As if being a motorcyclist isn’t enough

I’ll bet you sometimes feel that motorcyclists are considered, shall we say, less than completely worthwhile members of society. Someone says “temporary Australia”, someone cuts you off in traffic after making eye contact, your local authorities spend millions of dollars on cycle paths and not a single buck on motorcycle facilities… it can all add up.

But consider me.

I’m a motorcyclist, and I get all that. At a recent school function one of the other dads actually called me a temporary Australian. But for me, that’s not all. As if being a motorcyclist isn’t enough, I’m also a member of “the media”. And if you think you’re reviled for riding a bike, you should hear what we get for riding a word processor.

Most of the time I defend myself and my fellow scribblers by reminding people not to shoot the messenger, and so on, But there are times when I run out of defences… like right now, for example.

In front of me I have a story from the Sydney Morning Herald entitled “Runaway road toll blamed on rise in motorcycle use”. It quotes the director of the NSW Government’s Centre for Road Safety, a certain Soames Job, who apparently said that “a major cause of the sharp increase in the road toll – up from 321 deaths in 2008 to 415 deaths in 2009, as of Wednesday – was the increase in ‘two-wheeled vehicles’.”

Deaths are up 96, a terrible toll. But the story goes on to say that motorcycle fatalities are 65 as opposed to 44 in the previous year. That’s an increase of 21, if my arithmetic serves me, leaving eight additional fatalities among bicyclists and the rest – 68 – to be spread among pedestrians and the occupants of cars.

Now, I feel safe in assuming that in that year, neither the use of their feet by pedestrians nor the use of cars by their drivers has seen much of an increase. But there are lots more bicycles out there, as well as lots and lots more scooters and motorcycles. So in fact the increase in two-wheeled rider fatalities can be explained simply by the increase in the use of two-wheelers. I’ll bet that there is no increase in the rate of fatalities per kilometer travelled – unlike the rates for walkers and drivers.

And yet we get it in the neck with that headline and the story.

The journalist who wrote the story, and the sub who wrote the headline, simply took Mr Job’s interpretation at face value. No attempt to get behind it, no attempt to tell the truth.

No wonder people get annoyed with the “media”.

Oh, and there’s an agenda behind this as well, of course. Mr – sorry, “Dr” Job has “raised the possibility of new laws requiring the riders of mopeds [there are no mopeds in Australia] and motor scooters to wear protective clothing in addition to helmets”.

Protective clothing won’t save your life. But hey – why not stick riders with yet another restriction that doesn’t work?

Peter “The Bear” Thoeming