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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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14. Who is writing your biking advice? Make sure it’s good!

I sometimes pick up criticism for commenting negatively on other articles on better biking skills. “Why are you being so negative? They are only trying to help” was something I heard a while back. The trouble is, not all advice is created equal. When it comes to cornering, there’s a still a focus on prioritising ‘progress’ and textbook lines over hazard awareness, leaving riders exposed to surprises. Where we look and how we think about hazards in corners matters more than how fast we take a bend; the aim of the article is to explain why situational awareness should always come first in advanced riding. The reference to the MAC courses from 1998 may seem out of date, but in fact there is still a need for similar cautions, particularly in this age of modern tech; that might change the machine dynamics but cannot replace situational awareness.

Who is writing your biking advice? Make sure it’s good!

Some years back I was reading a new section on advanced riding on another website. The section was designed to pull in readers to the business, and I wasn’t surprised to see that the first article dealt with cornering – it usually does! But rather than being written ‘in-house’, contributions were from readers. In this case, the article appeared it was written by someone who had completed a two day Motorcycle Appreciation Course (MAC) in 1998 as part of that now-defunct Honda-run training initiative. No problem, I thought, I’m always interested in new ideas and new sources. However, reading it more closely revealed a couple of misunderstandings. At least I hoped they were misunderstandings and not what was taught!

So what did I spot that concerned me? The most important one involved our old friend the Limit Point (or vanishing, distance or convergence point) and what we should do with it.

He states “quick riding particularly through bends is all about position. Correct positioning will enable maximum visibility and consequently more rapid progress.”

Uh-oh. First warning sign. Notice the emphasis on quick riding and progress. As I stated in a previous tip, skills-based training has to be tempered by a knowledge of what can go WRONG. My first thought would be “what might make me slow down and maybe even stop”, not how fast I can get around the bend. Our goal in a bend is NOT ‘more progress’. It’s all about identifying hazards that might make us slow down. IF and ONLY IF we are certain that we cannot see any reasons to slow down, THEN we can choose whether or not making ‘progress’ is appropriate. And I know this is where the Survival Skills risk-based approach to training parts company with a lot of other post-test training in the UK.

“Therefore moving to the left for a right-hander, staying in to the left watching the vanishing point until you can see the exit then drifting away from the left towards the right easing out the bend and accelerating away will open the bend out allowing more brisk progress. The opposite applies for left-handers”.

No. Once we realise that our first task is always to work out where we might to stop, then we need to look out for the hazards that might make us stop. Gaining the best possible view around the bend isn’t the same as maximising our view of hazards.

If we’re going to experience a nasty SURPRISE! on a corner, it’s most likely to appear from a hazard called a ‘surprise horizon’. The surprise horizon is a blind area between us and the furthest point we can see is clear. The reason a surprise horizon is a hazard we need to be aware of is because of the risk that a vehicle (or a cycle or a person or even an animal) could suddenly appear. And it’s appearing between us and the limit point.

And that in turn leads to two other conclusions:

positioning to see as far as the limit point MUST be subsidiary to changing position to open up views into these blind areas. If we simply ride to open up view around a right-hand bend, it can place us perilously close to these blind entrances on the nearside.

our speed must be set to allow us to take some evasive action at the surprise horizon, not the limit point

Are there any other hazards?

We mustn’t forget that the more we position to the right-of-centre and close to the centre line, there is the potential risk of conflict with oncoming traffic. The narrower the road or the sharper the corner, the worse the risk. Too far to the right and the only benefit will be that we see what we’re about to hit a moment sooner. We must give up position if keeping right on a left-hander would potentially expose us to a risk of head-on collision. We MUST maintain a broader focus on the ROAD, not just the the corner – we must maintain SITUATIONAL AWARENESS.

Then he continued: “if all this seems rather obvious, it is probably because it is and certainly it came as nothing new to me. So why was I losing speed on the approach to bends and in some cases while negotiating them?

“I had forgotten not the need to assess the line of the road well in advance, but to maintain concentration on where it was going, in other words where I wanted to go… It took me some while to realise that instead of watching the vanishing point and chasing it, my eye was straying to changes in the road surface, the instruments, or minor obstructions. As soon as my concentration strayed, my momentum through the bend or on its approach reduced.”

Maybe I’m deliberately failing to read between the lines, but to me (and possibly to someone reading this with whilst looking for advice) this reads as if the broader situational awareness is being seen as a distraction from the all-important task of ‘making progress’ through the corner.

Of course we look at the road surface, of course we look at ‘minor obstructions’. We have to, because we are not on a race track and we need to keep an up-to-date 360 degree mental map of our surroundings, and a lot of vital detail can only be assessed when we’re closer-up. What’s a dark patch spotted in the distance? Only close up will we be able to tell if it’s a road repair with different coloured tarmac, a pothole, a damp patch or a fuel spill. Clearly, there are good times to make mirror checks and glance at the instruments, and that’s probably not in the middle of the corner, but denying that we need to check the surface or what’s left and right of our path is just plain wrong.

My guess is that the entire diagnosis of the writer’s problems was wrong. It was not ‘lack of forward vision’ so much as a late response to the hazards he had spotted – hence running in on a closed throttle – plus a general lack of a plan allowing the rider to negotiate bends as a flowing sequence. Possibly he got a lecture on the dangers of target fixation.

That would tally with what he says later about it being “a truism that we go where we look”. That’s another old chestnut. We actually look at what scares us – it’s built-in to human responses to threats. It’s target fixation and it’s a far more natural response to the threats of the road, and it takes a real effort to lift our view further ahead and away from the threat. And one of the things that creates target fixation, pulling our view down and to the immediate surroundings, is trying to ride too fast – we start focusing on the Number One job which is simply staying on the tarmac. If we haven’t got time to spread our vision around, then we’re riding too close to our limits. And there’s another reason progress should never be a goal of training, but an outcome of eliminating risk.

So next time you’re out on the bike, have a think about where you are looking. If you’re being surprised by hazards appearng AHEAD, then you need to pick your vision up and search further ahead. If you’re being surprised by hazards appearing from the SIDES then you need to spread your view left and right. In either case, you may need to slow down initially, but what you should not be doing is focusing exclusively on the limit point.

 

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07. What’s the goal of post-test training?

This article was first written over twenty years ago and lightly updated since, but the central question it poses remains unresolved: what should post-test motorcycle training actually be for? While machines, testing regimes and training organisations have evolved — with ABS, traction control and more formalised “advanced” pathways now the norm — newly qualified riders still emerge with gaps in confidence, control and understanding.

“Do they know what they’re doing, do they know why, and are they managing risk?” is as concise and useful a training lens as any modern coaching framework. It also aligns neatly with contemporary human-factors thinking, even if I did not label it as such at the time.

The tension between rider-centred skill-building and training aimed at meeting an external standard has not gone away. If anything, it has become more important to challenge, as technology increasingly masks weaknesses rather than addressing them.

What’s the goal of post-test training?

Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the goal of training after passing the motorcycle test. Obviously we want to improve the skills and knowledge that a rider gained on basic training. But what does that really mean in terms of what we deliver? Are we looking for perfection? Or should we be looking for a pragmatic approach to riding?

When I moderated a riding skills forum, we regularly used to get requests for help with a riding issue. In one instance, the request came from a very newly qualified rider on his new motorcycle:

"I passed my test 2 weeks ago tomorrow and am really a complete novice as I'd never ridden before I started my training which was basically 3 lessons. Anyway I bought a 6 month old Thundercat as my first bike after a lot of worrying that the bike was too powerful for a 1st bike. I want to know what tips you can give to a new rider... I'm really struggling with a few things in particular:

1. setting off I'm not sure what revs to use, and find it hard to keep the throttle steady... I panic that the the front wheel is going to fly up and throw me off

2. turning into a side road I was taught to use 1st but it just doesn't feel right as I'm very jerky on the throttle

3. which brake should I use? For example on country lanes if I want to slow down from a speed above 30 ish, is it the front? I worry that wheels are going to lock and start sliding"

Now, it should be pretty obvious that we have here a rider who has clearly identified some major problems with his ability to control the machine. So I responded with a series of practical suggestions.

I referred the rider back to some of the exercises he would have performed on CBT including some very simple straight line stopping and starting exercises to help get used to the clutch on the new machine. I also advised him to use a slipping clutch when turning into side roads (what would have been taught for the U-turn exercise, so nothing new) and a reminder about basic braking technique (front first, rear second, then a progressive squeeze of the front to slow at the required rate). I also suggested that the rider look for some personalised training to fix the problems sooner rather than later.

Of course, I wasn’t the only one with advice. I generally try not to criticise other people involved in rider training too often but in this case the response of one of our IAM observers made me blow my top. He started by offering some useful – but theoretical – advice, but then qualified it by saying:

“Unless you really do feel that you can’t manage I would delay any extra training until you’ve been riding 5-6 weeks or so. You’ll be amazed at how different it will be then and you’ll get more out of any training you do.”

Of course, there’s a very big assumption there. And that’s that our wobbly novice is still in one piece after that period.

And then he suggested that at the end of this learning period the new rider would then be in a position to benefit from advanced training with the IAM.

As I’ve said many times, there are two ways of approaching rider training:

a pragmatic ‘improve what’s weak’ approach
building standard skills to test against a set riding standard

Either are valid in certain circumstances. But which is more appropriate here?

I think the answer is pretty obvious. A client-centred course, of the sort offered by the Survival Skills Confidence: BUILDER one-day training course, is more likely to address the novice rider’s needs.

The mention of the Thundercat dates the event, and since then I’ve been told “ah, but the IAM has changed a lot”. That is undoubtedly true, there has certainly been a drive to improve standards and consistency but what hasn’t changed is that the organisation still promotes a brand of training style of riding which has passing the test as its goal.

At the risk of provoking a chorus of “he would say that, wouldn’t he?”, if you think you have a problem with your riding, ask yourself where you’ll get the better support; from an independent trainer who’s prepared to focus the training on YOUR needs, or from an organisation that commits you to pursuing their own goal?