Survival Skills

*** TIPS ON TUESDAY *** Après la sécheresse, le déluge
I'm interrupting the 'Fresh Start: Decoding the Road' articles and posting earlier than usual for a quick practical example of why recognising what's going on around us is so important, and I've butched the Dambusters' biblical motto for this morning's quick reminder:

“After the drought, the flood”.

We may not actually have an actual flood today or over the next day or two, but the forecast finally shows the relentless domination of high pressure over the south of the UK finally beginning to give way, allowing a return to the more usual run of Atlantic depressions.

Why does this matter? Simple answer; rain!

Remember that? It's been something of a north / south split, with bands of rain constantly crossing the north of England, Northern Ireland and Scotland, but it's been a different story over much of the south of England and Wales. Rain is a distant memory here in my parched corner of NW London where it genuinely hasn't rained a drop in over 60 days - two months.

And that means when it does rain, it's going to be slick.

After a long dry spell, the first drops of rain make the surface incredibly slippery because the water mobilises the various surface contaminants that have accumulated; dust, oil, rubber residue and other contaminants are lifted into a thin film.

This is all the muck that normally gets washed away thanks to the UK's usually-regular rainfalls, only this year the problem is worse than usual. The surface contaminants have had a month or more to build up.

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And this year, the combination of an unusual amount of sunshine AND the series of very hot days have also damaged road surfaces. The combination of direct heating from the sun and the high temperatures has softening tarmac in many places. What happens next is that passing traffic — particularly HGVs and buses — drive the stone chips into the asphalt, thus creating shiny strips of exposed tar and resin. This is particularly a problem on south- and south-west facing roads, especially if the road climbs a hill facing the head of the sun.

So here's the first rider message: the first few minutes are the time to treat a wet surface with particular respect.

Here's the second: the surface can change in a fraction of a metre. Look out for shiny patches. The clue is in the word 'shiny'. Surfaces reflect because they are smooth and shiny tarmac has lost the roughness that allows tyres to grip. Anything shiny is slippery and the surface that looked OK on the last bend can be slick a moment later...

..as this police biker found out in North Yorkshire.

There were the inevitable sage-sounding responses about how “after a bit of rain everyone forgets how to drive” or the need to “ride to the conditions”, but this is actually a great practical example of what I was talking about last week; the need to 'Decode the Road' and how riders operate in an environment where:

i. information is partial — the rider never sees the whole road; occlusion is constant.

ii. information is ambiguous — cues rarely point to a single interpretation.

iii. information is unstable — the scene changes faster than the rider can consciously update it.

I explained that new information arrives at frightening speed, meaning the rider’s perceptual model must refresh continuously. In this constantly-changing environment, “situational awareness” cannot mean “having a complete understanding of the situation”.

I'd say “ride to your imagination” because by the time we've seen “the conditions”, it's often too late to adapt. So imagine that the surface gets worse round every corner, at every junction, on every roundabout and anywhere else you need to change speed or direction.

Whilst the contamination will be washed clear if the rain is heavy enough, it won't help the slick surfaces, so treat what you CAN'T see with even more respect that what you can see.

Thanks to Halam for the reminder, and the link to the story on the North Yorkshire Weather Updates page.

https://www.facebook.com/NorthYorkshireWeatherUpdates

So, this has been a kind of Part 1A to the 'Decoding the Road' mini-series and we'll get back to part two next Tuesday.

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*** COMMENT *** DfT - "no reporting mechanism for illegal e-cycles"

Every year the Department for Transport announces the latest road casualties figures for Great Britain. 2025's came out at the end of last month. And every year, the numbers of motorcyclists killed and injured is used as the basis for a renewed effort to improve rider safety.

But how accurate are the stats?

In a recent Elevenses show back I reported on the case of a rider who managed to hit a goal post and kill himself whilst 'testing' his new off-road bike, and my surprise at the coroner recording the death as a road traffic collision, when clearly it was nothing of the sort.

I've also reported on a number of incidents where riders of unregistered electric motorcycles have been killed and injured. Unfortunately, this data is not separated out. This too is is fed into the KSI's that result from using legal motorcycles too.

The latest admission from the DfT is not just that they don't have a reporting category for illegal electric pedal cycles, but that there are no reporting guidelines either for the police either.

The DfT say the machines might be classed as electric motorcycles but "it can vary by force and reporting officer".

The consequence? "Unfortunately these vehicles cannot currently be identified in the statistics."

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Seriously, just how long does it take to update a reporting form?

As far as I can tell, no-one has counted how many illegal e-bikes are in use across the UK but it's clearly tens of thousands. Perhaps the best indicator is that legal 50cc sales have fallen by more than 40% since 2022. Meanwhile, seizures of the illegal machines are up 83% over last year, with 7000+ being taken off the streets in the last twelve months.

The Met Police have apparently seized over 2000 in a year, and since I've seen no obvious reduction in the number in use on the roads, either riders are treating the seizure as an occupational hazard and immediately buying a replacement, or the number seized is a tiny fraction of the total.

So what with illegal electric motorcycles, and illegal e-bikes that may or may not be recorded as a motorcycles, the question I ask is just how accurate is the headline claim about a 13% increase in motorcyclist deaths last year?

You tell me.

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*** SKILLS ON SATURDAY *** Repeating the same errors? Try something new!
Last week I wrote about Thomas Edison's famous observation that he hadn't failed 10,000 times, he'd simply found 10,000 ways that didn't work. For some reason, several people seems to think I was talking about repeatedly failing the motorcycle test. I wasn't, I was talking about making scattergun changes to riding in the hope that one of these random new ideas might turn out to be right.

And that was my point; that riders aren't re-inventing the light bulb. We're not operating at the cutting edge of motorcycle technology or rider training. Safe, effective riding techniques have been refined over decades by riders, instructors, engineers and researchers. There might be the odd tweak to the way we learn but the physics of two wheelers doesn't change. We don't need to (re)invent the wheel when someone has already worked out the answer.

But there's another lesson hidden in Edison's quote. And it's "don't keep spinning the same wheel if it's clearly taking you nowhere".

Years ago, one of my earliest conversations on the internet was with an American rider who'd just crashed his third Harley-Davidson. OK, riders crash, I've crashed myself, and Harley owners are no different.

But what alarmed me was that all three crashes had been – more or less – identical. He'd been behind another vehicle, and either run into the back of it, or in the last crash, he'd lost control of his bike by over-braking behind.

He actually said (and I remember this very clearly) that the thought went through his mind in the third incident:

“Here we go again.”

But why was he in the same place again? Once might be bad luck, twice might be a coincidence, but three times begins to feel like a (bad) habit?

His explanation was simple enough:

“The drivers all braked too hard / signalled too late”.

Why hadn't he tried to change something? If you've genuinely found that something doesn't work, why would you keep doing it, and get the same result?

Many riders fall into exactly that trap. It doesn't really matter what the error is. They struggle on, and approach the problem in exactly the same way ride after ride. They hope that somehow, with enough repetition, the result will change. This is the 'practice will make perfect' error. It doesn't.

I know that myself. Back in my courier days, I repeated one error several times. On a new bike with a front brake that was much better than the tyres of the era, I kept locking the front wheel, usually falling off. The crash that got me to try “spinning a different wheel” was the one that left me lying on my back looking up at the front wheel of a Routemaster double-decker bus.

The driver managed to stop just before he ran me over. At that point, I realised it was high time to change something.

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This is one of the reasons the M6 Framework places so much emphasis on Mechanism. Until we understand why something happens, we're left guessing at solutions. Once we understand the mechanism, we can choose methods that actually address the problem rather than simply treating the symptoms.

Since my problem was locking the front wheel on hard braking, I didn't need to brake harder but change my braking technique. I needed to learn to brake more progressively to avoid the front wheel lock-up, and to discover how to recover a front wheel slide if I did inadvertently end up skidding the front tyre.

It took me an afternoon of whizzing up and down an empty car park, but at the end of a couple of hours practice, I could brake firmly, progressively and reliably but I could also lock the front at will and recover the skid. And that skill has stuck with me since the mid-80s because I've transferred it to every new bike, and I've practiced it regularly – even on bikes with ABS.

That's what practice does. It makes 'permanent'. Remember that, permanent and not perfect. Repeat the same mistake, and all you're really doing is becoming more efficient at making it. Breaking out of a cycle of braking errors requires “spinning a different wheel”.

That Harley rider who had problems when following other vehicles where the driver “braked too hard” or “didn't indicate in time”? The forum universally suggested he check his following distance. It turned out he thought a couple of car lengths was enough regardless of his speed. The forum members introduced him to the 'double your speed, quadruple your stopping distance' rule of physics and got him to do some simple sums. He went rather quiet.

So, remember this:

1. Initially persistence is important because giving up at the first setback rarely leads anywhere worthwhile.

2. But don't blindly repeat the same action hoping for a different outcome.

3. And when progress stalls and the same bad things happen, don't ask yourself whether you're trying hard enough, ask if you're trying the right thing.

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*** FOCUS ON FRIDAY *** How 'AI Slop' morphed into code for “I don't agree”

Do you remember the days before AI — artificial intelligence? It seems like a long time ago now, since AI has appeared almost everywhere. It's not too surprising that there's some pushback against it, and not just because of the images of AI-driven 'terminator' machines taking over the world. Some of its output just isn't very good.

Some of the most obvious poor-quality AI is the use of generative image systems which began producing enormous quantities of strange, low-quality material around four or five years ago. And now AI is being tasked with jobs it seemingly isn't equipped to present. Just this morning I saw a 'walking map' produced by an AI agent which placed London's Tower Bridge in no less than three different locations — one around a half-mile inland — in the capital...

..all on the same map!

Not surprisingly, a new phrase is now doing the rounds on the internet: AI slop.

Slop is a centuries-old word, originally associated with things such as mud, liquid food and animal waste, and has taken on a broader meaning of rubbish. Merriam-Webster apparently made slop its 2025 Word of the Year.

The specifically AI-related use appears to have emerged around 2022, and the dictionary company defined AI slop as: “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence”.

The popular usage now seems to have shifted to encompass any poor quality, mass-produced material in online articles, the sort we see too often that are designed primarily to attract clicks for engagement or advertising revenue.



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A genuine piece of AI slop is reasonably easy to identify. It's the kind of content that might contain factual errors, generic filler, repetitive language, invented quotations, meaningless buzzwords or imagery with obvious errors, content that's generated in seconds and often apparently published without checking.

Flagging up that kind of use of AI is fair enough. I did it myself a couple of years back when I noticed a piece published by an influencer on social media not only contained repetitive language but variously located a famously-challenging Welsh pass in both the north and the south of the country in the same article. It's actually in the middle, in the Cambrian Mountains. That individual may have ridden the road, but almost certainly didn't write the article.

But there is a problem. Increasingly, “AI slop” seems to be becoming an easy throw-away dismissal of any article someone doesn't agree with.

Over the years, I've realised that motorcycling has a rather curious relationship with evidence. There are deeply entrenched beliefs about virtually every aspect of riding a bike. Write an article on what makes a good commuting bike as I've done that in the past and someone will disagree, telling me I'm talking rubbish. That's fair enough. I have my own opinion on what makes a good commuter machine, and others have their own.

But some of those biking beliefs are half-truths. Some are simply folklore which has been repeated for so long that repetition has been mistaken for evidence. Write an article on the apparent failure of rider conspicuity, an article that's based firmly on the science and...

..well, you can guess.

I suppose the takeaway — and the ultimate irony of the digital age — is that as individuals we have never had more access to information, yet it has never taken more human effort to filter out the noise and find the truth.

You can lead a biker to water, but you can't necessarily persuade them that drinking is a good idea.

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*** SCIENCE OF BEING SEEN *** Reversing the maths on SMIDSYs

Colin Brown's been very busy on YouTube recently, and his latest video [at the time of writing] is a self-confessed rant on the problem that some people within road safety think 'motorcycling doesn't fit' within the safe system scheme. Colin, not unreasonably, points out the flaw in this argument. If the safe system scheme can't accommodate motorcycling, maybe it's the safe system scheme needs to change, and not motorcycling per se.

You can hear Colin put his views over here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i90eHyiX4MA

I have a fair amount of sympathy with that viewpoint, having spent the last few months working on my updated M6 Framework for learning riding skills, with the latest article being an 'explainer' that looks back at just how rider training sits within the modern approach to safety generally.

The problem is that for all the talk of 'safe systems' and 'Vision Zero', we're still essentially stuck in a 1950s framework of Engineering, Education and Enforcement, The Three Es approach has been superseded in virtually every other safety-conscious environment, and until we make a genuine effort to move away from the 'blame culture' and to revise the way we think about errors towards understanding how and why they occur, nothing much is likely to change.

You can read about my thinking in my TIPS on TUESDAY article. It's here, should you have missed it.

https://ko-fi.com/post/ToT-Aug-4-Z1P124G93B

And this segues neatly into a recent post I picked up on Linked In from the Connected Motorcycle Consortium. Talking about the 'Sorry Mate I Didn't See You' motorcycle collision with a driver, the writer stated - and I quote:

"I didn't see them" may not be a line-of-sight problem

"When a left-turn collision occurs [right turn in the UK and other countries where we drive on the left], the common explanation is that the driver couldn't see.

"The CMC accidentology data suggests that may be incomplete in four out of five cases.

"In accident type 211 (GIDAS, n=1,568), the turning vehicle is a passenger car or light van in over 90% of cases and the main causer in almost all of those. Explicit view obstruction from the driver's perspective was present in less than 18% of cases.

"So that means, in four out of five cases, the line of sight was clear. The driver could have seen the motorcycle. The failure was human attention, not geometry."

1. The facts and nothing but the facts

Let's start the the statement that the "common explanation is that the driver couldn't see". That's hardly in line with police crash investigations where the most common contributory factor is "didn't look properly". I don't happen to believe the police explanation is right, but that doesn't make the CMC claim right either.

The fact is that there is some fifty-odd years of research on the 'Sorry Mate I Didn't See You' collision, research that came to light during my decade-long deep dive into the SMIDSY crash. This research repeatedly shows shows there are three main mechanisms.

The first occurs when the driver "looked but failed to see" - even a careful driver who 'looks properly' can fail to see an approaching vehicle thanks to the limitations of the human visual perception system. I've discussed at length in my Science Of Being Seen (SOBS) work, the issues including the narrow zone of clear colour vision which means we have to look in the right place to identify objects reliably, motion camouflage which conceals objects on a collision course, and how contrast and / or disruptive camouflage hide motorcycles against the background. These account for around one-in-three collisions.

The second mechanism is "looked, saw but misjudged speed and distance", .when the consequence of this incorrect assessment is a distorted assessment of 'time to collision' and thus a misjudgement of the available window for a safe manoeuvre. This error accounts for another one-in-three collision.

The third mechanism is that the driver "looked but COULD NOT see". This is the what the CMC are talking about, when they say: "explicit view obstruction from the driver's perspective was present" . in less than 18% of cases. So that means, in four out of five cases, the line of sight was clear." In other words, the direct line of sight was blocked. They say this occurs in around one out of five cases, That's actually very much in line with the data I've discovered in my research for Science Of Being Seen (which makes me wonder where CMC found their figures).

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Survival Skills — where Science meets the Street

At Survival Skills we look to explore real-world
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===================

2. How to interpret the facts another way

The CMC presents the data thus:

"...in four out of five cases...the failure was human attention, not geometry."

So long as we remember that human 'attention' is fallible, and a human attention failure does not mean "not paying attention", I can broadly agree with that.

But let's reframe the statement:

"ONE in FIVE drivers CANNOT see the motorcycle when they look."

It's the same data but a very different talking point. Have a look at the photo, snipped from a mid-70s "Think Bike" video. Can you see the motorcycle? Nope, didn't think so. It's behind the pedestrians.

Are you a gambling rider?

Whether you are or not, look at the odds again. ONE in FIVE drivers won't see you, no matter how hard they look.

Is that the kind of throw of the dice you want to take each time you are out on your motorcycle and approach a driver about to make a turn at a junction?

I'm guessing you'll probably say no.

3. The same flawed advice on conspicuity aids

And then the piece drops its second piece of poor advice; following on from this flawed "if the driver looks properly, they will see the motorcycle" thinking, the next claim is the old one that riders can rely on conspicuity aids "to be seen".

If they worked, wouldn't we have solved the 'Sorry Mate I Didn't See You' collision' wouldn't we, yet it's still topping the charts as a cause of motorcycle crashes.

And here's a thought for you; why would the Connected Motorcycle Consortium be working on sending wireless alerts back and forth to warn drivers of motorcycles, if hi-vis and day riding lights were the answer?

The CMC has history on this, stating five years ago that "Motorcycle safety relies on being seen by others", and the failure of that strategy is actually the rationale for pushing their wireless communication between vehicles; to help "detect dangerous situations earlier than the human eye".

4. Flip the logic and take responsibility

Regardless of whether a driver failed to "look properly" or simply "couldn't see the bike", this is only approaching the problem from ONE END.

Junction collisions by their very nature are 'Two to Tangle' incidents because even if the driver sets up the collision, the crash only happens if the motorcyclist actually rides into it.

So should we really be relying on the driver 'looking properly' or being aware there's a blind spot to stay safe. With or without connected vehicle, safety starts with us as the rider, scanning our own environment and reacting to what we can see (the vehicle that may be about to turn), or even can't see (the Vision Blocker potentially hiding the side turning or driveway).

There is nothing wrong with using DRLs or hi-vis clothing, no more than there is with getting a wireless assist in the future, but even when that technology rolls out, there's no reason we should rely on it 100%. How many riders are put at risk when vehicles with blind spot assist features merge sideways into their path? It's certainly not a 100% reliable technology, no more than conspicuity aids guarantee we'll be seen by other road users.

5. Research the topic yourself

I've spent the last decade and a half delving into the research on the 'Sorry Mate I Didn't See You' collision in order to try to bring some fresh insights to motorcyclists here in the UK and indeed right across the world. You can access that work on the Science Of Being Seen website at www.scienceofbeingseen.org.

If you want a short read that lays out the facts in an easy-to-absorb book, then order the PAPERBACK here the PAPERBACK here:

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Finally, if you actually want to learn how to apply a modern approach to understanding how it's knowing how errors arise, and how to correct them that really creates safety, and not the mythical 'Perfect Ride' approach you could do worse than look at my inexpensive series of 'Crash Scene' ebooks that feature the standard biker gotchas, junctions, corners and overtaking.

Find those in the shop at www.ko-fi.com/survivalskills

Or even if you really want your thinking challenged, sign up for the next Online eCourse which will start in September. Find out more at www.motoonline.co.uk.

Nice and easy to remember.

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*** COMMENT *** More news of Ducati

Over the last few weeks, rumours began circulating that Ducati could be sold by parent company Volkswagen Group. Then I mentioned in the last Elevenses show that an Italian company named Patritalia has announced that they have made a €2.5 billion bid for Ducati, with the aim of bringing the company back into Italian ownership.

It was met with a degree of scepticism in the press not least because no-one had heard of Patritalia, plus silence from Ducati.

So now Patritalia repeated the claim, and published a bunch of AI-generated images showing what its proposed MotoGP, Moto2 and Moto3 racing machines might look like, adding a commitment to field an entirely Italian rider line-up.

There was, and remains, no response from owners Audi, or the Volkswagen Group that owns the car manufacturer.

What we do know is that Ducati isn't standing still under the current ownership, because the manufacturer has announced a major €121 million (£104 million) investment programme called "Ducati Raise the Bar", aimed at strengthening its research, development and technological innovation capabilities.

More than €99 million of the funding will go directly into industrial research and experimental development, with the stated goals of expanding Ducati's product range, developing new sustainable technologies and improving manufacturing processes.

Ducati says the investment will help maintain its position as a global technology leader while supporting Italy's "Motor Valley" engineering sector. Significantly, around €33.5 million of the programme is being provided by the Italian government as a non-repayable grant, covering just over a quarter of the total investment.

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