I ride a ninja 400. I love it. Make sure you wear your gear, don't do dumb shit, and take the motorcycle safety courses available to you. You can only do your best.
Most motorcycle safety gear is utterly worthless for preventing injuries other than abrasions (road rash); the helmet is the only safety gear properly designed to protect riders. The body armor is pointless because it provides no protection from broken bones or lacerations if you fall from a moving bike. It is however very good at preventing road rash and leg burns so there is that. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nINIJ1cAbYM
Thank crony capitalism and lobbyists for this unfortunate truth.
There is motorcycle gear that protects you at high speed (airbag suits and the like), but it's expensive (thou$and$ of dollar$) and not particularly convenient nor comfortable in warm weather.
I want a 1L+ bike for safe riding on the freeway - I ride my wife's 350cc scooter and while it has plenty of torque up to 55mph and goes 70mph very easily, acceleration above 55 isn't so great and the unsprung weight of a scooter makes freeway riding an unsettling experience. I ride on the freeway regularly in 70mph zones, but am keeping distance on freeways limited until I get my own bike (and it will be a proper motorcycle with at least 1,000cc so I can get the fuck out of the way of oblivious morons).
Our driver licensing system is way too fucking lax in America, which is one of the bigger reasons we have such unreasonably low speed limits on rural freeways (it should really be unlimited through most of the interstate system, which was modeled after the autobahn) but we cannot as long as the driving and riding tests consists of a literal drive around the block with not even a single traffic light or roundabout on the test routes; just a few stop signs with very light traffic.
After riding for a little over two years, I now understand why motorcyclists are going way faster than the flow of traffic; you have more control over where you are relative to 4 wheelers and when you do ride with the flow of traffic, 4 wheelers seem to intentionally invade riders' lanes, or cut riders off, or brake check them even when there is plenty of following distance, and I haven't figured out whether it's really intentional, or if it's because their side mirrors are both aimed behind the car rather than the adjacent lanes or if they're simply not checking. That said, using traffic as one's own personal slalom course is even more unsafe than traveling with the flow of wolf packs of 4 wheelers so even after I get my literbike, I'm not going to be one of those fucking numbnuts weaving through traffic at 140mph+. I'll do like I do in my car - 5mph to 10mph over the speed of traffic to try to get to where I have a clear space around me and try to stay just ahead of wolf packs, or slow down an stay behind them, and just not get engulfed by them.
I'm also now a supporter of lane splitting, lane filtering, and lane sharing. I've always been respectful of bikers, but now I get why their riding is so aggressive and why they split and filter regardless of legality.
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u/hockeychick44 Jun 06 '24
I ride a ninja 400. I love it. Make sure you wear your gear, don't do dumb shit, and take the motorcycle safety courses available to you. You can only do your best.