It's best to focus on myself - my experience right up until my arm accident. And, I’ll be honest, I should include my experience in the first two years after getting back on the bike. This is me doing my best to address a bad habit all riders have: confusing criticism of our riding behaviour with criticism of our riding ability.
I've certainly had somebody say "you ride like a dickhead", heck, I've definitely had a police officer tell me much worse. Did it sink in? Obviously no. Why not? Because whoever said things like that to me was attacking my ability to ride - that's how I saw it. I didn't hear the message - you're taking unnecessary risks, you're on borrowed time if you continue riding like that. I heard what they didn’t say: "You have zero skill, you can't ride a motorbike." Which wasn't true - I could ride a motorcycle pretty well, I mean, I had a pretty awesome scoreboard; 4 police pursuits without capture, incredible "lap times" between two locations, heck, back in the day, I could even do wheelies. Proper wheelies, that looked cool, I tell ya. I had skills; I could ride, so anybody implying I couldn't ride or that I rode poorly fell immediately into the "ignore this person" bucket.
I’m always banging on about confusing the willingness to take unnecessary risks with “skill”. But I think I’m going to start suggesting that some riders confuse the willingness to take unnecessary risks with a way to communicate their self-worth/status/skill to other road users/riders.
I’m not preaching. I'm still not a perfect rider, or an ideal human. But awareness and acceptance are a start, and I've been chipping away at my riding behaviour. A few things have helped me change the way I ride: realising you don't actually have to ride like a hooligan to enjoy the ride, and who am I actually trying to impress by riding without regard for risk? Am I really teaching the slow car driver a lesson by accelerating by them at warp speed? Maybe the type of people I want in my life aren't the type who are excited by watching me run around in a hurry to hurt myself. I’m not sure who you ride with, but I’m pretty sure they’d be sad if you didn’t make it home one day.
Lately, though, I’ve become acutely aware of how my riding behaviour affects public opinion of motorcyclists in general. There’s a lot in that - if the community continues to see us as “temporary Australians”, what are the potential outcomes? I can think of a few negative effects on the motorcycling community if we dont start tightening up our behaviour on the road, and I want none of them. I love riding bikes, and I want to ride them for as long and as often as I can, unhindered by increasingly restrictive laws/costs. But my big concern is that I want Karen, in her giant 4x4, to see me as a human, not some yutz who has no regard for his own life. Maybe, just maybe, if the average driver starts thinking - motorcyclists = humans too - they might drive with more awareness.
These are the things I think about while I'm riding my bike.
