Motorcycle Survival 101: Don’t attach your phone to the bike.
Seriously,
This is pretty far afield for this blog, and I apologize, but it’s becoming a common practice that will kill riders.
It seems to have started with motorcyclists putting their cell phones into the transparent map pockets on the tops of tank bags, so they could see if a call came in. Now it’s spread to more and more bolting their smartphones onto their handlebars to use the GPS, track incoming messages, listen to music, whatever.
Please consider not doing that. Any of us that are half-sane know that motorcycling is more dangerous than driving a car, we consciously choose to do it anyway, but we sometimes show a curious reluctance to come to grips with that fact.
Your phone is a life-line. You take it for granted, and you take it for granted that you can call 911 any time.
Someday, if it’s a really bad day, you might go from riding to lying in a ditch somewhere very suddenly. Might happen to any of us. You might even wake up by the side of the road. You may be in pain, you may be broken, you may be bleeding or just immobile and the cold ground is starting to pull the body heat out of you… when multiple things turn against you, the time to deal with it is suddenly limited. You may need and desperately want to call for help, and when you can get a hand into your pocket you realize there’s nothing there.
You may have no idea where your motorcycle is. You may have an idea where it is, but you can’t move, or not much. Even if you could make it to your motorcycle, that tank bag may well be gone to parts unknown, or that bracket for your smartphone may well be empty. You’d have to be in pretty good shape to start a serious search of the whole area, and you’re not in good shape, you’re in pain.
At that point, your fate is a matter of luck. You’ve lost control of a key fail-safe tool, and it turned out that you needed that day, so you either get lucky or you die.
Is the convenience of having the phone visible when you’re riding (and really shouldn’t be sparing the attention to look at it anyway) worth putting yourself in that situation?
Please at least be aware of the potential downside of this seemingly trivial decision. Wanting to be able to see the phone while you’re riding is a pretty silly reason to die.
If you happen to agree, think about possibly passing the concept along. Apparently the downside is not occurring to a whole lot of riders, and a whole lot more are assuming it’s safe because it’s so common now. Spreading the idea might save some lives.
– Robert the Wombat