negative comments

[TorontoBoy]

[quote="flynrider"]The best advice I can give you is just ignore them. I've been riding for 27 yrs. and I still hear comments like that when I walk into work carrying my helmet. The people making them have no idea what they're missing, so I forgive them a bit of ignorance.
[/quote]

+1 Ignore them, for they know not what they speak. And what they are missing. I've built up quite an immunity.

If you ride to work ask for a special parking space.

[blair]

Maybe somebody here with a better grasp of the statistics than I have can illustrate this better, but my understanding is that you are about sixteen times more likely to get killed on a motorcycle than you are in a car ...

Over on my blog is a post from 2005/05/04 (can't link directly to a post unfortunately) where I did a little math. Here's an excerpt:

Noodling around the net looking at crash and fatality rates, I found Michigan's rather exceedingly detailed report on the subject.

2003 Michigan Traffic Crash Facts

Cooking the data a little, we can say roughly that there is one fatality per 8 million motorcycle miles, and one crash per 200 thousand motorcycle miles.

Michigan Motorcycle Crashes (pdf)

Other data in that report, and a diagram I saw elsewhere, show that most danger comes from the front and front-left.

I think I'll go knock my front wheel into a car bumper later this afternoon, just to clear up the next 15 years.

Crash rate per licensed driver (pdf)

Between the URL above and this one, we see that one in 9 motorists of all kinds will have some sort of crash in a given year. But one in 60 motorcyclists will. Am I figuring that right? Is motorcycling 7 times less likely to get you into an accident? That actually makes me feel safer, even though one in 400 automobile crashes is fatal, while one in 40 motorcycle crashes is fatal. Or maybe it's that not many motorcyclists use their bikes as much as their cars.

Just a little more math:

1 in 40 times 1 in 60 is 1 in 2400 or 0.042%. That's the percentage of motorcyclists who will die each year due to riding. Or it's like saying that being a motorcyclist and having access to a running bike will kill you once every 2400 years.

1 in 400 times (1 in 9 minus 1 in 60) is 1 in 4200 or 0.024%. That's the percentage of car drivers who will die each year while driving a car.

So being a motorcyclist is almost twice as deadly as being a car driver. But that's one of those statistical overstatements that the news-droids like to use to scare you. It's still only a 0.018% greater chance of dying.

What's striking though is the 1-in-60 stat. If the average biker has only one accident every 60 years, then why does every one of your biker buddies have stories and the scars to prove it?

I heard one just today. But it featured the phrase, "while doing a wheelie at 55 mph on the freeway." Which is kind of a clue. He hasn't been on a bike since.

[zed]

Please tell me how I can deflect all the negative comments from work colleagues who think they're "funny" by saying things like, "I hope your wife is upping your life insurance", "I knew a guy who had a bike..... *story ends up with dude in hospital or dead*" I have to hear this every time riding or bikes are brought up.

Do you guys have any advice?

Throw it right back in their faces....

I'm with Gummi on this one, throw it right back at 'em, the grosser the better.

[Scott58]

Just tell them they are a bunch of nancy boys. That should do it.

[jstark47]

It seems to be really bad for newbs. After a couple of years of ignoring 'em at work, I've found they've pretty much stopped.

Except....... now it's summer thunderstorm season, I get the "rain comments:"

them: You ride in the RAIN?????!!!!!!
me: Ummmm....... yeah....... the bike's mostly made of metal, it doesn't melt.
them: But isn't that.............. DANGEROUS????
me: Well......... it beats pushing the bike home!!

[BMK]

Like one of the previous posters, in addition to riding, I own and fly a small airplane (Piper Cherokee). The only reason I mention it is because of the statistical similarilies and shared image problems with riding. When I first started flying, I used to get a lot of the same type of death and destruction comments I now get about riding. (Funny though, those same commenters rarely turn down a ride in my plane when I offer.)

The way I delt with it is to just ignore the comments because I realize that people often put down what they don't understand. By now, flying and riding has become such a part of who I am, nobody gives it a second thought and most think it's pretty cool.
To acknowledge their comments with a smart remark, in my opinion, makes you no better than they are and only exasperates the situation.

Just answer their remarks with that "you-don't-have-a-clue-what-you're-talking-about" head shake and grin, and they will stop in short order. They're looking for a reaction...if you don't give them one, they feel stupid and stop.

Worked for me.

[celt]

one guy i worked with would tell me every time there was a motorcycle accident or if he saw somebody going too fast on one, etc.

one day, he told me somebody died from a motorcycle crash on the highway i take to work. he followed it up with "You know, every time somebody dies in a motorcycle crash, I think that it's YOU"

my reply was:

"Wow, that's horrible. Noe every time I hear about some family dying in a car crash, I'll assume that it is yours"

He never said anything negative about it again.

I DID find out that he wanted to learn ride, but his "wife wouldn't let him".

[rwp]

Maybe somebody here with a better grasp of the statistics than I have can illustrate this better, but my understanding is that you are about sixteen times more likely to get killed on a motorcycle than you are in a car ...

Over on my blog is a post from 2005/05/04 (can't link directly to a post unfortunately) where I did a little math. Here's an excerpt:

Noodling around the net looking at crash and fatality rates, I found Michigan's rather exceedingly detailed report on the subject.

2003 Michigan Traffic Crash Facts

Cooking the data a little, we can say roughly that there is one fatality per 8 million motorcycle miles, and one crash per 200 thousand motorcycle miles.

Michigan Motorcycle Crashes (pdf)

Other data in that report, and a diagram I saw elsewhere, show that most danger comes from the front and front-left.

I think I'll go knock my front wheel into a car bumper later this afternoon, just to clear up the next 15 years.

Crash rate per licensed driver (pdf)

Between the URL above and this one, we see that one in 9 motorists of all kinds will have some sort of crash in a given year. But one in 60 motorcyclists will. Am I figuring that right? Is motorcycling 7 times less likely to get you into an accident? That actually makes me feel safer, even though one in 400 automobile crashes is fatal, while one in 40 motorcycle crashes is fatal. Or maybe it's that not many motorcyclists use their bikes as much as their cars.

Just a little more math:

1 in 40 times 1 in 60 is 1 in 2400 or 0.042%. That's the percentage of motorcyclists who will die each year due to riding. Or it's like saying that being a motorcyclist and having access to a running bike will kill you once every 2400 years.

1 in 400 times (1 in 9 minus 1 in 60) is 1 in 4200 or 0.024%. That's the percentage of car drivers who will die each year while driving a car.

So being a motorcyclist is almost twice as deadly as being a car driver. But that's one of those statistical overstatements that the news-droids like to use to scare you. It's still only a 0.018% greater chance of dying.

Using the 2005 Michigan numbers, the motorcycle death rate is .158 deaths per million miles travelled. The same number for ALL vehicles is .00859 deaths per million miles travelled. That works out to a motorcyclist being approximately 18 times more likely to die than a random motorist for each mile of travel.

[Nalian]

"Yeah, people die every day doing all kinds of things. It's a shame but things happen while you're busy planning for other things."

[Gummiente]

"Yeah, people die every day doing all kinds of things. It's a shame but things happen while you're busy planning for other things."

Match point: Nalian.