Time To Get Rid Of The Two-wheeled Killing Machines
The Age
Thursday May 23, 2002
It is not only older motorcyclists who are at risk (``Over 30s vulnerable in motorcycle death toll", The Age, 20/5). Motorcycles are unsafe at any speed, with any rider, anywhere.
Motorcycles account for about 10 times the deaths that their rate of usage on our roads would indicate. If there were no motorcycles, there would have been 60 fewer deaths on Victoria's roads last year.
That means we could get about a 15 per cent reduction in the road toll with the stroke of a pen that disadvantages 2 per cent of road users.
Motorcycles are unsafe at any speed. If you go too slow they wobble. If you hit anything from a dog to a brick or loose gravel at speed they lose adhesion. If you stop they fall over.
A simple fender-bender in a car that may cost 10 minutes inconvenience turns into death, paralysis, amputation or months in recovery for a motorcycle rider. The crumple zone on a motorcycle is the rider.
No, it is not the car's fault! Two-thirds of car-bike collisions are rider-contributory, and about a third of all bike accidents are of the ``lost control - hit pole" variety. Any pole will kill a rider, so any argument about safer roadsides is facile because it cannot be done in any effective way.
And why should 98 per cent of motorists pay to protect 2 per cent who are virtually beyond protection?
Modern cars protect occupants well up to 60 to 70kmh. Bikes kill people in 30kmh impacts. Motorcycles are unsafe with any rider, anywhere.
Recently we have seen an experienced rider killed on a closed track, unhelmeted youngsters killed on a country road, an older rider ``slide under a vehicle", and various other combinations of skill, power, conditions and traffic and error leading to death.
The only sensible way to remove the deaths caused by motorcycles is to eliminate the brutes completely. But how do we do that?
Easy. Regulate to place a government tariff on any year's compulsory third-party insurance for bikes, the rate set to recover the total cost of the previous year's motorcycle accidents.
In about two to five years that would be the end of the killing machines.
John Nieman, Monbulk
© 2002 The Age
Share This