I'm a pretty live-and-let-live person, but the ratio of individual benefit to negative externality of motorcycles with intentionally loud mufflers seems clearly in favor of tighter regulation
https://twitter.com/jamiepitts/status/1000186890169892864 …
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Replying to @devonzuegel
Also considering motorcycles have a 35x vehicle fatality rate per mile traveled relative to cars, individual benefit is probably negative
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Replying to @calcsam @devonzuegel
OTOH, per the Hurt Report most fatal motorcycle accidents are due to cars at intersections turning left into the motorcycle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurt_Report … IME motorcycle culture is very interested in risk management & how to stay alive, vastly moreso than for drivers of four-wheelers.
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Replying to @starsandrobots @devonzuegel
On the one hand, I'm sympathetic to motorcycle culture. On the other hand with a 35x per-mile fatality rate over cars, banning motorcycles would probably be more effective than every car-focused safety intervention.
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Replying to @calcsam @devonzuegel
Why not just make motorcycles with roll cages? (Fun: you know why we don't have those? Because the American Motorcycle Association felt that moving to fairings would require aerodynamic engineering which would put "mom'n'pop" repair shops out of business. In the fifties.)
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Furthermore — if safety is the metric, what's the argument against also banning bicycling?
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Replying to @starsandrobots @devonzuegel
Much more common to replace 30 mile commute or 300 mile car trip with motorcycle than bike (although I had a roommate who tried the former!) Bikes typically used as last mile of commute with eg BART.
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Replying to @calcsam @devonzuegel
I have commuted on both motorcycles and bicycles (>20mi/day) but again, if you are banning a vehicle class on the basis of safety, shouldn't bicycles be on the block along with motorcycles? Put another way, if bicycles weren't "grandfathered" in, would we even allow them?
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Replying to @starsandrobots @devonzuegel
Guns empirically make their owners more unsafe, mostly due to increased suicide effectiveness. Other self defense mechanisms like mace and pepper spray don't. Motorcycles do. I suspect bicycles don't due to observed behavior.
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But you're not addressing the issue here which is *why* the motorcycles are unsafe for their owners. Again, it's demonstrably the reduction in visibility and the other drivers. Data show this. Motorcycles absent cars don't have a 35x fatality rate.
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Replying to @starsandrobots @devonzuegel
Guns absent depression probably don't have an increase in mortality either. The problem is we'll never get rid of cars, any more than we'll get rid of depression.
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I would have agreed with you two years ago on this. But given the rise of scooters, I don’t think it’s an impossibility that we will see that, on most streets, in urban centers.
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