Back at the beginning of the year, Senior Drain Plug, Art Friedman (a former sidecar owner himself, he still gets a giggle from riding them) posted an article on the motorcyclecruiser.com Web site commenting on California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's sidecar crash. In his remarks, found at: www.motorcyclecruiser.com/streetsurvival/arnoldcrash/, which he stands by, Friedman said that "in most situations they [sidecars] aren't as safe as a regular motorcycle." This predictably annoyed sidecarists everywhere. One of their number, actor Perry King, penned the following editorial in response.
I was very disappointed by Art Friedman's reaction to Governor Schwarzenegger's sidecar accident, printed on the Motorcycle Cruiser Web site. His contention is that sidecars are more dangerous than solo bikes. Friedman is usually spot-on with his thoughts about riders and their bikes, but when it comes to sidecars, he's dead wrong.
I have been riding motorcycles for 43 years, piloting sidecar rigs for 39 years and I presently own 22 motorcycles, two of which have sidecars. I have raced both solo bikes and sidecar rigs and in 1987 I helped to set a land speed record at Bonneville for a bike and sidecar outfit. I think those years of experience make me a pretty reasonable judge on issues of control and safety. I've had innumerable dirtbike crashes, but only one streetbike crash in all those years. Significantly, it was in my youth and was caused by a driver turning left in front of me. I nearly lost my leg.
That accident changed my attitude about riding. Once I recovered, I decided I would only keep riding if I got serious about being safe. I learned how to pay attention, read everything I could about accident avoidance, practice skills, and experiment with new ideas and techniques. The editor of this magazine, Jamie Elvidge, taught me a lot about aggressively imposing my choices on traffic rather than passively accepting what happens. The end result is that since 1970 (touch wood) I haven't had one real incident on the street.
In all that time I've always felt safer on a sidecar rig. There are several reasons. People see you more clearly on a rig, and enjoy your presence. They point and give you a thumbs-up. It seems to me that even people who probably don't like motorcycles, like sidecar rigs. I figure that while they're paying attention to me they're not killing me-that's the bottom line.
Another reason I believe they're safer is that you must be willing to give up a lot of speed to ride a sidecar rig. You can't split lanes, change directions or accelerate as fast. So you have a situation where an enthusiast is willing to go slowly. That, I think, is a recipe for safety.
Stability is a safety factor, too. Some police departments use sidecar rigs in bad weather situations, knowing their riders are far less likely to get into trouble. You can't beat a rig for motorcycling in wet weather, through patches of snow, over gravely roads, or where visibility is limited and surprises lurk.
All of that requires skill, of course. But the fact is that solo bike skills are a liability to a sidecar rider. On a sidecar rig, you turn left to go left-the opposite of what you do on a solo bike. You don't lean the rig into a turn-you lean your body in. These are only a few of the differences. You should definitely be trained to ride sidecars-but the sidecar industry has done an excellent job of seeing that that is done. The DMV in California was sufficiently confident of that to change the rules in 1981 and allow a Class 1 driver's license to be all that is required to operate a sidecar rig. As a sidecarist for 39 years, I believe that was a good decision. A solo bike rider's skills have to be put aside to operate a sidecar rig. The best sidecarists are often those whose only previous experience with vehicles is in automobiles.
However, the evidence is that, once skilled, the sidecarist has a better safety record than riders of solo bikes. Some insurance companies in the U.K., where sidecars are more common than in the United States, give discounts to riders who mount a chair on their bikes. The Hurt Report on motorcycle accidents disregarded sidecars because so few incidents were found that it was deemed they had no statistical significance. In 1990 at the International Motorcycle Safety Conference, it was presented and discussed that sidecarists have 3.7 injuries per million vehicle miles, just slightly higher than auto drivers, and far less than the solo bike operators at 13.32 injuries per mvm.
All of this makes me positive that if I had been in Governor Schwarzenegger's position when that car backed out in front of him, I would have chosen to be on a sidecar rig and not on a solo bike. True, I couldn't change my direction as effectively as I could on the solo bike, but I could brake much harder without considering traction because of the rig's stability. Knowing I wasn't going down allowed me to be much more aggressive. Plus my speed was lower because it's always lower on a sidecar rig.
I think Art Friedman is a great advocate of motorcycles. I wish he were of sidecars, too. I think he just doesn't like them, and so he assumes they're more dangerous. Those of us who ride them know differently.