The Impact of Impact
GL1800 air bag testWith the frantic Christmas holidays behind us and my bikes tucked away for their winter slumber, I was having a bit of a struggle coming up with an overall topic for this month's newsletter. I started browsing through the GoldwingDocs Forum looking for some common themes, to see if there were one or two topics that were generating a lot of interest. I didn't have to look far.
That common theme: crashes - from several different angles: A couple members who have suffered major crashes recently, talk about ways to make you and your bike less likely to be involved in a crash, and methods to mitigate injury when crashes did occur.
Motorcycling carries with it inherent risk. Anyone who denies this is fooling themselves. There are two major aspects of risk: the fact that as motorcycles, we are hard to see on the road, and drivers (for many reasons) fail to see us. The other is that when we are involved in a crash, we have significantly less protection against injury, compared to a regular passenger vehicle. It is important that we mitigate these risks in every way that we can, to tilt the odds more in our favor. Basically, first do everything we can to try to prevent the crash, and second, be prepared as best we can in case the crash does occur.
Back in 2009, member propstop reported that a driver had pulled out in front of him while riding his 1983 GL1100. He swerved and ended up sideswiping the driver. He managed to stay on the bike and keep it upright, ironically thanks to the impact itself. The driver, as usual, claimed he had never seen the motorcycle. He wrote a post entitled "The Invisible Motorcycle" asking what we can do as riders to make ourselves more visible to the drivers who seem to be blind when it comes to motorcycles. Five years later, people are still reading and posting to this topic.
Zdroj: http://goldwingdocs.com/
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