{"id":4754,"date":"2012-01-02T23:15:02","date_gmt":"2012-01-03T07:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lee.org\/blog\/?p=4754"},"modified":"2012-06-01T11:38:55","modified_gmt":"2012-06-01T18:38:55","slug":"about-motorcycles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/2012\/01\/02\/about-motorcycles\/","title":{"rendered":"About Motorcycles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Update: You should get 3 things out of this post:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Cars are dangerous.<\/li>\n
  2. Motorcycles are 35 times more dangerous than cars per mile driven.<\/li>\n
  3. There is no riding “safely”. 2\/3 of motorcycle deaths are not the motorcyclist’s fault.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So maybe drive a motorcycle as a pleasure-craft or occasional-transportation, but don’t make it your daily vehicle. I love you too much to see you dead like that!<\/p>\n

    ————————————————–<\/p>\n

    I’ve been thinking about getting rid of my car. I’m going to school so I need to save a bit more; I don’t need my garage for storage any more; so far school has been all accessible by public transit. So I’ve been considering my options.<\/p>\n

    A friend old me how she loves her motorcycle. She said how it was like a shortcut: you can always find a place to park, they are inexpensive, even insurance is cheap, just $100 per year for her, and they are completely awesome.<\/p>\n

    I wrote this to her:<\/p>\n

    I thought about what you said about your motorcycle and how you love it. So I thought I’d give the idea of getting a motorcycle a chance.<\/p>\n

    And then I read this: http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Motorcycle_safety<\/a><\/p>\n

    What got me was in the first paragraph. Mile for mile, a motorcycle is 35 times more fatal than a car. Now I know that cars are very dangerous, some 40,000 Americans are killed every year. Or as I like to say to people, “Hey, did you hear about the big car crash last week where almost a thousand people were killed? Yeah, it really happened! Well, not all at once, but yeah, almost a thousand Americans were killed in car accidents last week. Yes. Really”<\/p>\n

    It feels like an acceptable risk to be in a car, I mean, you’ve got to get around somehow. But if everyone rode motorcycles instead of cars (yeah, I know, that’s not realistic), then bikes would kill 1.4 million Americans every year! That’s insane! That’s more deaths than the top 3 killers in America: heart disease, cancer, and stroke COMBINED<\/strong>, almost doubling the number of people that die every year.<\/p>\n

    And what really bugged me is the Wikipedia article talks about studies that say some 2\/3 of fatal crashes are where the car smashed into the bike without even veering; neither the rider or driver saw it coming and the rider had no chance to save themselves. Hurumph.<\/p>\n

    Sorry, but that’s not for me. I want to go the whole 9 yards, but nope.<\/p>\n

    Rock on,
    \nLee<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Update: You should get 3 things out of this post: Cars are dangerous. Motorcycles are 35 times more dangerous than cars per mile driven. There is no riding “safely”. 2\/3 of motorcycle deaths are not the motorcyclist’s fault. So maybe drive a motorcycle as a pleasure-craft or occasional-transportation, but don’t make it your daily vehicle. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4754"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4756,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4754\/revisions\/4756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}