Motorcycle vs Fire truck...

[Teehaml]

Motorcycle vs fire truck. He survived...

 

[rPGoatBoy]

Glendora Ridge Road (GRR). One of my favorite roads; not far from where I live and breathtakingly beautiful. I'm up there about once a month. Motorcyclists crash and die on that road (and others nearby) frequently, mostly because they're treating it like their race track (kneedragging, unsafe passing, speeding). GRR is particularly narrow, has lots of blind corners, and does not have a center line, so there's plenty of opportunity for oopsies.

It's a shame to not slow down and digest all of the scenery up there.

 

[JamesW]

Ingesting scenery, aptly put, my style. Rider seemed to have road space enough.

 

[Millsaps2]

Typical case of target fixation, also look where you want to go and not truck.

 

[James Burleigh]

Just another example of a crazy f**kin' cager turning in front of a motorcyclist!

Do over: Just another example of a motorcyclist being overwhelmingly responsible for his own accident.

I can see several ways the rider could have anticipated and avoided this scenario, and two of them track to Pat Hahn's "Three Degrees of Separation":

1. Make good decisions: In this example, stay right, stay alive. Also, choose a speed that lets you stop within your sight distances (i.e., presume there's a fire truck right around that blind corner).

However, if you make poor decisions, then...

2. Have good skills: Here, counter-steering is your friend, not to mention swerving and braking. (Do something, anything, to avoid the accident. Reminds me of a conclusion of the Hurt Report that most riders failed to take evasive action.)

However, if you've made bad decisions and your skills fail you, then for god's sake at least...

3. Be wearing good gear. Hopefully he/she did. But that's gotta hurt.

 

[Bugnatr]

Scratch a cat life, hope he learned a lesson.

 

[HotRodZilla]

Ouch. That guy deserves some tickets, but I'd say, "Penalty Assessed."

 

[Old Guy]

Yep. If he learned something maybe he can avoid that situation next time. It's amazing sometimes how often the motorcyclist totally denies any fault of his own. But without accepting it, we'd just keep making the same mistakes over and over and over and ........

It's hard to see how he could deny any fault here, though.

 

[bluesdog]

Yep. If he learned something maybe he can avoid that situation next time. It's amazing sometimes how often the motorcyclist totally denies any fault of his own. But without accepting it, we'd just keep making the same mistakes over and over and over and ........
It's hard to see how he could deny any fault here, though.

Doubt he'll manage to repeat that particular mistake often. He's damn lucky to be alive. Simple lesson: Never outstrip your ability to react in a timely manner.

 

[Old Guy]

Yep. If he learned something maybe he can avoid that situation next time. It's amazing sometimes how often the motorcyclist totally denies any fault of his own. But without accepting it, we'd just keep making the same mistakes over and over and over and ........
It's hard to see how he could deny any fault here, though.

Doubt he'll manage to repeat that particular mistake often. He's damn lucky to be alive. Simple lesson: Never outstrip your ability to react in a timely manner.

Can't argue that. Unfortunately it's a beginner's error that I've seen all too often. They cover this in MSF courses, but for a beginner it's really tough to get your head wrapped around the fact that you must push on that inside bar to make the bike turn hard. He just rode right into the truck. I remember a stat from the Hurt Studies where a very large percentage of the riders involved in accidents did nothing; they just froze at the controls.

 

[LKLD]

Saw this on FB, and someone mentioned he had only been on a bike 7 months. Supposedly he was following a friend who had much more experience. He did a lot of things wrong, as I'm certain most of us saw in his video, and he was extremely lucky to be alive. If nothing else, it's a reminder for the more experienced riders, to take the time to TEACH the new rider how to ride safely, and not show them how fast you can go and see if they can keep up.

All of these videos of motorcycle crashes on YouTube, have some lessons in them.

 

[SacramentoMike]

First posted while I was on the road, so I'm late to the discussion--and BTW the original link didn't work for me, so I Googled the title and lots of hits came up.

I've thought a lot about a theory I have about the "X Lives Theory," where X= some unknown number, different for everybody. They say a cat has nine. I dunno. But I read once that you should consider every time you leave your lane unintentionally as one of your lives, scratched, and moving you one number closer to X. So the question is, what is your "X?" I don't know how many times this guy had crossed the center line on a blind right-hander like that (or crossed the fog line on a left-hander, or just drifted into the wrong lane on any old turn). But luckily for him, none of those previous unintentional cross-overs came at a time when a car, or a Humvee, or a big old red fire truck happened to be coming along right then. So his mystery number ("X") was whatever the total number of those previous mistakes was, plus one. And thanks to GoPro, we got to see number X. (Yeah, I know, he wasn't killed, so maybe he still has lives left, but this is a theory, not a law. And if you ever do have a head-on with a truck, do make it a fire truck.)

FWIW, the truck was as far right as he could have been, and there was all the room needed to go safely by, as others have said. So ride in control. Stay in your lane. Without that inconvenient fire truck, right then, Jesse Lopez would have been just fine. But it was there, this time. Ride like there's a fire truck around every blind corner. You don't know what your X is.