Your TWO best survival tools

[andyvh1959]

Two factors have more impact on traffic riding survival than anything else. Two factors influence ALL your traffic riding actions and skills more than anything else. Visual Ability/Acuity (VA) and Situational Awareness (SA) should be your top skill sets, and should guide and determine all your choices for surviving riding in traffic.

Learn to develop and use VA at a very high level, and use it constantly. Because your accurate detail visual field, the one that most impacts info to your brain is only a small visual cone, you need to be assertive, nearly aggressive using your eyes to constantly scan and search. An example of highly effective VA is any pro football quarterback, and any pro baseball batter and fielder.

Learn to develop and use SA at a very high level and use it constantly. Apply VA to enhance and develop your SA to a point that you are able to take in all factors of a traffic condition to guide your actions and choices.

One way to develop and enhance your VA and SA is when you are operating anything other than your motorcycle. To do that, consider your VA and SA when taking in factors of natural lighting (sun in front or sun behind you) shadows (caused my natural light or other conditions) and how those relate to traffic conditions and patterns. Then consider and study any traffic landscape conditions on the road and just off the road, that can cause limits to VA or impact your SA. In a way, look for traffic landscape issues that can easily "hide" a motorcycle to the field of view of other road users.

By building your VA and SA, your brain will interpret and act on factors you have loaded into your skills and actions options, and trigger the "what if" signal that keep you from riding into your own trouble. Aside from distracted and uncaring operators in traffic, when they say "I never saw the motorcycle" in response to reviewing the crash, they are likely not lying. Many riders ride themselves into their own traffic issues.