Yamaha price themselves out of the market?

As it’s Christmas, I treated myself to the ‘review of the year’ Motorcycle News.

One story that caught my eye was that the 2010 Yamaha R6 is going to be priced at no less than £8999.

That’s just over £1000 less than a ZX-10R and an amazing £1500 increase in price in a year.

A Yamaha spokesman says:

“This new price reflects the increase in VAT to 17.5%. Regretfully it also has to include increased costs of manufacturing and volatile exchange rates. The increase has been kept to a minimum.”

The VAT ‘rise’ is in fact the end of the temporary drop in VAT to 15% and only adds just over £200 to the price, so it’s hardly Gordon Brown’s fault this time.

And in fact the exchange rate with the Yen is actually better than it was 12 months ago, with £1 buying approximately Y145 as opposed to Y130 back in January.

Can manufacturing costs have riding that much?

We’re certainly not looking at a radical new model to explain away the costs. Unlike the cross-plane crank R1 which took the roads by storm last year, the R6 is barely changed from the 2009 model.

Or are the importers trying the usual new year trick of hiking prices, as seems more likely?

The big question is whether other manufacturers will try to follow suit, or if Yamaha will find themselves out on an over-priced limb. The undoubted popularity of the R6 could well suffer if the importers try to hold out for silly prices at a time when spending has been reined in across the board.

Meanwhile, down at the car dealers, you can currently pick up a brand new Kia Picanto for £4495 with the scrappage scheme.

I know what I think’s the better deal on a snowy December morning.

Vision Zero – all for naught?

Just yesterday I was pointed at an online version of a magazine, to wit the Vision Zero 2009 Annual.

I thought the term ‘annual’ was reserved for the Beano and such, but hey ho, such is life.

Anyway, I was specifically directed to look at the section entitled ‘Biker Road’. Should you wish to read it, you’ll find it here but be warned, it’s a flash document that takes a while to load, and the specific article is on page 66.

The article starts by going over the old ground that is the “1% of vehicles, 20% of fatalities” statistic.

They then point up the equally well known fact that the majority of motorcycle accidents involve a so-called ‘Right of Way Violation’ (ROWV)where the car turns across the bike’s path, either because the driver failed to detect the presence of the bike or saw the bike and misjudged speed/distance, and just went ahead with the manoeuvre in any case.

Depending on which study you look at, these accidents account for between 2/3 and 3/4 of all motorcycle accidents. That of course means that the rider is fully responsible for 1/4 to 1/3 of accidents!

At this point, they dropped an interesting hint about the speed/misjudgement issue:

“This is related to… certain disadvantageous characteristics of motorcycle lighting systems”.

I sat up all expectantly. I’ve been arguing for some considerable time now that dipped lights on bikes are just about the worst of all possible compromises for Day Riding Lights (DRLs).

This is because the primary function of a dipped beam is NOT to shine light at eye level – they are deliberately focussed at the ground so as a DRL they offer little real help! Some riders have of course noticed this and ride on main beam! But in an attempt to give a usable range to a dip beam, the cut off is often lifted assymetrically to the nearside of the bike. Add in the characteristic fore and aft pitching of a motorcycle over bumps and you have the ingredients for a ‘flash’ of the lights by an approaching bike. And in the UK at least, a flash means “after you”. The evidence for such accidents is anecdotal at best, but there’s no clear evidence the DRLs do reduce collisions either, yet we now have them hard-wired regardless.

Unfortunately, the paper throws no further light (sic) on the issue, and moves swiftly onto the Motorcycle Accident In-Depth Study (MAIDS) that looked at 1999 data on bike accidents from five countries in Europe.

MAIDS reinforces the detection failure/decision failure split in ROWV collisions, with a ratio of about 7/10 for the detection failure and 2/10 for the decision failure. I wonder what the other 1/10 was.

Anyway, the article then looked at two possible approaches to making riding safer.

The first they chose to highlight was a Norwegian project to re-engineer the ‘roadscape’.

Whoever coined that word should be made to sit on a traffic cone in hell for eternity, but in short, the Norwegian authorities believed they had a particular problem with one stretch of road; a nine mile stretch of the RV32 near Oslo.

They started re-engineering the road based on suggestions by riders themselves. They moved lighting and ’siding posts’ (whatever they are!) to the inside of curves, and shifted a lot of rocks from the outside so there was less to hit if the rider ran off the road. Where guardrails were installed, ‘underrun’ bars were fitted to stop riders hitting the posts that support the rail (something the Spanish have been pressing the rest of the EU to do for a decade, incidentally!) They also improved the sightlines by removing obstructions to vision on the inside of the curve.

As one of the engineers explained: “we weren’t able to solve all the problems of this stretch, but through a combination of crash barriers fitted with subrails, strategically placed signposts, and more forgiving terrain running along the side of the road, we definitely made a difference.”

The road was opened by the president of the Federation of European Motorcyclists’ Associations in May 2008, and referred to as a milestone in motorcycle safety. And it cost “under $1million”.

Back to our engineer: “Before we reworked this stretch of road, we had around one fatality a year. This season we haven’t had any. We look forward to seeing what will happen in the future, but I’m sure we won’t have any serious motorcycle accidents. ‘Vision Zero is a realistic goal for motorcyclists.”

Hang on. “Around one fatality a year”. “None this season”. Hardly conclusive statistical evidence, is it?

And one million dollars for under ten miles of road? We have (according to the Ordnance Survey in 2006) just on a quarter of a million miles of road in the UK. Do the sums. Even if you targeted just the most dangerous biking roads in the UK, it’s still a significant investment.

It’s not going to happen, is it? You simply can’t go around removing trees and hedgerows or re-siting millions of road signs and telegraph poles in a busy country like the UK in the same way you can re-engineer a short stretch of ‘near-wilderness’.

(As a by-the-by, that doesn’t mean the councils shouldn’t avoid putting NEW hazards in place. The M20 junction improvements around Maidstone featured decreasing radius slip roads which claimed a police rider on the very first day they were opened, Kent continues to put up new signs and paint road markings in motorcycle-unfriendly locations, and the county has recently replaced many signs that used to stand quite happily on single poles with DOUBLE ones – presumably to stop them blowing over in strong winds or something. But they represent a significantly larger hazard to riders because they are now effectively half a metre wide instead of five centimetres.)

Final comment on that new bit of road back in Norway. Now, I don’t know about you but what does a nicely surfaced road, with excellent sight lines and plenty of run-off sound like?

A bit like a race track perhaps?

Can you imagine how you would react on a bike if you such a bit of tarmac? I’d go faster. So any crash I DID have would probably have a more serious impact on me in any case. Nor do I think it takes much imagination to see that such a road could well attract MORE riders who actually take MORE risk than average – think of the reputation of Snake Pass.

I think we need to see such work done in a busy country on a busy road before we can pass meaningful judgment on the success or failure of such as scheme.

The second safety highlight was on the Honda motorcycle-to-car communication system. Basically the system works by locating your vehicle via GPS, transmitting that via an uplink to the satellite, then downloading corresponding data given out by other vehicles to log their proximity in the neighbourhood. You then get a warning that you’re on a potential collision course.

We’ll leaving aside the issues of a system that tracks your vehicle 24/7 and the possible uses an anal retentive government to put it to!

It seems to me that discussions about whether this technology requires a heads-up display in the helmet, warning lights on the dash near the line of sight, or audible alerts all miss the fundamental point that we’re removing another level of personal responsibility for avoiding collisions and delegating it to a mechanical system.

It’s another of those seemingly sensible ideas that ‘reduce the workload’ for the driver (workload being something I’ve talked about before), but in fact the aid is more likely to be used as a crutch by the car driver (“I’m safe to fiddle with the radio/chat on the phone/programme the GPS because the system will warn me if I need to look“) rather than an aid (“oops, I didn’t see that bike even though I looked carefully“).

Worse, it’ll reinforce the idea that the motorcyclist has no responsibility to avoid a collision at an intersection (“the system will warn the car driver I’m around and he’ll stop “).

No doubt like conspicuity aids stop car drivers pulling out in front of bikes, or so we’re led to believe.

Unless the system actually takes control of the car and actively prevents the driver from moving, we’ll still have:

• collisions resulting from incidents where the driver simply doesn’t register the device squawking or flashing (how many of us have missed a spoken direction by a GPS because we’re concentrating on something else – just about every one of us who’s used one, I would suggest!).
• collisions where the driver overrides the advice given and decides he can pull out regardless.

Both scenarios thus create the very situation that the rider is relying on the technology to prevent.

And what of the impact on the rider when the car does emerge? Will the rider be relying on the technology to stop the car and so drive unthinkingly (and without slowing!) into the accident? In fact, very much along the lines of the rider who complains:

“but I was using my lights and wearing my dayglo vest and he STILL pulled out.”

And no matter how clever the system is, it WILL malfunction. My GPS regularly shows positional errors of tens of metres – that’s enough to turn an innocuous pass at a junction into a false alarm warning of a potential collision. Or vice versa.

We can press for more accurate satellites and receivers but all we do is increase our reliance on the system. Look how highly trained commercial jet pilots make mistakes because they rely on the ’systems’. Call me a Luddite if you wish, but the fewer such ‘aids’ we have, the better, in my opinion.

Karen Cooke, director of safety for the Motorcycle Industry (MCI) in the UK seems to share my doubts:

“…we are all human beings and we all make mistakes. I don’t believe Vision Zero is a possibility for motorcyclists. I think we would all like to get as close to that as we could but I think the law of luck tells you it isn’t going to happen. I actually believe that whereever a human being interacts with a machine, the chances of no-one ever getting hurt are about zero.”

I agree but arguably it’s not so much about human interacting with machine as human interacting with another human. THAT’S when mistakes are made.

Christmas Makeover

At the risk of a “Bah, Humbug” or two, the blog’s had a seasonal makeover. Snow’s apparently not very likely for the south of England so if you were hoping for a White Christmas, perhaps you’d better make the most of what’s falling onscreen!

Inexpensive heated waistcoats

When heated riding kit gets mentioned, many people head for the expensive gear sold by bike shops. In my experience, some of it is very good quality, and some rather less so. A few years back I’d have recommended the US-manufactured Gerbing or Widder kit but Gerbing seems to have had some quality control problems, and Widder seem to have closed down.

In any case, it’s expensive for a piece of kit you may not wear all that often. So there are budget powered waistcoats for as little as £20 which run off standard AA rechargables.

Whilst I was rather sceptical about how good such a budget waistcoat would be, I bought one from Maplin when the temps plummeted to near freezing back in November last year and I felt my Exo2 kidney belt wasn’t quite offering enough heat for 3 or 4 hour sessions on the bike.

As it happens, the temperatures got colder still and as I had a batch of last minute training courses in Oxford, I ended up wearing it quite a lot over the course of one of the coldest winters the south east has seen in the last 15 years or so.

The first thing to mention is battery life. It’s not nearly as bad as the Maplin website suggests. I was able to run it for about 2 1/2 to 3 hours continuously on a set of 6 (2×3) 2700mAh NiMH rechargables, not the 40 minutes suggested on Maplin’s own website; it was still going after a 2 hour ride from Maidstone to Oxford, and was just fizzling out after 3 hours on the road when out training. A spare set of similar capacity rechargable batteries would give you upwards of 5 hours continuous heat, which isn’t bad! At the moment, the batteries are half price in Maplin, too, so 8 AAs would set you back a tenner (and of course you can use them for other jobs at other times!).

I didn’t expect it to get very hot but in fact the heating element puts out enough heat to feel as pleasantly warm through a tee shirt. That’s surprisingly effective if you have insulation over the top. I’ve been wearing mine over a thin, sleeved tee shirt, with a microfleece over the heated bodywarmer, an EDZ pertex microshell thingie over that, my ‘Stich riding suit and an unlined nylon jacket as a wind stopper on top of that and that enabled me to deal with hours out in temperatures around freezing.

Together with my Exo2 heated kidney belt running off the bike’s mains, I’ve have been warm enough on several courses on days when the temps haven’t got above zero.

Downsides:

1) The heating element isn’t very big – they cover an area about the size of the palm of your hand on each side of the front of the chest with another around the back of the neck.

2) The waistcoat is a bit small in terms of sizing, but they’re not really intended to be worn as a top layer over several shirts and fleeces, but over something like a teeshirt.

Realistically, they’re not nearly as good as expensive heated kit but at £20 in the Maplin sale they are a steal if all you want is something to add a bit of warmth on a short to medium commute and you can remember to recharge the batteries! And there are no wires to forget to unplug either!

(This article is a re-write of a post that appeared last year!)

IAM report on bike crashes tells us nothing new

It’s a bit difficult presenting bike accidents with a new spin. Impossible perhaps. Particularly when nothing much changes in the world of falling riders.

So it’s no big surprise that the study published by the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) to coincide with the NEC Bike Show doesn’t really throw any fresh light on the problem.

Neil Greig, Director of Policy and Research, said:

“The fact that most crashes happen in good conditions may come as a surprise, but is due to the fact that many riders simply avoid riding in bad weather or in the dark. The message is clear – even if the conditions seem good for riding, accidents can still happen.

“Sundays are the most dangerous day of the week, with 20% more accidents happening than on any other day of the week. Sundays have mostly leisure riders on the roads, who travel much longer distances than the average weekday rider.”

I’m not really sure who that would be news to. Ten years ago, I wrote this on my www.survivalskills.co.uk website after seeing the 1998 DETR report:

“The average daily casualty count was higher during the week than at the weekend, with Fridays having the most casualties in 1998. However, the proportion of casualties killed or seriously injured was higher at the weekend, at 32% compared with 24% during the week.

There is a marked difference between the proportion of motorcyclist casualties injured during summer and winter, whilst there is much less seasonal variation in all road user casualties. The highest percentage of casualties occurred in August for motorcyclists and in November for all road users.”

SO nothing much has changed there then.

The press release is all a bit vague. Whilst claiming older riders are safer, the statement doesn’t actually produce any evidence that post-test training cuts accidents, even though the conclusion drawn by Mr Greig is:

“Safe riders are made, not born. Courses such as those led by the IAM expose them to experienced riders who can show them where the risks lie.”

It’s quite possible that the older riders simply got safer by falling off and surviving when they were younger! That’s the way I learned.

And the conclusion that younger riders are most at risk is probably skewed by the unqualified moped and 125 riders who are overrepresented in casualty figures, something that doesn’t get a mention.

Evidence from elsewhere points up that the risk factor isn’t simply age, it’s experience in terms of time riding, and experience on a particular machine – even experienced riders tend to crash bikes new to them.

One thing that is worth flagging up is that 50% of the fatalities occured when the rider left the road and hit a roadside obstacle – so how much real use is body armour?

As I’ve said before, it’s really only designed to cushion the impact of falling from the height of the bike (and a bit for highsides) to ground level, not absorbing the energy generated by the weight of your body stopping suddenly against a tree.

The IAM press release can be found here.

Yellow Tint shatterproof glasses – inexpensive Xmas pressie

One of the things I discovered years ago was just how good a yellow tint visor is at this time of year. Here’s Alan Dowd’s review for Superbike of such a visor:

“First, it sharpens your vision and improves contrast on horrid, grey winter days. It’s especially useful in the rain.

“Second, it’s got enough tint to cut the worst of sun glare, yet is also clear enough to use at dusk – so you don’t need to carry two-visors on sunny winter days.

“Finally, turning the world outside slightly yellow means your brain is fooled into thinking it’s a nice summer’s day rather than a rancid, sleeting, steel-grey January morning.”

The cons?

Well, first of all they aren’t legal in the UK, ridiculous as that may be. Second, most of the manufacturers don’t make them anyway. It’s only the top end lids like Arai that these are made for. So even if you could get one, you’ll have to buy them over the internet and you’re likely to pay something of a price premium over a standard visor.

However, there’s an economical alternative. Via the Survival Skills online shop I can supply yellow tint sunglasses.

They are anti-scratch and 100% optically correct – they’re actually better than the visor on some cheaper lids! It’s worth noting that the material of the lenses is constructed to the CE_EN166 safety eyewear standard, so they are also much safer than ordinary sunglasses.

The semi-flexible sidearms are comfortable under the helmet and the light weight means little pressure on the bridge of the nose, something I can have trouble with with conventional sunglasses. The wide lenses and lack of a rim means uninterrupted vision too.

As the trainees who’ve done my course will know, I wear them myself much of the year. (They are also excellent on a bicycle!)

There are also smoke and iridium tinted glasses, as well as clear ones available. A soft carrying case will protect them when you’re not wearing them.

Prices are:

£12 per pair of sunglasses
£10 for the soft case

Deals are:

£20 for one pair of sunglasses PLUS a soft case
£22 for TWO pairs of sunglasses

Online payment is available – email me at survivalskills@clara.net for details.

Harley’s troubles continue – York plant to shed half workforce

After the much publicised closedown of Buell, and the sell-off of MV Agusta, Harley-Davidson continues to restructure.

An Associated Press report today details the restructuring of the York plant in Pennsylvania.

The plans to restructure the plant will come as some relief to the workers there, as a statement in May stated that it was too inefficient and costly to continue to run. Relocation to Kentucky was favoured.

However, a package of concessions by unions which included wage freezes, increased health insurance contibutions by employees, and reductions in holidays led to workers agreeing to new contract terms yesterday.

The state also offered a $15 million incentive package of capital grants and training funds.

Harley will shut one of its two factories there, and will lay-off nearly half the 1950 workforce. About 120 of the 270 management staff are also set to loose their jobs.

Harley said that the smaller workforce will be more flexible, and lead to a more streamlined operation.

Overtaking lines of traffic

I’ve long said that about the most dangerous manoeuvre we perform on a bike is an overtake. Some people disagree, but if we look at the accident stats and then compare the number of overtakes we do every day with the other common accidents (junction collisions and falling off in bends), we should see that even the fastest riders are exposed to far fewer overtakes than the situations that expose us to either of the other two accidents – junctions (we pass hundreds every ride) and bends (likewise).

The fact that the risk of a fatal accident is still very high should tell us comparatively speaking how often they go wrong.

One of the more difficult (and thus more likely to go wrong) overtakes is one that passes multiple vehicles.

Extra considerations passing a queue

We should be able to see immediately that there are a number of issues above and beyond the simple “is it legal/safe/necessary to overtake” questions that we would always (hopefully!) consider.

The first is speed. It’s easy to think that if we open it up, we’ll be safer because we’ll make the pass quicker. But I’d suggest we shouldn’t be tempted to wind on the speed any more when we pass multiple vehicles than we would a single vehicle, just because the road ahead appears to be clear. We’re already likely to be travelling at a fair lick if we’re overtaking on the open road and that means two things:

- our stopping distance is long (double your speed, quadruple your stopping distance!) and whilst we may not need to stop, we may need to match speed unexpectedly and in a big hurry. Braking isn’t linear and if we need to pull our speed down from 100mph to 50mph, it takes far more than half the total stopping distance from 100mph. This fact of physics catches riders out when they ride faster than usual.

- speed causes tunnel vision; the faster we go, the more we pull our viewpoint back towards our immediate ‘future’. We tend to focus only on the task in hand and forget to scan properly further ahead, to the sides and behind. Cue a ‘where did that car come from’ moment.

The second is distance. We’re used to making decisions based on our ‘comfortable speed’ and adding extra speed means we need to look further ahead, yet unless we train ourselves to do just that we still tend to look where we normally look:

- our ‘perception and planning’ distance needs to be even longer if we travelling faster – now factor in the tunnel vision!

- the further back we come from, the less chance drivers ahead (either in the queue or in side roads) have of seeing us, particularly if we are overtaking round a bend (think where mirrors are aimed!!)

What goes wrong on multiple overtakes?

Once again there are several issues.

One is that riders try for the ‘bridge too far’. Rather than be content with the progress we’ve already made, we try to make yet another pass. At this point, we find misjudged their distance to the ‘dead ground’ concealed by a bend or a crest, then find a car heading towards us, or even simply run out of road to slow for that bend – it happens!

Likewise, try to avoid planning to take the last available gap when aiming to tuck back into the queue – we should leave ourselves one more ahead. It might seem we’re wasting an overtake opportunity, but that way, if the gap we’re aiming for disappears we should have one last chance.

Another mistake is to try to take so many vehicles at once that we simply can’t see the side turning in the distance. Now, if we’ve wound the speed on when that car suddenly slows to turn, or one emerges, we find we are struggling to slow down – and if the whole queue is slowing, even if we match speed, we’re going to struggle to merge back into the queue as it concertinas up.

So we’re planning an overtake because of a line of slower vehicles. Two questions to ask. What’s holding the entire queue up? What’s behind us? It should never be a surprise when trying to pass a queue that someone else is thinking the same way!

It may be a car or van (or even a bike we’ve not spotted) in the queue ahead, and if they’ve not seen us when they pull out, we may have to hit the brakes.

Or it may be a vehicle from behind. However fast we THINK we are, there’s always someone faster or prepared to take more risk.

The resulting accidents are often head-ons or the rider clips a car trying to get into a non-existant gap, having been forced back to the left because of an oncoming car. The speed we carry in overtaking ensures the prognosis for the rider isn’t a good one. Overtaking accidents are rarely minor.

Rushing it

If we can’t spare a moment to check our mirrors and at least consider a shoulder check before moving out, then we’re in too much of a rush, and probably too close to the vehicles we’re trying to pass.

We can alway plan ahead to some extent; for example, we could scan the mirrors in the middle of the bend that we’re hoping leads onto a straight but we should always have time to make a final check. If you find that you can’t… then ask yourself are you fully in control of what you’re doing?

Many experts will say a rider who’s check their mirrors regularly won’t need to check the shoulder blind spot. All I’ll say to that is that from experience is that a bike can appear VERY suddenly alongside you. If I haven’t got time for a shoulder check then I’m cutting the overtake very fine, and if I’m unhappy looking over my shoulder, I’m too close to the car ahead.

Is it necessary?

Overtaking is easy to get wrong, which is one reason I learned when I was despatching that the tortoise often does beat the hare!

I did a lot of long distance couriering and always preferred A and B roads to a motorway if I could find a reasonable route, but it did sometimes mean a lot of busy traffic to deal with on single carriageways.

The odd thing was I found that overtaking often didn’t get me much further up the road. I’d pass a car or ease my way past a column of trucks only to find at the next set of red lights at the next town they were right behind me. What had I achieved – 40 or 50m further down the road!

So it makes sense to only take on passes that REALLY make some progress. If we come up behind a very slow vehicle, then it makes sense to pass.

But if the bloke ahead is only fractionally slower, what’s the gain in passing? We might only be a few hundred metres further ahead at the next speed limit, where he’ll catch us right back up!

What about a queue of ten lorries on a busy single carriageway? How much distance are we really making down the road for those ten overtakes before we get stuck behind the next gaggle?

Stress and Tiredness

Looking back to my couriering days, I was often spending 10 or 12 hours in the saddle. I wasn’t just out for a fun ride for a couple of hours, or even a police shift! I found I had to pace myself to get home safely, and that I just couldn’t ride at the pace I could manage for a short ride. I found a relaxed rhythm.

Making stressful manoeuvres should tell us we doing something risky in any case, but it has a knock-on effect. It’s extremely tiring. Fatigue sets in and then the rest of the ride goes down the pan too – we’re now in an extremely vulnerable state.

Risk and Economy

Cutting out the marginal overtakes makes our ride MUCH less risky as well as one heck of a lot less stressful and tiring. It’s also easier on tyres and petrol if we’re gliding between gaps, rather than nailing it on the throttle and brakes in turn.

Try to avoid braking into gaps

I’ve been caught out (badly sometimes) on a number of occasions going for the “brake into the gap” approach, and the tighter the gap, the riskier it gets. The ideal is to match speed THEN move into it, and again that’s a lot easier if we’re not tempted to carry too much speed into the overtake.

Even where there is a big gap that is most unlikely to disappear, things can still go wrong if we’re trying to brake into it. Most recently this happened to me on a training course in Wales, where the trainee surprised me by going for the overtake at the end of a long straight, pretty much at the last moment before a bend.

I followed without really planning what I was doing other than thinking that I’d slot in behind the last car in the queue. Needless to say, just as I was braking a car came round the bend ahead. Assuming I was trying to get in front of him, the car driver ‘helped me out’ by hitting the brakes too, leaving me hung out to dry on the outside.

I ended up doing a 50mph rolling stoppie to get back in behind him.

The clue to me that I shouldn’t have gone? I wasn’t planning carefully, but made a snap decision. You have to be absolutely certain of an overtake, not just reasonably sure. The mistake? Even though it was a big gap, I tried to get too close to the car I was going to follow though the bend, the idea being that I’d be in a good position to overtake on the far side.

Don’t Rush!

Unfortunately, many riders are taught that a missed overtake is a missed opportunity. An (ex-police!) instructor said to me a couple of years ago:

“the mark of a skilled rider is the ability to make a snap decision when overtaking.”

I hate to say it but he was 100% wrong. I’d far rather sit there on the bike thinking “I could have gone” rather than lying in an ambulance thinking “I shouldn’t have gone”. Don’t mistake a ‘well judged overtake’ for one with no margin for error!

The mark of a skilled rider is actually to perform ALL the careful evaluation QUICKLY, by knowing exactly:

• WHAT to look for
• WHERE to look for it
• WHEN to look for it
• WHY to look for it
• HOW to look for it

That’s VERY different to making a snap decision or making the overtake itself fast.

Don’t rush overtakes. Take your time to think it through – it WILL pay off in the long run, even if you miss opportunities in the short term.

Overtaking and Post-test Training

Final point. Making your own decisions is particularly important if you are taking advanced training – don’t be persuaded into overtaking where you don’t think it’s safe. YOU are the only one who can make that judgement call. Your instructor can help and advise how to make the assessment more quickly and show you the skills but they can’t make the judgement for you.

As we practice, we get better at the skill of overtaking, our assessment of the hazards will get faster, but alway trust our own judgement at holding back. Remember the adage:

“There are old pilots. There are bold pilots. But there are very few old, bold pilots.”

So what’s the bottom line whether riding for yourself or under instruction?

If you don’t know, don’t go!

Palm put the Garnet operating system out to pasture – bye bye Palm OS

I normally keep an eye on the technology news, but with all the excitement about the launch of the new Palm Pre early in the year, the very bit of kit that prompted me at the beginning of November to review my own Palm Centro , I missed the news that the Garnet operating system was to be discontinued, a story that apparently broke months before I wrote about the Centro.

Garnet or Palm OS 5.4 lies at the end of a decade and a half development chain, although arguably there’s been little real improvement to the Palm OS since the OS 5 version appeared in 2002. For some time now, it’s been fairly obvious that the Palm OS occupied something of a time-warp niche.

Never-the-less, it works, and it’s fast and reliable in use.

Although an accusation that’s often thrown at Palm OS is that it can’t multitask, that’s not strictly true. It’ll play music (Pocketunes) as you work, download e-mail in the background, as well as run instant messaging (Mundu) and SMS. There are also various hacks that allow you to update the calendar and address book from inside other applications.

And whilst you might not want to edit War and Peace or create a complex Powerpoint on a 320×320 screen, with ‘Docs-to-Go’ you’ve a powerful application for productivity. And that’s just one of a range of software that ranges from heavyweight to tiny. There’s still a huge range of software for the Palm.

One thing it’s not very good at is accessing the web. It’s a shame the bigger 480×320 screen I had on my Tapwave Zodiac (another much underrated device) never made it to the phones. The Zodiac could display the info, but without a phone built in, it had no way to pull data in. It would have made a decent web browser.

The bigger screen in a smartphone, combined with a slide out keyboard would have made a real difference to the usability.

OK, Garnet’s had a long life and all things move on, and the market for devices like the iPhone prove that – everyone I met in New York last weekend seemed to have one.

But if you are happy with the Centro and the Palm software as it stands, if it does everything you need, you could survive on this simple smartphone for years to come. Just make sure you buy anything you need now. Wait too long and it’ll probably vanish and you’ll be stuck with the basic built-in PIM.

Display Problems on the Survival Skills blog

I’ve had a couple of reports recently of the page not displaying correctly; it appears that the right hand column is floating over the top of the body text rather than alongside it.

I can’t reproduce this problem myself and I’ve tested it in the common (and some uncommon) browsers, the template for the blog is a standard WordPress one so I’m guessing the problem is one of either rendering via the browser or possibly a plug-in misbehaving, rather than an inherent issue with the CSS.

However, if you can reproduce the problem yourself, fire me off a note of browser and operating system, as well as any plug-ins that might affect layout (ad blockers and the like) and I’ll see if I can see the problem for myself, and then I can try a different template, as well as report the problem to the author of the template.