Until very recently, I thought all motorbike riders were temporary citizens, riding in the face of hard statistical evidence, and only one corner away from being turned into a meat crayon. And yet in the last two months, I've taken great delight in riding a 500cc broomstick through the high country, wiggling my way to the front of every traffic light, and scouring the internet for secondhand leathers that don't make me look like I'm on the way to a kink party or stunt-double for Tron.

But I'm not here to yuck anyone's yum, and I hope you're not here to yuck mine. I was merely surprised to have my mind changed, and am curious to see if you will be too.

What are the risks, really?

Blanket statistics are a shitty comfort-blanket

We often hear that you are far more likely to die on a motorcycle. At a high-level, this is true; in Australia, motorcyclists make up 4% of road users yet account for 17% of road deaths and serious injuries ^[1].

However, it's important to note that this blanket statistic does not account for riding technique and risk prevention. We do have some statistics about how safety features, like helmets and ABS, reduce risk of dying in an accident. Unfortunately, we do not yet have any statistics on how riding with a three-second gap, lane-filtering to be the first off from the lights, and improving positioning on the road, can reduce your odds of being involved in a crash.

So the next best thing we can do is interrogate other statistical factors (like sex and age), which may correlate with safer driving, to indicate whether driving style may reduce your risk of dying. Some possibly relevant facts:

• Males are twice as likely to end up in hospital compared to females. ^[2]
• Males are 3.7 times as likely to die as females ^[2:1].
• Males aged over 65 have the highest risk of dying of any sex-age category. ^[2:2]
• In most states, the rate of hospitalisation and death has steadily decreased. ^[2:3]

I am not about to argue that being female inherently makes you a safer driver for some bullshit evolutionary hypothesis about the female brain. Nor am I about to argue that the aerodynamics of a pair of testicles makes you more likely to fly off a bike during a crash.

But it is my opinion that this data indicates that females are more likely to drive in a manner that both prevents injury and death compared to males. Likewise, it may indicate that younger drivers tend to drive in a safer manner than older drivers.

Perhaps the evidence for testosterone's impact on financial risk-taking may translate to general risk-taking. ^[3] And if it turns out that being saddled with a testosterone factory does increase your risk of a motorcycle accident on the road, then like all baser impulses, as a self-conscious individual you can mitigate this with rider training and a prescription of chill out, brother.

My point is that we cannot yet use data to ascertain how driving style reduces your risk of dying, but it surely does. You may choose to rely on blanket statistics to decide which risks are worthwhile in this lifetime, but they are far from perfect.

Push-bikers are only one push away from buying a broomstick

I've ridden my pushbike on the roads of Melbourne and Sydney for a few years now. It is an invaluable tool for transport. I started riding when I realised that I was paying to cram into a bus on a freeway when I could be exercising and smelling grass on my commute instead.

If you feel comfortable to ride a pushbike on the roads, motorbikes are statistically not so much more unsafe. Motorcyclists are 24% more likely to have a serious injury or death on the road than cyclists. This isn't insignificant, but it is far from panic-worthy.

Let's move away from statistics for a moment and talk about risk prevention for some of the most common accidents for cyclists and motorcyclists. As a cyclist in Australia, you are forced to ride in the left wheel-track of a single lane road or astride parked cars. In my experience, you are forced to hedge your bets between positioning further-left (and getting cardoored by a parked car) or further right (and clipped by a driver). As a motorcyclist, you are not confined to such a space because your magical broomstick can match speed with cars, giving you license to sit in front of a car and be more noticeable, and remove the risk of cardooring.

One of the most common accidents for motorcyclists is colliding with a car coming out of a side street. In the learners course, you're taught that the right wheel track is the safest place to be in order to increase your vision around the corner. This both gives you more time to see and anticipate a prospective hitman in a side street, and gives the hitman more time to decide if you're worth trying to kill. As a road cyclist, while you benefit from increased reaction time from traveling at a slower speed, you are far less visible by being forced to ride in the left wheel track. You are even less visible to cars entering the road from side streets on the right hand side, hidden behind the main lane of cars.

Finally, let's think about what happens in the event of a crash. I know zero cyclists including myself that specifically wear abrasion resistance clothing or armour to reduce the damage sustained by high-five-ing the road, a car or their handlebars. It's just too damned sweaty, and skimping on gear here is for some good reason; being unable to cool your body with sweat increases your heart-rate enough to make you pull off some dumb shit that could land you on TikTok (or LiveLeak, if you're unlucky) ^[4]

While finding effective motorcycle gear is still a can of worms, risk mitigation has come a long way. If you follow ATGATT (All The Gear All The Time), wearing abrasion-resistant clothing suitable for the speeds you're going (like kevlar for urban mid-speed areas, or leather for the track or an open country road), and suitable body armour (which makes you feel big and strong, like a 6 year-old's six-pack Superman costume), can allow you to walk away from a crash even after coming off the bike at over 200kph. ^[5] It goes without saying that you are not invincible in the right gear, and even a road barrier or a gutter can break your spine. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

With no statistical basis, my intuition is that if you already tolerate the risk of cycling in the city, then motorcycling does not significantly increase your risk, and in some common crash scenarios, permits you better risk-prevention strategies due to your ability to match speed with cars.

The utilitarian case for motorcycling in urban areas

I've driven a scooter in Puducherry, India^[6], which has over ten times the population density of Melbourne^[7] and I dare say has more than ten times the number of vehicles on the road at any one time. Though I was an idiot for not wearing more than a helmet for crash protection, I felt far safer and calmer on a scooter in Puducherry, surrounded by hundreds of honkers, compared to how I feel driving a car through Melbourne suburbs. Various travellers I've met feel the same way; there is a culture of palpable road rage and congestion frustration in Melbourne.

Despite the noisy chaos, Puducherry's streets flow far better than Melbourne's with ten times the people on it. What's up with that?

The answer lies in the average size of vehicles on the road. Traffic delay gets exponentially worse with the number of cars on the road^[8]. If you've driven in a city over the last ten years, you can probably feel this for yourself. In Australia, cars make up over 90%^[1:1] of vehicles on the road, while in India motorcycles account for 85% ^[9].

Intuitively, this makes sense; motorcycles can move around each other much easier than cars can. What's more, in the event of traffic congestion, motorcycles can filter through to the front, and it becomes easier to filter more motorcycles to the front the less cars they have to squeeze around.

One of the best personal advantages of riding a motorcycle for a commute is that you can be the first to take off from nearly all sets of lights you come across. Better yet, Australian states are progressively permitting motorcyclists to use bus lanes to bypass traffic congestion altogether.

Furthermore, cars searching for parks can contribute to 40% of total traffic congestion^[10], while motorcycles are able to easily nab available space between cars (and in Victoria, we can even park on the footpath).

Beyond the personal time-saving from riding a motorbike, having more motorcycles on the road clearly reduces traffic congestion for everyone. As our roads become more congested, I suspect that city commutes will become increasingly dominated by cyclists of all varieties. What's more, as the roads become dominated by bikes, who ride with a common understanding of "if we crash, we both suffer", I hope that I might feel as calm as I did in the chorus of Puducherry's chaotic main roads. Part of Melbourne's road rage is, I think, fuelled by keyboard-warriors armed with chronic pain from sitting all day, frustration with the endemic exploitation of labour in city life, and an "invincible" metal chassis. The camaraderie of motorcyclists can be spotted in their nods and salutes, but when you're riding a bike yourself, you feel it all the time.

To those who counter that "public transport is the answer to peak hour", I'll take you up on that when every bus route is covered in bus lanes, it doesn't cost half the average hourly wage a day, and when Victoria's public transport system isn't a privatised garbage heap of unaccountable subcontractors. The 302 bus route that inspired me to start cycling would frequently drive past me, crammed with city-goers in peak hour. When I asked the driver if they would consider adding additional buses, they replied that drivers had been flagging this congestion for over ten years. Our public transport can work wonders if you are wealthy enough to base your life around a train line, but there are many gaps in its reach, and with great smugness, I've easily beaten the network's estimated travel with a pushbike for years in Melbourne and Sydney.

Cackling with glee, earthing with a machine, and Making Commuting Fun Again

This is the romantic part of this article. The part where I appeal to the part of you that might feel mildly dead inside your comfort-crisis-mobile as you dissociate and listen to Atomic Habits, true crime or whatever Kool-Aid flavour you prefer ^[11]. The part where you consider that if 20kph on a pushbike feels way more fun that 20kph in a Prius, then maybe 60kph on a broomstick is enough to make you look forward to a rollercoaster of a commute.

If you can (slowly, but surely) adjust your risk tolerance to include riding a motorbike, you will find beauty in the transport that has become a chore for the majority of us who reside in a congested city. Let me rattle off a few things I've loved:

1. Hitting 50kph on a bike for the first time each day and feeling like a child on a new scooter for Christmas.
2. Cackling like witches with a travel friend as we floored rental scooters on dirt roads in India.
3. The care with which my brother, teacher and uncle showed me how to ride with a clutch and sense when the engine is under stress.
4. Navigating the second-hand bike market, and talking to older riders about their favourite moments and bikes they've ridden on.
5. Finding secondhand armoured leathers on marketplace, and suiting up for each ride.
6. Learning to drive defensively like your life depends on it, and becoming aware of the magnitude of information on the road that I previously had no reason to notice.
7. Hitting 90kph for the first time in a tunnel, and feeling my leather's aircon kick in as the air licked sweat off my ankles and wrists.
8. Planning a route back from Sydney to Melbourne through the mountains with my uncle to avoid the monotony and horror of the Hume freeway, and being gifted his Motorcycle Atlas as a "welcome to the brotherhood".
9. Despite my best efforts to avoid cyclone Alfred, hitting 110kph for the first time in a downpour and laughing as I tore away from trucks.
10. Being pleasantly surprised at a wild brumby horse crossing my path, which I didn't expect for the first animal to try collect insurance from me.
11. Feeling the weak point in my body move to different muscles as I spent more time on the bike.

I don't expect anyone to read this and think "motorcycling is a perfectly safe venture". It's certainly not. But I do hope that this inspires you to draw a tighter border around your risk tolerance for pleasure - whether it's in pushbikes, eating animal products, or a cheeky smoko at a bar - and only then decide whether to brush aside broomsticks as an avenue of joy.