We all remember Pythagoras as the guy who invented the theorem. He didn't see himself that way. As far as he was concerned, he was the visionary founder of a new religion, the main tenets of which were metempsychosis, abstention from beans, and the idea that the universe talks to us through the language of numbers. Now, the business about beans got nowhere, and the notion of reborn souls is nowadays an odd quirk from the land of telephone tech support; but the idea that truth is numerical has sure gained wide credence over the years. Belief, logic, even common sense, all fall on their face when confronted by numbers these days. Numerical science is to all intents and purposes the modern religion, just as Pythagoras envisioned. This credence has led to universal practical application of numbers to everything from bullets to cannonballs. It is generally accepted today, by thinking people everywhere, that you cannot bullshit the numbers. Denial doesn't alter the outcome. No amount of belief or reasoning alters the outcome. It is what it measures.
I begin with these preliminaries because what I am about to tell you will immediately make you expostulate your beliefs, logic, and common sense, in angry denial, in the face of numbers. Here it is: Motorcycle safety courses do no good at all. If anything, they increase your danger. How do I know? That's what the numbers tell us.
Go ahead. Expostulate. I know. Flabbergasting.
Okay. Now listen to this: Some months back, trailering an R1100R down to the buyer in Charlottesville VA via route 29, I passed the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety (IIHS). I had recently read an IIHS article about ABS brake effectiveness in the BMWRA magazine which mentioned in passing the ineffectiveness of rider training courses. That got me curious. What do they do there? Why would they mention that? I hit their web site. I found some stuff. I was astonished. So I followed links and googled bibliographies from the UK to California to you name it. I read studies commissioned by DMVs from a dozen states and several different countries. They all agree. All of them. That's the funny thing. By the numbers, motorcycle rider education courses don't do a damn thing good for you.
Now, granted, there are problems with the studies. Many are based on pitifully small samples. Many suffer from methodologies so poor they make you want to smack someone. Many are interpreted with strange illogic. All seem to be written in tortured opaque bureaucratese. However, let me summarize three such studies. The first is flat poorly done; the second is tortured to derive a desired conclusion, but the third is lucid, simple, straightforward in method, and also based on a generous sample:
1) Here is a dumb methodology which actually recurs in many studies. They call several hundred people. Those who answer the phone they ask whether they will answer a survey. Those who say yes they ask whether they ride a motorcycle. Those who say yes they ask whether they have taken a motorcycle safety course and have they had any accidents. Then they compare those accident stats against the general rider population. That's it. Now, you would think that riders who voluntarily sign up for non-required rider courses would of course be more concerned about safety than the general population and would therefore ride more carefully. Not so; same stats. But these studies are open to dispute because the methodology is so poor: Who answered versus who wasn't home? Who was willing to be surveyed versus who wasn't? Who answered truthfully? What qualifies in a dirt bike rider's mind as an accident? How do you telephone survey those riders who had an accident and died from it?
2) Here's a dumb conclusion: California commissioned a study which compared accident statistics after passage of their new rider education requirements with stats before the requirement. This study wasn't written by a scientist or a statistician, by the way, nor even by a safety maven; instead it was contracted to a writer of homosexual mystery novels (God bless Kali). The result was simply that stats for new riders did not differ from stats for riders licensed before the new requirements. However, the mystery author, not satisfied with plain results, proceeded to deduce that since mortality for riders as a whole declined during the period, the program must therefore be a success. This was despite that fact that the period coincided with a nation wide decline in mortality, and that new riders were only a small portion of all these riders as a whole. The numbers themselves only said it was a wash.
3) Finally, here's a smart study: New York randomly assigned 26,000 new motorcycle license applicants to one of four groups. One group just took the little DMV quiz and got their motorcycle endorsement. The second group was required to take the Motorcycle Operator Safety Training (MOST) test developed by the NHTSA. The third was required to take three hours of basic rider training plus the MOST. The fourth group got the full boat, including the MOST test plus 20 hours of MSF training, including 8 hours classroom and 12 hours in the saddle. A year or two later, all these licenses were checked against traffic accident reports. The second group did no better than the first. The third and fourth groups did a little worse than the first and second. What does this tell us? If it were bullets or cannonballs, any dispassionate observer would naturally conclude from these numbers, assuming numbers are the language of the universe, that classroom doesn't help and the rider course actually hurts; yes, hurts, as in increases your chances of getting in a wreck. Nor is this the only study which finds more accidents, not fewer, among trained riders.
Remember: These studies were generally commissioned by bureaucracies which are heavily invested in justifying safety courses. There are no opponents to the idea of safety courses other than the facts. They didn't twist facts to make it look like they should put themselves out of business; on the contrary, these invested bureaucracies generally concluded: "We evaluated our safety courses. They don't work. Therefore, we need more of them." But the place which has more of them gets equally futile outcomes. Results have been repeated in one state after another, one country after another. The better the method, the wider the sample, the worse the results.
I don't expect you to buy it on my word, because it just sounds so wrong. But consider: For ages it seemed to everyone that the heavier an object is the faster it falls. A heavy cannonball would of course fall faster than a little bullet. You can feel it. Hold one in each hand: the cannonball is heavier. Then one day Galileo dropped a bullet and a cannonball off the tower of Pisa and his spotter on the ground confirmed that they both hit the ground at the same time. Who'd have thunk it? Not me. The different rates of fall idea made natural sense to me up until the day they told me in school about Messer G and his two Bs up on the tower of P. That was a How Bout Dat moment.
So read about it yourself and think it over and see if you have a similar how bout dat moment. Here's how: There's a suitably scholarly and lengthy study of driver education studies in general entitled "Effectiveness and role of driver education and training in a graduated licensing system" by Mayhew and Simpson published at www.drivers.com/article/305. I have excerpted the whole section about motorcycle education and posted it on the web for you to read, at www.motorcycleclub.org/safety/mayhew_simpson.htm. This excerpt goes into brief detail about many different studies conducted in different states and different countries. Read it. At the end of Mayhew and Simpson, there's a heck of a bibliography. Google it. This is not a study itself; it is the summary of many such studies. The farther you follow its sources, the more persuasive are the results.
Why is it this way? I don't know. Life's a funny business., full of dangling whys that you just get used to For example, why is it I can go up and down, forward and back, right and left, but in the fourth dimension, time, I can only go one way. Why? Beats the crap outta me; ask Steven Hawkings; that's just the way it is. And this is the way motorcycle training is. That MSF training works backwards, if at all, is no more bizarre than time, seahorses, baseball salaries, bullets versus cannonballs, or any other dangling mysteries of life.
I feel absolutely confident many of you will by now have concluded: "I don't care. It doesn't apply to me. I know I got good things out of that course. I will continue to advocate them. It makes sense to me." I feel equally confident that innumerable soldiers over the years have entered the battlefield confident that they would be the one who did not stop a bullet, statistics did not apply to them, they would have a good war and return a hero, yet wound up mouldering cannon fodder at the exact same rate as anyone else. It is folly to assume that numbers which apply across the board do not apply to you. Projectiles will fall the same rate in your back yard as at Pisa. An open mind accepts proof. A closed mind, when confronted by facts, shoots the messenger and changes the terminology.
Now back to your regular programming. Next BMW Owners News you read, people will extol motorcycle rider courses. Next internet forum you visit, people will extol motorcycle rider courses. Next meeting of your riders group you attend, your friends will extol motorcycle rider courses. Next person who tells you he would like to ride, you will advise him first take a motorcycle rider course. This is the first and last time you will be warned that they won't actually do any good. In numerical fact, they are more apt to do harm. And that is why I bring this to your attention.
Ride safe through this curious world.