Motorcycle Accidents
Before anyone is concerned, I wasn't in an accident.
Two friends of mine have been involved in motorcycle accidents in the last few weeks. Taylor was in a fairly serious accident earlier this month that landed him in the hospital and totaled his bike.
I just got an email from Sonya about an accident that she was a witness to and as a doctor, a first responder. She sent me this little bit from the local paper:
PRESCOTT -- One woman died and another received injuries Thursday night when a car and a motorcycle collided on Montezuma Street just north of Sheldon Street in Prescott, police said.
Police said the driver of the motorcycle was not wearing a helmet.
In spite of this, I'm not about to stop riding. I simply don't have the patience to sit in Bay Area traffic. I take some precautions and do what I can to minimize the risks, but I'm not going to live in a bubble.
2 Comments:
Dude. Aren't spam comments annoying? Ugh. I wonder if Google is working on blocking them.
Anyway, this is not a spam comment, this is your old riding buddy Catherine. :) Yeah... oof. Those accidents sound pretty bad. I am still committed to riding (though I still need to repaint my ex500, who is still mad at me that I left for Princeton). But stories and thoughts like this make me wonder if I should ever take a passenger with me on the bike. I'm a pretty small person (5'2") and handling even the teensy ex500 is pretty much the most my weight will comfortably handle. Put another 1-200 pounds on top of that bike, and I get a lot more nervous. I suppose that it's one thing for me to risk my life, because I can take responsibility for the risks that I incur based on my actions. But I get nervous about taking responsibility for the risks my actions impose on another life, especially given my own weight limitations.
(Yes, I know that we are always imposing the risks of our actions on other people since we share the road, but anyone who has taken a passenger on the back of the bike knows it's slightly different.)
There is nothing wrong with riding as long as you respect the bike, the road and other drivers. Once you start acting like a child and not knowing your limitations and what you can handle, thats when you'll hurt or kill yourself. Once you learn to respect the road and the bike, you should be good, but you still have to watch for those driving a vehicle, they dont always see you.
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