Springing into Summer – polishing off ‘rider rust’

The underlying addressed here — the seasonal degradation of perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills and the way that confidence tends to come back faster than competence — has not changed. If anything, modern riding conditions make the issue sharper rather than softer since modern riding aids can quietly smooth over clumsy motor skill inputs and mask warning signs of rustiness. And motorcycles are increasingly being fitted with the kind of rider-assistance systems that even cover up for lapses of concentration and pour judgement in following distance and awareness of the movements of other vehicles on multilane roads. The machine shouldn’t be covering up for our lapses, and that makes a deliberate, structured re-entry into riding not just sensible, but essential.

Springing into Summer – polishing off ‘rider rust’

Winter’s finally over, the roads are dry and salt free, and the sun is warm on your back. We’ve changed the oil, adjusted the chain, checked the tyre pressures, cleaned the visor and paid for the tax and insurance. It must be time to park the car at last and go for a blast over our favourite rural roads, right?

Wrong. It’s not just time to give the bike a once-over, it’s also time to take it easy, polish up our biking minds and bodies, and rebuild those riding skills!

It’s an easy mistake to think that we can take a ride out on the first nice day in the spring and ride it just like we did on the last fine day in autumn. It doesn’t matter whether we have parked the bike up for three months, or whether we’ve commuted through the winter months. We’re not in the same place physically or mentally as we were. Even if we’ve continued commuting during the bad weather, our brain’s operating on a different planet and looking for different problems. All the skills that became second nature during summer have gone rusty and we’ve forgotten half the problems we’re likely to encounter. One thing I see time and again in the spring, particularly after a trainee has parked the bike and swapped it for a car, is that positioning – both defensive ‘dominant’ positions in traffic and positioning for a better view of hazards has vanished. All these skills need practicing before they become automatic again.

We can all get rusty. Even when I was an all-year courier, I found that my rural road riding skills fell away during the winter months, and one year, due to a change of basic training job the bike remained almost entirely parked up for six months. So back on the bike and taking a nice spring ride out with my buddy Keith, as we headed back to Oxford after a sojourn in South Devon I found myself rather rusty. We’re normally evenly matched, but now I was struggling to keep Keith in sight, and the inevitable happened. Pushing on too hard, trying to up my pace, I made a hideous cock of a corner.

I completely failed to read the bend, thinking it went gently to the left when in fact it led into a sharp and tightening right-hander. Suddenly realising I was too fast and going the wrong way, I mentally warned myself “Don’t brake, Steer”. Then it was “oh bugger” as than I hit the brakes anyway. Of course the bike stood up and headed straight for a five metre drop into the River Exe. I was lucky that there was some run-off into a car parking space to admire the view and I glided to a halt alongside the wall protecting the drop.

So what can we do about this?

Two things. The first is to give our bodies a chance to get in tune. Don’t set off on a 300 mile ‘Winter’s Over’ ride-out, without having done some shorter rides. Remember all those aching muscles and stiff knees when you first started to ride? If you’ve been off the bike for any time, they’ll be right back if you overdo it.

And the second suggestion is to spend just a little time going back to basics. Think about the sort of exercises learned on basic training and maybe on an advanced course. Clutch control, slow starts and stops, Figure 8s, U-turns, emergency braking. We can practice all those in a quiet car park.

Take the bike out initially onto quiet roads and do it alone, not on a group ride. We just need to take our time, keep speeds down a tad, ensure we’re not following close behind other vehicles. Now we can spend some time deliberately hazard-spotting, working on machine control inputs – braking, throttle control, counter-steering – and chosing lines and positions. This way we can ease back into the groove.

Talking to ourselves can help but I wouldn’t suggest a full-Monty police-style commentary on everythign. It require so much mental processing – it’s not a usual activity for the average rider – that the very act of thinking how to vocalise the words to describe one hazard actually distracts us from spotting the next. Keep it short and simple; “lefthand bend, push left, go left”… “tight bend, brake”… “car on the left, move right”. So long as we keep it simple, talking our way through hazards will get us refocused on riding the bike quicker than anything else.

And of course, the same basic principle applies in spades if we’re commuting by car or train. Our biking Spidy Sense is going to be lagging way behind. Slow down, to take time and space to get back in to the rhythm.

And if anything does get a bit scary, slow down! Minor mistakes will cause us to tense up, and then things will only get worse. Drop the speed, take the pressure off, and talk yourself into relaxing. After my near-dip, I slowed down maybe 10% – just 5 or 6 mph on thes fast rural roads. As a result, Keith soon disappeared round the bends ahead but that means I could ride my own ride. No longer chasing, I relaxed and began to enjoy the next ten miles or so. As I relaxed, the speed came back and he wasn’t too far ahead when I reached our next turn-off point.

And of course, why not think about a refresher course? You can book one of these with Survival Skills Rider Training, and we’ll head off to give your riding a service. Even if you have post-test training qualifications, why not get a different perspective by training with another organisation? You’ll not only practice what’s rusty in company with someone to point it out, but you’ll undoubtedly learn a few new wrinkles too.

 

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23. Organising and joining group riding – some rules and tips

If I were rewriting this article today, there’s little I’d change. I would emphasise the ever-widening gulf between hot-of-the-production line bikes and old-school machines. My observation that group riding introduces unique risks remains correct and is now widely accepted in safety research. The Lincolnshire statistic reference aligns with later findings elsewhere, that peer pressure, pace escalation and delayed fatigue recognition are all major contributors to group crashes. The framing of “organising a ride equals accepting responsibility” has received some legal attention, with group rider organisers being held responsible following fatal crashes on riders. That’s a fact that’s rarely emphasised when articles cover group riding . Fatigue as a hidden cause is also something that modern crash analysis has shown up, not just as an end-of-day problem, but as a mid-ride cognitive degradation; rider performance likely begins to degrade before the warning signs actually tell us we’re “feeling tired”. I’d probably reframe the decision to leave a ride early, to emphasise that it’s not a personal failure, but a success in identifying that the ride doesn’t suit us.

Organising and joining group riding – some rules and tips

This particular article was originally penned after a friend of mine (at the time member of an advanced group), told me a sorry tale of things going wrong on their group rides. Three rides, three crashes bringing the rides to an unplanned halt. Now, having organised trouble-free group rides for years I’d like to say that on a well-organised ride, with proper rules and sensible riders this shouldn’t happen. But having written the article, the next three rides I organised were also brought to a halt by silly crashes. Two riders fell off at walking pace on sharp corners, and required medical attention. The third ran out of road on another tight bend and whilst unhurt, needed a van to take his bike home. Bad luck? Perhaps. But maybe we were actually. Shortly afterwards, a survey of rural riding fatalities in Lincolnshire found that ALMOST HALF occurred on group rides. So if we take on the organisation of a group ride, we take on a lot of responsibility and we need to understand just how group riding brings some very unique problems. But we also have some responsibilities if we join a group ride.

Most discussion on how to organise a group ride tends to focus on how the ride’s organised once it’s underway. But if we’re setting it up, we really need to back up a stage and focus on some risk assessment and management.

Virtually all the serious problems I’ve seen on group rides result from just a few issues. Three really crop up in the planning stage:

poorly-planned routes

fatigue

lack of organisation to deal with a mix of abilities

worst case scenarios

And one is down to the ride attendees:

individual poor attitude to riding and a lack of self-control

Planning and Organisation

The route: start by deciding what the ride is for. Is it just a couple of hours out with some buddies? A club outing to a different part of the country? Or do you want to put on a day’s riding for riders you don’t know?

That’s important because it’ll influence the route. For example, if we’re leading a small club group off for a few days riding in a totally different area, then planning a ride up a motorway is likely to be the quickest way of getting there – it’s easy enough to organise a rendezvous at a particular service area or junction. But on a day-long ride with a big group of unknown riders, then short stretches of motorways can cause real problems with keeping the group together. And believe it or not, I was on one group ride where the organisers had forgotten there were a few riders on L plates.

Town centres also cause problems, even with a good system of marking. As well as having drivers get annoyed by being ‘blocked in’ by a stream of bikes crossing a junction, and deliberately pulling out, a big group can be chopped into numerous chunks by traffic lights or roundabouts. This happened on a ride down the French coast through Bolougne with thirty-odd riders. One rider didn’t follow the group riding rules and failed to mark an exit from a roundabout. The next rider just ahead of me couldn’t see where he’d gone so followed the ‘all directions’ sign. He guessed wrong so the back end of the group went the wrong way. After ten minutes we stopped when we realised we’d lost the front. But the group leader was still blissfully unaware because he still had bikes behind him, thanks to that rider who didn’t stop. With no contingency plan and no route map to the lunch stop, we had to contact him by phone – not so easy when someone’s riding with the phone in a pocket. We made it to lunch, an hour late, and that meant we had to abandon our pleasant ride back to Eurotunnel. One mistake totally disrupted the day. One group kept stopping and reassembling after each junction, but this causes inconvenience to other road users, and eventually becomes unworkable if the group’s a big one. You could have a reassembly point marked on a map. That’ll work IF people can read a map.

For the same sort of reason, right turns on fast, busy roads are best avoided. It’ll take ages for a big group to make the turn. Meanwhile, there’s a long queue of bikes backing up and potentially blocking the road.

And think about whether the group will cope with really awkward corners or turns. I planned one route for some new riders, but overlooked one very tight, right-back-on-itself, downhill junction. As I approached I suddenly realised it would be a major problem for some of the less-experienced in the group. I had to pull the group up and warn them at the last moment. That one would have been best avoided.

It may be that the UK’s not blessed with vast areas of open roads, so we’re bound to encounter villages. But with a bit of careful planning, it’s usually possible to avoid the bigger towns and motorways, and to avoid the most awkward manoeuvres.

Don’t forget fuel. It’s amazing how often it’s a last-minute consideration but plan your stops and make sure everyone can reach them. It’s no good planning around your own 250 mile tank. My Hornet has a notoriously short reliable fuel range of 120 to 130 miles. With reserve, I can be reasonably certain of hitting 150 miles… unless we’re riding at speed. On one group ride in France, our destination was only 90 miles away, so starting with a full tank should have got me there with plenty to spare… except the leader didn’t take the obvious route, but a much longer ride that was marginally quicker thanks to some autoroute with no service area and didn’t check if anyone would need a top-up. I had just hit 135 miles when we turned off the motorway and a moment later I ran out of fuel. Fortunately, I was able to coast downhill into the town and straight into a filling station half-way down.

Getting tired: the problem of fatigue shouldn’t be underestimated. I know that because it’s something I’ve been guilty of. I tend to forget that I’m used to spending long hours in the saddle. Just recently, I left at 9am to ride 90 miles to meet a trainee at 11am, covered another 90 miles in five hours training (which actually took six and a half hours because we talked so much), then rode just under 100 miles for another two and a half hours to my final destination, not arriving until 8:30pm.

But not everyone is capable of doing that. We have to remember that for some riders, one hour in the saddle is likely to be a long ride. Others will make problems for themselves. Having organised a ride in North Yorkshire a while back, I was rather flattered that someone had ridden almost 150 miles to make our 10 am start, but in retrospect it meant he’d set off at 7am and by the time he crashed, at about 4pm, he’d covered another 120 miles of fairly technical riding with only a couple of twenty minute refueling stops and an hour’s lunch break. Even though it was in clear sight, he failed to spot a sharp kink at the end of a gentle left-hander. The bike left the road at walking pace, but fell a metre on the far side. The bike was unrideable, and was ultimately a write-off. He said some months later that he was absolutely knackered when he crashed.

Make sure you plan stops. Dehydration is an issue on a bike so we all need to personally refuel and rest up on a long ride, but be aware of the issue that the slowest riders will be last in and have least time to recover. Up front, you may feel refreshed. The rider at the back may barely have got the helmet off. And factor in loo stops, and bum and ciggie breaks. Be particularly cautious after lunch when the combination of food and biorhythms cause a low point in our riding.

Who’s on the ride: we also need to think about who is on the invite list. If we know the riders, then we should be aware of their strengths and weaknesses. Similarly if it’s closed-to-club, we should have a reasonable idea of who will turn up. But once it’s an open ride, we have no idea who’ll turn up. We can pitch a ride for ‘experienced only’ or ‘suitable for newly qualified’ but we’re relying on attendees to self-assess. I’ve seen plenty of ‘experienced’ riders with poor skills. Ultimately, we won’t have any idea of their capabilities – or level of self-control – until we see them ride. Or we can suggest a ‘fast’ or ‘slow’ ride. One of the problems of ‘fast’ riders turning up for ‘slow’ rides is that they get bored and start messing about.

We also need to think about the size of the group. It may stroke our ego to be leading a big group of thirty-plus riders, but it causes any amount of problems. We have to find ways of keeping the group together, and to keep it under control. Having said that, I have ridden in groups of thirty where everyone’s behaved impeccably but I’ve also seen chaos. My own preference these days is for small groups – single figures. And with just four or five riders, the leader can usually see everyone else in the group. Plus it’s more intimate, everybody gets to know everyone else – and it’s easier to find somewhere to stop for lunch.

And it almost guarantees a mix of abilities. So what do we do about inexperienced or new riders mixing with an experienced group? The usual solution is to put the slowest or least experienced rider behind the leader. That way, in theory at least, the pace is set for the entire group and no-one will be left behind. But think about this. However much they are told to “ride at your own pace”, the rider behind the leader will not want to hold the group up. So there’s a serious risk they’ll override, and the leader will progressively up the pace to the point where they can no longer sustain it.

If the group’s a large one, does everyone ride together? Or should it be split up into mini-groups which ride at their own pace? This is one way to deal with a mix of experienced / inexperienced or fast / slow riders. Or does everyone do their own ride but following a common route?

If the ride is split into mini-groups do they cover the route at their own pace? That’s an approach I have used successfully in France. Or do the mini-groups plan to meet at intervals along the route? Do they set off together again? If they do, this inevitably means the slower riders have less time to recover. Or if everyone is riding alone, do they do their own thing once they’ve set off?

How are you going to organise the ‘marking system’ so riders know where to turn? Is overtaking allowed? These are all decisions that need to be made before the ride.

With small groups of half-a-dozen or so, the leader can keep everyone in sight, but bigger groups need a marking system. There are two alternatives – the ‘caterpillar’ (as used by the National Motorcycle Escort Group which escorts cycle races and similar and of which I was a member for some years) or the ‘leapfrog’.

In the caterpillar system, the rider immediately behind the leader stops when the leader turns off, and waits for the next rider who slides into his place as the first rider moves off again. This works well with groups which are riding on open roads where riders are riding at their own pace and can lose sight of the rider ahead. Why? Because everyone stays in the SAME ORDER. Each rider knows exactly who is ahead and behind. You’ll see why that’s important in a moment.

With the leapfrog system, the rider immediately behind the leader stops to mark the point where the leader has turned off, but this time that rider stays there and lets the entire group pass by, only moving on again when the tail end rider, sometimes called ‘the sweeper’, comes into view. Now, if no overtaking is allowed within the group, then the group order stays the same aside from this ‘front to back’ rotation. But many groups do allow overtaking. And then two problems arise. Unless it’s a small group and we know exactly who’s on the ride, we’ll probably not know everyone. And that means it’s possible a random rider can get into the group. It’s always possible that the next group rider won’t realise the interloper is not part of the ride, and will follow that random bike when it turns off. Riding with a buddy, that’s exactly what happened when I pulled out into what turned out to be the middle of a group ride. I turned off, stopped to wait for my buddy to appear, and whilst the front half of the group carried on on the main road, the back half thought I was marking a turn for them and turned off where I’d stopped. The second issue is that in my experience getting back to the front can become a competition for some riders, who end up constantly passing the slower riders. I’m not a great fan of this method as it results in dodgy overtakes and scary moments for slower riders as they are passed by the quicker guys.

Worst case scenarios: what can go wrong? The obvious issues are the group splitting, crashes and breakdowns. What are your fallback plans to deal with each? Are you going to provide a route map? Does everyone have a contact number? Can you hear the phone and answer it? Have you got anyone with first aid training? Does anyone have a first aid kit? What about tools? Can you deal with a puncture?

Here’s another to think about. How do you deal with a disruptive rider? It’s worth thinking about because sooner or later, you will get someone who thinks a group ride is an excuse to pull wheelies down the village high street.

On the day

Don’t just set off. Hold a briefing at the beginning of the ride. Make it clear that rules will be operating. You may find that some people will leave at that point. Too bad. If they’re not happy to follow rules, then we don’t really want them along.

Whether you provide route maps and contingency meet points is up to you, but make sure everyone knows the lead and the last rider (the ‘sweeper’) in the group. Ideally, make it easy for everyone to see you. Don’t just wear a fluoro yellow hi-vis, as half the group will – try a different colour like blue or green. Maybe use a coloured headlight cover. There’s little to be gained from an introduction such as I saw on one group ride where we were all sitting in the cafe, drinking tea. “Bob will be sweeper, there’s Bob for those of you who don’t know him”. Bob duly stands up, in his pullover, waves and smiles all round. Yeah right, that’s going to make him very easy to spot when he has his gear on and is riding his unidentified bike.

Joining a ride?

You may be joining a ride, and possibly a bit nervous, so here are my tips for group participants. The main thing to remember is that it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of not looking any further ahead than the tail light of the rider in front and never checking your own mirrors.

1) Ride your OWN RIDE

Don’t ride in the wheeltracks of the bike in front! In the event of a sudden stop, you might not! On twistier roads where there’s only one line, sit well back. On wider and straighter roads, it’s possible to stagger alternately, one bike to one side and the next to the other, but it does require everyone to understand how it works. It’s particularly useful in town, as it makes the group shorter and more compact, thus taking up less room on the road, which helps prevent drivers turning into the middle of it.

Don’t follow the rider ahead either. Stay back and look past the bike in front. Get too close and it’s hard to look at anything other than the brake light. The bike you’re following speeds up, you speed up. That bike slows down, you slow down. The rider cocks up and you follow them straight off the road… it happens. If you find yourself struggling to do this, drop back until the rider ahead is out of sight and trust the marking system – if it works properly, there’s no need to worry about getting lost. That way, it’s possible to focus on your own lines, pick your own speeds, choose your own braking points and cornering lines. Most importantly you deal with hazards for yourself.

2) Ride at your OWN PACE

A major cause of group crashes is someone over-riding to try to keep up with the rider in front. Once you begin to stress over speed, you tense up, stop scanning ahead but fixate on the bike in front, and your riding will go ragged. Let them go. Similarly, if a rider behind catches you up, don’t try to speed up. You can move over on straights, but don’t make silly efforts to let them past, so hold your own line where necessary – it is up to the rider behind to overtake safely, not for you to make things easy. The moment things start to surprise you and scare you, slow down!

3) Don’t hassle other riders

So you’re quicker than the rider ahead and you’d like to pass. Hang back and wait for a safe overtaking opportunity. Don’t hassle slower or less experienced riders, because if they feel they’re being pressured, they’ll often either speed up and over-ride to avoid holding you up, or slow down and pull over in the daftest places. And if the rider ahead is trying to pass another bike or a car, wait your turn, however long it takes.

Whilst it’s important not to get sucked into a copy-cat mentality when riding in a group,

If you’re not happy with the group’s behaviour or simply not enjoying the route – that’s happened when I’ve joined an unknown group and the route consisted entirely of busy A roads – go home. Don’t just turn off but ride to the next group stop, and let the leader know you’re leaving.

And don’t show off. Easy enough.

 

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20. Filtering – what’s legal and how to do it

Although this article was revised in 2019, the principles behind safe filtering have not changed. UK law still does not define filtering as a specific manoeuvre; instead, riders are judged on whether their behaviour would be considered reasonable and competent in the circumstances. What has changed is traffic density, and possibly driver distraction from in-car systems like GPS. And riders also need to pay attention to and the frequency with which vehicles move unexpectedly within queues.

A modern complication is the rapid spread of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) such as lane-keeping assist, blind-spot monitoring and adaptive cruise control. At the time of the 2019 update, these systems were far from widespread. It’s likely they do not reliably detect filtering motorcycles, particularly at higher closing speeds or when the bike is offset from the centre of the lane. Some were never tested against motorcycles. It’s likely they change driver behaviour. Many drivers may now rely on warning lights rather than mirrors, make lazy steering inputs because the car normally ‘looks after’ lane position, or make sudden movements when automation disengages in slow traffic. The result is that filtering riders can no longer assume they are dealing with fully attentive human drivers. With autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle trials already under way in the UK, this trend will only increase. As a result, filtering today demands even more emphasis on anticipation, stopping distance and the assumption that we will not be seen—because legality offers no protection once physics takes over.

Filtering – what’s legal and how to do it

This is another tip I’ve completely rewritten for 2019, because filtering past or through slow-moving or stationary traffic is one of the most hotly-debated topics in biking. Please note that this article refers ONLY to UK practice. Whilst other nations have legalised filtering (Belgium for example) and lane splitting is legal in California (which has produced a code), it’s up to you to determine what the law is if you’re not a UK reader. And don’t forget to reverse left and right if you ride on the wrong side of the road.

So, here in the UK Motorcycle Roadcraft explains that filtering is a form of overtaking to make progress past stationary or slow moving traffic but gives no real advice on where or where not to do it. Filtering and other road users’ response to filtering motorcycles is also laid out in the Highway Code, which says in the section about ‘Road users requiring extra care’ that:

“It is often difficult to see motorcyclists and cyclists, especially when they are coming up from behind, coming out of junctions, overtaking you or filtering through traffic. Always look out for them before you emerge from a junction; they could be approaching faster than you think. When turning right across a line of slow-moving or stationary traffic, look out for cyclists or motorcyclists on the inside of the traffic you are crossing. Be especially careful when turning, and when changing direction or lane. Be sure to check mirrors and blind spots carefully.”

There is also guidance on the Highway Code which refer to overtaking, but can be applied by extention to filtering. Let’s mention the places you must not overtake first.

You may not:

cross solid white lines except to pass an obstruction or to overtake a slow (10mph), horse, bicycle, local authority vehicle (with its amber beacon flashing)
overtake after passing a No Overtaking sign, until you reach the end of restriction sign
overtake the vehicle nearest a pedestrian crossing
However, you may overtake vehicles where there is a solid white line on your side of the road if you can pass the vehicle without crossing or straddling the white line with any part of your vehicle.

You may:

enter a hatched lane divide as long as it has dashed boundary lines and it is safe and necessary to do so
pass traffic on the left (ie undertake) queuing or slow moving traffic but you should not change lane in order to gain an advantage
pass traffic on the left if the vehicle is indicating to turn right
pass traffic on the left if you are turning left in a dedicated left turn lane
pass traffic on the left in a one way street

So whilst there are some places we must NOT filter, there are no clear legal guidelines about HOW to filter. Unfortunately, some years back a wholly inaccurate article on filtering claimed to explain the law. As is the way of the internet, search engines turn it up from time to time, whereupon it’s ‘rediscovered’. I’m not going to tell you were to find it because it’s inaccurate but I will tell you why you shouldn’t trust it.

The article’s starting point was that a filtering crash should always be the driver’s fault. Commenting on a case, probably Leeson vs. Bevis Transport (1972), where the motorcyclist was found equally responsible for a collision with a van driver emerging from a side road, the article was penned in a way that implied that a filtering collision was always the other driver’s fault:

“I mean, you’re filtering past stationary cars and some clown t-bones you and you have to pick up half the bill?””

The Survival Skills approach is always to look at why things go wrong on the road, and I always encourage riders to see a situation from the other road user’s perspective. We could easily rewrite that statement:

“I’m trying to pull out of a side-turning into a busy street with parked vehicles on either side making it almost impossible to see, and some clown filtering past the bus that has kindly let me out t-bones me and I have to pick up half the bill?”

But it got worse. The writer then claimed that the law on filtering ‘changed’ after a case was heard in the Court of Appeal in 2006. The writer said:

“…in the case of Davis vs Schrogin, the judge found that “a filtering motorcyclist passing stationary or very slow moving traffic could not be to blame if a collision occurred if the rider had no chance to take avoiding action”, then jumped to the conclusion: “Ladies and Gentlemen, filtering past stationary traffic is no longer a grey area – it’s completely legal”.

First of all there was no ‘change in the law’ for the very simple reason that there was – and never has been – any road traffic law that defines filtering or how to go about it.

You may be wondering how do courts make a judgement on a filtering crash? The answer is based partly in terms of how each road user behaved. The question asked is “did the rider or drive behave in a way that that a competent driver or rider could be reasonably expected to drive or ride?”

Where it gets complicated is that a previous judgement (‘precedent’) by a magistrate’s court, crown court and county court is not binding. Although judges will look at previous decisions if the case is sufficiently similar, each case will be judged on its merits. However, higher court judgments (except in the House of Lords, where the Lords can change their minds) including those from the Court of Appeal, are binding on themselves and lower courts, UNLESS it can be shown that a new case has enough differences that it should be decided on its own facts. In that case, the judge can distinguish it from the previous case by pointing out the relevant differences and thus not be bound by precedent.

So the second error is to argue that a judgement in a single court case defines how other cases might turn out. Whilst case law sets a precedent, that precedent only applies in identical circumstances and the assessment of each individual case will depend heavily on statements and witnesses. There’s no ‘law making it legal’.

In any case, being on the right side of insurance claim doesn’t mean much if being in the legal ‘right’ doesn’t stop us being carted off in a pine box! So, let’s move on to looking at filtering from a practical perspective.

Above all, we need to be aware of where we might need to stop suddenly. What we mustn’t do is treat empty road ahead of us as a ‘motorcycle lane’ whether we’re filtering down the outside of a queue of traffic against oncoming vehicles, or (to use the American term) ‘lane splitting’ between queues moving in the same direction.

And that determines our speed. We have to be able to stop in the distance that we can see is clear AND EXPECT TO REMAIN CLEAR. So what’s the ‘right’ speed? Well, it’s all down to the physics of stopping. Two issues. The first is ‘double your speed, quadruple your stopping distance’. The second is ‘three-quarters of your braking distance loses one-quarter of your speed’.

In the collision between Messrs Schrogin and Davis, Mr Schrogin was stopped in a traffic jam in his car on a straight road, whilst Mr Davis was overtaking the stationary queue on his motorcycle. As nothing was coming in the opposite direction, Mr Schrogin decided to execute a U-turn and failed to see the approaching bike. Mr Schrogin accepted that he had looked the wrong way but argued that Mr Davis was contributory negligent. Mr Davis admitted seeing Mr Schrogin’s car moving towards the kerb in preparation for the U-turn but claimed that as he was no more than five cars’ length back from the point of impact, he had no chance to stop.

What surprises me is that when the case went to the Court of Appeal, it held that Mr Davis was so close to the point of impact that he could not have avoided the collision, so there was no basis for a finding of contributory negligence. But could the rider have stopped, given the quoted five car lengths?

Let’s do a quick sum. Something like a Vauxhall Astra is around 4.5 metres long, and that’s a fairly average sized car. Multiply that by 5 and you get 22.5 metres. Add a metre gap between the five vehicles and we probably have at least 25 metres in which to stop. When I demonstrate emergency stops, I can bring the bike to a standstill on a reasonable surface in the dry in around 10 metres from 30mph. So could a competent rider be ‘reasonably expected’ to stop too? if Mr Davis was accurate in his memory of distance (and post-crash, most witnesses are hopelessly inaccurate) then I’d say “yes, a competent rider could be reasonably expected to stop”…

…if he wasn’t taken completely by surprise by the event! If you’ve read Keith Code’s ‘Twist of the Wrist’ books, you’ll know all about ‘Survival Reactions’, the unplanned response to emergencies. They’re triggered by SURPRISE!, something you can find out more about by looking up our ‘No Suprise? No Accident’ campaign. If we’re not predicting something to happen, then SURPRISE! kicks in and triggers the Survival Reactions, which include freezing and ineffective braking. So the problem is really our expectations about that happens next. Is it really unexpected if a pedestrian steps out from between two vehicles? Or a door opens into our path? Or a car swaps lanes? Or a van pulls out of a side turning. Or a car starts to make a U-turn. Of course not. At least, not if we’re planning for the Worst Case Scenario, rather than looking at the empty tarmac as a motorcycle lane.

If we can see what’s happening ahead – a car edging the left in a queue is a great clue that the next movement will be the driver swinging out to perform a U-turn, whilst a gap being left between two vehicles is an equally fine clue that someone’s leaving space for an emerging vehicle or for someone to cross the road – we just have to interpret what we see. But the moment our view ahead is restricted – perhaps by a bus – then we have to assume that whe might have to stop level with the front of that vehicle – and down comes the speed.

You may read that so long as you keep to a 15 mph speed differential with the vehicles you’re filtering past, you’ll be safe. I know where that claim came from, and what they ignored was the physics. If we’re filtering past stationary traffic at 15 mph, our stopping distance is about a metre. If we’re filtering past traffic moving at 10 mph at 25 mph, our stopping distance is about six metres. By the time our speed climbs to 55 mph, filtering past traffic moving at 40 mph, our stopping distance is out to 35 metres or so. That’s a huge distance back from where things can go wrong. It’s already too late to worry about the cars we’re passing NOW.

Now, if you take a look at the shape of a braking graph, it takes us around half the total stopping distance to lose (very, very roughly) one-fifth of our speed. And we lose approximately three-quarters of our speed in the final quarter of the available braking distance. The result is that if we can’t stop, impacts are MUCH harder than riders intuitively expect. We only need to run out of space by one-quarter of the distance, but we hit with three-quarters of the impact of not braking at all. And the higher our starting speed, the worse the impact. Only considering traffic speed differentials is a really nasty filtering trap. Once traffic is moving at around 20, I’ll be back in the traffic stream. You certainly won’t see me lane splitting at motorway speeds.

What other tips can I give you?

Most important of all, assume you will NOT BE SEEN. Don’t expect to be seen in a mirror. Just like you, drivers are watching the traffic ahead when it’s moving in queues, so that they don’t run into the back of a vehicle that stops suddenly. Mirror use is erratic at best, the view is often blocked by the next vehicle back, and as soon as there is the slightest curve in the road, the mirror won’t show a filtering motorcycle until the last second in any case. All the hi-vis kit in the world, even riding with lights on main beam – makes no odds if the bike’s not visible. And loud pipes? When I’m driving, it’s not uncommon that the first time I hear them is when the bike is alongside. They project the engine sound backwards, not forwards. They do not save lives. So we need to look forwards and be ready to change our plans and even take evasive action. And keep a thumb near the horn – it might just stop a driver moving into your path.

When passing stationary traffic on a single carriageway road, where possible move into the opposite carriageway and stay wide – it gives us a better view of emerging and U-turning vehicles. But don’t be tempted to carry too much speed – as we’ve seen, it may be necessary to stop suddenly so watch out for junctions, where pedestrians might cross and only filter past after checking it’s clear. Don’t be tempted to go the wrong side of a solid line on your side of the road or Keep Left islands, it’s an offence and a guaranteed nick if you’re spotted. When confronted with oncoming traffic it’s still possible to filter IF there is sufficient margin, but as we get closer to the vehicles we’re filtering past the speed must come down – could we stop if a door opened? Eventually, when further progress cannot be safely made, we should find a space and move back into the queue. Don’t forget we should never force another vehicle to swerve or slow down – this could count as grounds for a prosecution.

What about filtering on the left? First of all, there is no offence of ‘undertaking’ if you pass the left of slower traffic on single carriageway roads, dual carriageways or motorways. But… like all filtering or lane splitting, if done in a way that inconveniences other road users, specifically forcing them to change speed or direction to avoid us, it can be construed as careless or even dangerous driving, offences which carry points, a fine and even a custodial sentence if dangerous enough.

Legal or not, fltering to the left of a queue is generally riskier for several reasons. The first is because – bar the odd foreign vehicle – the driver is sitting on the far side of the vehicle and is much less likely to see a bike coming up in the passenger side mirror. Keep a good eye out for side turnings and entrances, and watch for vehicles turning left into it. We’re also at risk from oncoming vehicles turning right through stationary or slow-moving queues because we’re blindsided by the vehicles we’re passing. And don’t forget emerging vehicles too – drivers often miss spotting cyclists as well as bikes filtering alongside the pavement because they’re busy looking at the queue of traffic and working out whether someone will let them out. Although some bus lane allow motorcycle access at any time and it’s perfectly legal to use them when not in use – check the sign boards at the beginning of the lane – we’re now passing slower traffic to our right and the same problems apply. It’s not difficult, if there’s a turning to be see or a gap to the right, then look for – and respond to – the turning vehicle. Slow right down, expect NOT to be seen and be prepared to Give Way.

When lane splitting on any dual carriageway including a motorway, we’re always passing to the left of a stream of traffic, so the same mirror issues appear. Where there are three lanes, passing between lane two and lane three (the right-hand lane) is usually the best bet. HGVs are not allowed to use the outside lane so there’s a bit more space, a slightly better view, and you won’t be lane-splitting between two trucks too often. As a rule of thumb, look ahead for gaps in each lane big enough for a vehicle to move into – if there’s a space, someone will aim to take it, and it’s usually the driver on our RIGHT who, because they are usually moving to a slower-moving lane – is least likely to see us approaching in the passenger side mirror. Be particularly careful when lanes move at different speeds. It’s called ‘lane shear’ and drivers will do exactly what we’re doing – try to get to the faster lane to make progress. Be ready for lane swapping to the faster-moving lane. Watch out too near junctions and services. Drivers will generally move left through the lanes to get to an off-ramp, and after we pass the on-ramp, they’ll be moving to the right. And don’t forget, there are junctions where drivers can turn right across a dual carriageway.

Plan as far ahead as possible. Be particularly cautious passing long vehicles. The driver’s view from the cab is often not very good, they need space to turn on bends and at junctions and may swing wide, so hang back till you know what they are doing, and pass when they’ve straightened up. Watch out for buses parked at an angle in a bus stop – if you can’t see the mirror, the driver can’t see you. Make sure you spot left or right turn lanes so you can anticipate turning vehicles. Look for obstructions like traffic islands and bollards, pinchpoints either side of the road, or cyclists – they will all make vehicles change position and possibly ‘squeeze’ our space. Watch the surface for cats-eyes and painted lines, potholes or slippery surfaces which could make braking or steering difficult. Look for lane markings approaching junctions to predict traffic movements, and watch traffic lights to judge the sequence – we may be able to slip to the front whilst they are red, but we may need to look to slip into a gap in the queue so we don’t get stuck against the island when they turn green.

Watch out for legal traps too. Just because you see lots of other riders breaking laws, don’t imagine they all get away with it. Don’t get caught out by cycle lanes bounded by a solid line, and be aware that we’re not supposed to use the advanced cycle stop box at lights. In practice, nearly everyone on a bike uses them, but riders do get nicked – some are monitored by CCTV. Likewise active bus lanes are often monitored too. Passing in a zone marked with a broken line and cross hatching is allowable if “safe and necessary”, but it’s illegal to enter a zone with chevrons and a solid line. Be careful about moving back and forth to the fastest moving lane on a multilane road to make progress in heavy traffic. A traffic cop told me that he was shown a video of a motorcyclist moving at speed from lane to lane on a busy motorway on a training course, and was asked for comments. He thought that the rider was safe enough, although a little closer to some of the cars than he’d like, but that generally he had no problem with what he saw. So he was surprised that the video evidence had been used to prosecute the rider, who’d be found guilty of dangerous driving and handed a ban!

Try to be courteous to other road users, even the ones holding you up. Don’t harass them with rev bombs or drive a centimetre behind with lights on stun. Even if your impatient bahaviour doesn’t trigger an equally aggressive response, it can distract them into making a mistake that puts you at greater risk. Give drivers a chance to see you – a highly-manoeuvrable bike can cut through traffic and really DOES appear from nowhere. Back when I was a courier, the best despatch riders used to move through traffic almost imperceptibly – but they were always there at the head of the queue. And if you’re from a big city, don’t try the same filtering techniques out in the sticks. What works on the Euston Road in London is asking for trouble in a small Scottish town.

If you are not confident you can do it, don’t! And don’t copy other riders if you’re not sure what you’re doing either. You’ve no guarantee they have a clue what they’re doing. If there’s one rule to follow, look for places it’s easy to filter – wide roads, stationary traffic. Avoid it where it’s tricky – narrow lanes, against heavy oncoming traffic. You might see someone else taking a risk, but a little caution, a little extra time on your journey will mean you arrive at your destination by bike rather than at hospital by air ambulance.

Taken cautiously, filtering can be relatively low risk and we can still make good progress by combining excellent observation with careful planning. I spent sixteen years as a courier, and covered half-a-million miles, so I must have filtered tens of thousands of miles through London, and the worst that happened was hitting a taxi driver’s door when he opened it to empty his ashtray just as I was filtering past. His door caught my clutch lever, which broke one of my fingers. But as I point out in my Urban Survival Skills advanced motorcycle courses, filtering isn’t ‘safe’. It’s one of the main killers of riders in big cities, usually because riders become complacent. Nothing ever went wrong before – but it only needs to go wrong once, and we’re in the KSI stats.

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18. Staying awake

If anything, this article was another to pick up a riding issue well before it became better known. Drowsiness remains one of the most consistently underestimated risk factors in road safety, particularly among private motorists and motorcyclists, and we can fall asleep anywhere. Prof. Jim Horne’s research was at the time I reported hot off the press, but now there’s a deeper body of evidence backing up his work. The central premise — that sleepiness kills more people than drink-driving — is broadly consistent with the research base then and now, as modern studies continue to show that fatigue is strongly associated with serious and fatal collisions and still under-reported. Yet the cultural blind spot — acknowledging drink-driving risk but dismissing fatigue — is still very real.

02:00–06:00 remains the highest-risk window and the mid-afternoon dip is well established between 13:00–15:00. The observation that riders feel tired well before control degrades, underestimate how badly they are performing, and push on because “we’re nearly there”, is strongly supported by human-factors research. It’s a danger on group rides, and I have experienced it myself, because experienced riders — who often volunteer to lead — often underestimate how tired other riders are, and because nobody wants to be the rider to stop the group. The phenomenon of micro-sleeps remains one of the most misunderstood fatigue mechanisms, and the “long blink” warning is accurate. Caffeine can temporarily improve alertness, but it does not reverse sleep debt. One modern insight worth adding is that fatigue is cumulative and many riders start long journeys already impaired. It strengthens the “planning matters” argument, before the key is turned. We can fall asleep anywhere.

Staying Awake

This article was first written in the early 2000s, and was prompted by research by Professor Jim Horne of Loughborough University’s Sleep Research Centre. His findings indicated that more people are killed on UK roads due to sleepiness than through drinking and driving. Whilst we generally think of monotonous roads such as motorways are as the problem areas, because of the high speeds and serious consequences are often serious, we can fall asleep anywhere. Whilst bus, truck and coach drivers are strictly monitored, drivers and riders are particularly at risk because there are no rules which regulate the amount we can drive or ride. And as a group, motorcyclists seem to be blissfully unaware of the problems.

So why do we have problems staying awake? The obvious one is spending too long on the road at any one time. I discovered it was a particular issue in New Zealand, because towns are far apart and the roads are slow, but clearly if we’re riding from London to Edinburgh, that’s a long way and if we attempt it in one hit, we will get physically tired and sleepy.

Less obvious are the body’s natural biorhythms. We are programmed to fall asleep at certain times. Not surprisingly the highest risk time is between 2am and 6am, but fewer people are aware there is a similar period between 12am and 4pm, which is made worse if you have had a heavy meal or if you are an older driver. Shiftworkers are particularly at risk because their sleep patterns are disrupted.

So first and foremost, we should try to avoid the risk of getting sleepy in the first place. And that means planning a journey to avoid excessive daily mileages. We should also factor in breaks. At least fifteen minutes in every two hours is recommended, but regular longer breaks are a good idea, with a nap as needed when we start to feel sleepy. And avoid heavy meals during breaks and strong coffee or ‘energy’ drinks. The former divert blood to the digestive system away from the brain, and the latter only provide a very limited, short term lift.

So how do we know we’re at risk? We get some early warning. Simulator research shows a driver will often start to feel sleepy around forty minutes before the real problems occur, but typically we try to ride through this stage rather than pull over and take a break, frequently because we’re close to the end of our journey. At the same time, we don’t realise how badly we are riding, even though others often notice. Witnesses to accidents involving a dozing driver often report that the vehicle was being driven erratically before the accident occurred.

As soon as we realise we’re getting tired, we should stop as soon as it is safe. If you are on the motorway, don’t push on to the next service area, pull off at the next exit. Common ‘cures’ such as opening the windows / flipping up the visor, singing to ourselves or turning the stereo up loud don’t seem to work.

The next stage is something called ‘micro-sleep’, where we doze off for a second or two. Ever had that really disconcerting ‘long blink’ when you suddenly discover the truck ahead is no long three or four seconds away but right in front of the wheel? That’s a micro-sleep.

If we start to be concerned about keeping our eyes open, then stop IMMEDIATELY, even on the motorway. The hard shoulder is for emergency use and in my opinion this is an emergency. Although the police might not interpret it that way, if you get off the bike and kick the tyres or something, even a five minute stop should wake you up enough to get safely to the next exit, where you can leave and take a proper break.

It’s likely that tiredness-related problems are at the root of some seemingly-inexplicable group riding crashes. I know that I had a crash on one of my rides that was fatigue-related. The rider had started early because he’d had a long way to ride. I had tried to cover too many miles on the road and hadn’t factored in sufficient breaks. With around forty minutes to the end of the ride, he lost concentration on a bend and went off the road. He was unhurt but the bike was a write-off. So if you’re organising a ride, watch for signs. And if you’re in a group ride and YOU start to feel sleepy, stop the entire group rather than try to push on to avoid inconveniencing everyone else.

And finally, just in case you think you can’t fall asleep on a bike, you can! It happened to me years ago when I was a courier.

It was a hot summer’s day, around 3pm. I’d been riding since about 9am with just a couple of short breaks and had just passed the last exit before a 20 mile stretch of the M26/M25 where there is no exit, when I started to feel really sleepy. I knew I was riding badly, and then I experienced a micro-sleep. I suddenly found myself about five metres behind a truck.

But I carried on. I lifted the visor, started trying to sing myself away, and made the mistake of trying to push on to the next exit because of that rule about not stopping on the hard shoulder.

Bad move… five minutes later I found myself riding diagonally across the hard shoulder, heading for a grass embankment and with the left hand indicator on.

The weird thing was I could remember a little dream of seeing the exit ahead. This time I stopped, got off the bike and took my helmet off, walked around and jumped up and down for a few minutes before getting back on the bike and pulling off at the next exit. I found a stretch of grass beside the road, and had a kip for half an hour. That way, both rider and parcel made it to their destination, just a few minutes late.

I posted this story to a motorcycling group elsewhere. To my surprise, few people took the danger of drowsiness whilst riding at face value and hardly anyone considered it as a real (or even potential) problem.

A scary number came up with a “I get tired but I continue to ride/drive whilst singing/looking around/jumping up and down and that works for me” rationale. One very experienced rider claimed, he could tell non-dangerous tiredness from dangerous tiredness. Yeah, right.

The interesting thing is that the report highlighted that people do not see driving whilst tired as a high risk activity, and here was a group of experienced riders responding in exactly the way the report predicted.

My guess is that what’s happened is that they have driven or ridden many times whilst tired and got away with it. So they dismiss the dangers as negligible, despite solid evidence to the contrary. It’s the same “I can handle it” attitude that drink drivers habitually use to excuse their behaviour, right up to the day they fail to handle it. I guess we need a lot of educating before we believe the dangers of our behaviour.

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16. A Moment of Inattention? Or a lack of attention to fixing problems?

A universal and ongoing challenge in motorcycling is understanding how human instinct, fear, and attention interact with skill under real-world stress, what’s now referred to as ‘human factors’. Even experienced riders can find themselves in situations where instinct and fear override skill. This article explores a real-world braking emergency to illustrate how inattention, poor anticipation, and stress responses interact, why emergency skills alone aren’t enough, and how proactive hazard assessment and mindset can prevent dangerous situations before they occur. The article’s core message — that accidents often result from cognitive and attentional failures rather than purely technical deficiencies — remains as relevant today as ever and explains why neuroscience matters to motorcyclists.

A Moment of Inattention? Or a lack of attention to fixing problems?

The following was posted in a discussion group by a friend of mine, Don Kime, an instructor in the States. What can be learned? The rider identifies some of the problems for himself. So why’s he not done something about sorting it out? And here’s the really scary bit: “Here we go again.” So he’s been in this position before. What’s he not learned from the previous incidents?

“More harrowing braking experiences. This is beginning to scare me. I just got back from a ride and was on a two lane, fairly straight and wide, country road. I was following a pickup doing somewhere around 75mph. He was about four car lengths or more ahead of me. I was just enjoying the ride, as usual. Next thing I know all I see is brake lights and I am closing on his tail gate fast. Here we go again.

“I immediately get down on both brakes, and the back wheel promptly locks up. At first I am not really sure which wheel is sliding until the back end starts to wag back and forth. At this point I know I need to be squeezing the front brake harder than I am, but for some reason I am afraid I am going to slide the front wheel and loose control. In retrospect, I don’t think I was anywhere near loosing traction on the front. I am in the grips of fear and (again) fixated on the tail gate of the truck.

“For a moment I am sure I am not going to be able to stop in time, but I feel like I can at least get my speed down before I impact. I continue on the front brake with the rear locked. I know I should have released the rear, but at the moment there was no way I was going to let off either brake. I managed to bear down a bit harder on the front once I realized that it was the rear that was sliding and not the front. I brought the bike to a stop about 10ft behind the truck in a cloud of smoke from my rear tire. (I flat spotted the heck out of my new Macadam!)

“The pickup had just stopped dead in the middle of the road to make a right turn (without signalling). I don’t know if he had slammed on his brakes hard or if I had not seen them when they first came on. All I remember is going about 70 and seeing brake lights and a truck that had come to a complete stop right in front of me.

I made several rookie mistakes (again). First of all, I made no attempt to avoid. I fixated. I probably could have gone around, but once I locked the back wheel that was no longer an option. I don’t remember if there was any oncoming traffic or not. I don’t think I had time to look. Second, I did not brake the front wheel aggressively enough. My first instinctive reaction was to jam down the brake pedal which resulted in the rear wheel slide and making me panic. I think if I had used only the front brake I would have stopped much sooner. But for some reason, I can’t seem to keep myself from stomping on the rear brake in an emergency. Right after the incident I did three practice emergency braking tests. I was able to bring the bike to a controlled stop all three times in a distance much shorter than what I had just done. But I was not in a real emergency situation.

Something happens to my brain when I am in a real emergency situation that prevents me from thinking clearly and braking correctly. Fear, plain in simple. Maybe I just need to practice more so it is second nature. My brain just seems to lock up in panic situations. I need to somehow learn to control my fear instead of letting it control me.”

So what can we learn? What are the issues?

Let’s take a moment to think about what the rider has for himself identified as a problem – his braking technique. Notice he said he practiced three stops immediately after the incident and managed them fine. It should be obvious that he was not familiar with the using the brakes hard. Practicing emergency stops after the event is too late!

But here’s the real problem: “Something happens to my brain when I am in a real emergency situation… I made no attempt to avoid. I fixated. I probably could have gone around, but once I locked the back wheel that was no longer an option.”

Once in a panic situation, self-preservation and instinct took over from planned riding. Why? Because we cannot easily practice emergencies! As there’s no actual emergency in a practice emergency stop, the risk is that if we don’t see it coming soon enough to brake hard consciously, our unconscious ‘Survival Reactions’ take over. These are the primitive and instinctive responses the threat, such as target fixation, freezing and over-braking. Keith Code first talked about this in his ‘Twist of the Wrist’ books. And it’s actually a dramatic limitation of training in emergency techniques. We know what to do in an emergency, but we don’t know how we’ll react in an emergency.

So, how do we prevent survival reactions taking over?

The first option is not to follow so close. He said: “I was following a pickup doing somewhere around 75mph. He was about four car lengths or more ahead of me”. If he’d really been that close, he would have hit the back of the truck before he had even applied the brakes, so let’s make some allowance for hazy perceptions of following distance after the event, but it’s still clear he was too close. If we’re to avoid triggering survival reactions, we need to see the vehicle ahead begin to slow, and still have time to think.

How far back is that?

Well that depends on something else. Our expectations. He said: “The pickup had just stopped dead in the middle of the road to make a right turn (without signalling).” Well, that’s not exactly unusual is it? Vehicles – including motorcycles – stop. Our rider had failed to anticipate it might happen. And that means it was a SURPRISE! And SURPRISE! is the trigger for survival reactions. More about this on the No Surprise No Accident website.

It’s hard to give hard and fast distances but in essence if we’re taken by SURPRISE we can add anything from 1 second to 3 seconds to our stopping distance. That’s not because we’re braking less effectively, it’s because it takes that long to actually BEGIN to react. The Highway Code talks about ‘reaction time’ and ‘stopping distance’, but ignores this ‘recognition time’. Whilst we can certainly stop in less than the near-100 metre distance the Highway Code says we should allow IF we anticipate the need to stop and hit the brakes immediately, if we freeze for three seconds, we’ll have travelled no less than 90 metres before even beginning to brake!

What we actually need is a riding plan that factors in things going wrong before it actually happens. Read this: “I was just enjoying the ride, as usual… I don’t remember if there was any oncoming traffic or not. I don’t think I had time to look.” Do you begin to see the problem? We all tend to drift at times but a lack of focus on the riding task is dangerous. Alertness can’t be sacrificed for relaxation. He shouldn’t have had to think about looking, he should have been aware of other traffic As Don says “I don’t see this as a ‘braking’ issue – I see it as a ‘thinking’ issue”.

Finally let’s look at Don’s summary of the event.

“First, as many of you have said, unless the rider was planning on overtaking, his following distance was far too close. If he was planning on overtaking, he should have been fully aware of all traffic ahead including any sideroads or driveways or other situations which could produced just what happened. I have learned to never put myself in an overtaking posture when there could be reason for the driver to brake for an unsignalled turn, an animal, bad roadway surface, etc., etc.

“Assuming that the rider was not overtaking, it was a potentially disastrous mistake to follow so closely, but this was exaggerated by a very lackadaisical attitude toward having full information on traffic conditions ahead – together, in my opinion, a potentially deadly combination.

“I see this as 90% of the learning opportunity from this situation. Most emergency braking, in my opinion, results from this kind of failure, and I’m not sure that all the braking practice or discussion in the world assures a rider of righting this wrong. I’m not sure how any of us, including me, will react in a true ‘the collision is imminent’ braking situation. I’ve fortunately not had to find out as ‘heavy braking’ has always been enough. Nonetheless, I practice maximum braking as often as possible.

“However, it is my personal preference to concentrate the vast majority of my efforts at avoiding this situation. I personally believe that this is the only right answer.

“My final thought on this is that… with proper anticipation and attention to defensive motorcycle riding these kinds of situations do not have to be the norm. I don’t recall when last I had a traffic situation ‘surprise’ me. …and I don’t say this to blow my horn as a rider. There are many far better riders than me. I simply practice religiously a system of riding which attempts to separate me from situations at which this particular rider failed. In my opinion, this is the difference between motorcycling being a ‘relatively’ safe, wonderfully challenging and enjoyable activity and one which can kill you very quickly. At the same time, I am fully aware that, in spite of all our best efforts, there is one out there that can get any of us. That’s why I wear the gear and am very appreciative of good luck.”

My final comment is to repeat what another contributor said: “The old pilot axiom is that superior pilots are the ones who never get in a position where they need to use their superior skills”.

Absolutely.

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15. Getting it wrong is easy, learning from a mistake seems a lot harder

Motorcycle crashes aren’t random. They follow patterns that haven’t changed for decades, yet many riders continue to repeat the same mistakes and the persistent human factors behind motorcycle crashes are overconfidence, poor anticipation, and failure to learn. Modern studies in accident analysis still emphasise that cognitive biases, overconfidence, and misjudgment are major contributors to crashes. Encouraging riders to ask “what could go wrong” and analyse their own role in crashes is a principle that should underpin all modern advanced rider training.

Getting it wrong is easy, learning from a mistake seems a lot harder

However good we are, we all make mistakes. Provided we survive them, then do we learn from them? It’s a good question and insurance industry statistics suggest that most riders don’t. Riders who have had an accident in the previous three years are three times more likely than average to have another accident in the following year – insurance companies do not load the premiums of riders who crash for no reason! And here’s something else to think about. We don’t have to learn from our own experience, we can look at where other riders crash, and historically we still have the same accident types as motorcyclists have always had. Here are the Big Three. Collisions at junctions. Crashes on corners. Overtaking accidents. Look at statistics from the 1950s and 2010s and you’ll find nothing has changed. What does that tell you? It should suggest we don’t learn well from experience – either our own, or someone else’s.

Have you had a ‘moment’ recently?

Have a think. Ask yourself some questions.

Did you see it coming, and if you did were you able to react in time and take avoiding action? If you couldn’t take evasive action, why not?

If you didn’t see it coming, what were you looking at? Did you fail to spot the clues to what was about to happen or did you fail to anticipate the likely sequence of events and consequences of what you were seeing?

We should know by now that the most common motorcycle crash is a collision between a bike and a car. But have a think on this. If the driver failed to spot the bike, the car was almost always where the rider could see it. Riders usually report that “the driver didn’t see me” and not that “I didn’t see the car”. In fact, they often say something along the lines of “the driver was looking right at me”. So the rider saw the vehicle they were about to collide with, no problem.

So what was going on in the rider’s head at that moment? Do they simply glance at the car, then leave it to the driver to sort it all out? That certainly seems to be the case in most car : bike collisions.

Here’s another example. A typical overtaking and filtering crash occurs when the driver turns right across the bike’s path. The rider’s cop-out is usually that “the driver should have checked his mirror properly” or “the driver didn’t signal before turning”. But think about it. If a car COULD turn right, why is the rider overtaking? Did the rider fail to spot the junction or driveway? Or did the rider simply assume that the driver wouldn’t turn?

If we haven’t anticipated a dangerous situation, then it’s our mistake as much as anyone else’s. And many bike crashes are down to the rider alone. Most cornering crashes and many overtakes that go wrong result from really poor decisions by the rider and the rider alone. Even when legally it’s the fault of another road user that we found ourselves in a difficult or dangerous situation, we should be looking for ways not to get into that situation in the first place. There’s no benefit to blaming the other road user from the stretcher.

If we don’t ride in a state of mind where we are looking for things to go wrong, then we WILL be caught out by unexpected – and very much routine – crashes. If we habitually say “it was the other guy’s fault” or “there was nothing I could do”, then we are fooling ourselves and will learn nothing. We need to assess our riding critically. Yet many riders find it almost impossible to admit to making a mistake. “The corner’s surface was rubbish”, or “the driver coming the other way was speeding”.

As I mentioned right at the beginning, we have the same crashes as we always have always had. Why haven’t we learned?

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13. Practice doesn’t just makes PERMANENT… it keeps POLISHED too

The very first version of this article, written over fifteen years ago fell into a common trap. I talked about how practice makes perfect. But I quickly learned – thanks to a horse riding instructor who was took training courses with both Survival Skills Advanced Rider Training and another former trainer who remains a buddy of mine – that’s not actually how it works. Repeating a skill actually fixes it in place – it makes it PERMANENT. For that reason it’s vital to learn the RIGHT techniques before we start practicing. We need to practice the perfect! It highlights a slightly different angle of rider development—skill retention, mental mapping, and context-dependent performance—rather than purely skill acquisition or risk awareness. But even after that my ideas developed. It’s perfectly possible to LOSE skills if we don’t keep them POLISHED. Riding skills should not be ‘just learned’, they shouldn’t eve be ‘maintained’. They should be honed and worked up to even higher levels.

Practice doesn’t just makes PERMANENT… it keeps POLISHED too

It all started when I was watching an online debate about the technique of ‘offsiding’, which is where riders cross the centre line onto the other lane to get a better view ahead:

“It helped me get over my reticence for going over the white line onto the wrong side of the road approaching corners for more visibility…. The thing I noticed in France was that I could easily move to the left for a right hand corner, because then I was on the ‘correct’ side of the road for home, therefore it didn’t feel as awkward. I think it’s just a mental barrier I have to overcome.”

I’m not going into the offsiding technique here – that’s another debate altogether – but it got me thinking.

I’d noticed that when I was abroad, although I was comfortable sitting near the centre line on a right-hander (ie, the reverse of what we’d do in the UK), I really wasn’t nearly so happy lining the bike up with the righthand edge of the lane near the grass for a left-hander. In the UK, I can place the bike precisely along the grass verge, but in France I was giving myself a good metre of leeway. I felt very uncomfortable pushing myself any closer, and if I tried I began to fixate on the edge of the road to the exclusion of taking advantage of the view ahead – it was definitely a mental thing.

Holding our position accurately within the lane is largely subconscious and relies on peripheral vision – or it should, if our our attention is up away and some distance ahead. But to achieve that precise positioning, we need a ‘mental map’ of the lane so our peripheral vision has something to refer to.

Riding all the time in the UK, constant practice generates a clear mental map of how my position should appear in peripheral vision. So when positioning left-of-centre to see around a right-hand bend, I ‘knew’ where I was in the lane, which allowed me to get on with looking further ahead.

But once I switched sides of the road in France, the mental map was clearly missing. As soon as I lined up right-of-centre near the verge, I began worrying subconsciously about the position of the bike.

As soon as I realised this, I began working on moving position bit-by-bit, rather than trying to take up the mirror image position. It took a bit of effort, but I was soon overcoming this mental block.

Now, here’s the reference to ‘practice keeps polished’. If I don’t ride abroad for a while, the problem comes back. But if I ride abroad regularly, it goes away quickly. If I take a break from riding abroad – as I did some years back – then it takes much longer for the issue to vanish again.

An excellent demonstration that we need to constantly work on riding skills to keep them polished and in tip-top condition. So…

…when was the last time you performed an emergency stop?