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[Schneed10]

Originally Posted by mooby

Sometime soon I'm hoping to take a class to learn how to ride a motorcycle, it's something I've always wanted to try and it would tremendously help me out on my commute to work in the warmer months, because I could just take HOV right up 95 to my job (the HOV lanes on 95 are for cars with 3 people or people on motorcycles.).

The safety risk doesn't concern me as much because like FRPLG said there's inherent risks in nearly everything nowadays and riding a bike is no different.

Not a believer in degrees, huh? Everything is either risky or it isn't, there are no shades of gray? No degrees of risk?

[Schneed10]

Yeah sometimes I just like to toss a grenade and walk away. I'm just messing with you, Rat.

That said, to FRPLG, I have to debate the risk question at least a little bit. Yes everything has risk. And everything, well at least most thing, have a benefit. Getting in a car carries risk, but the benefit of being able to reach distances more than 5 miles away fairly quickly makes that risk completely tolerable.

If talking about a motorbike, you have the same benefit of being able to transport yourself those five miles. But the risk of dying in an accident is significantly higher on a bike than it is in a car. On a bike, all it takes is a little nudge from some idiot not checking his blind spot, and down you go splattered on the pavement. In a car, sure you can die in accidents, but it often ends up as just an annoying fender bender.

Risk is about cost/benefit, and the benefit of substitutes. Ergo, why take the risk of riding a motorbike to get somewhere when you can do it much more safely in a car?

Answer: because motorbike people think it's fun. That's the benefit they get that a car doesn't offer them. It's just that while they think it's fun, I think they look like idiots, and root for them to Ben Roethlisberger themselves.

But, to each his own!