I just read an article that stated Ford Motor Company is putting a front sensor in its F150 pickup trucks that would detect a vehicle pulling out in front of it and automatically hit the brakes for the driver. That would be great if you were approaching an intersection in your truck and a vehicle made a left turn into you path of travel. But, how about us on our motorcycles? That type of technology does not yet exist for us. We must rely on the old standby. “STAY ALERT AND PAY ATTENTION!”
When you are approaching an intersection on your motorcycle you cannot be day dreaming. It takes two seconds for your eyes to tell your brain and for your brain to tell your hands and feet that something is wrong and something has to be done. It takes two more seconds for your hands and feet to make you motorcycle react to either brake or swerve to avoid hitting the problem. So that means you burned up a total of four seconds not to hit something if you were lucky enough to have enough space to do so.
Let’s talk about available time and space. If you are approaching an intersection at 40 mph you are traveling 60 feet per second. If you are on you game you would burn up a total of 240 feet to avoid hitting that car that just turned left in front of you. If you were day dreaming and delayed just one more second before you began to react you would now have burned up 300 feet. That is the length of a football field. Think you might have hit the car?
The point of this article is to remind you to stay alert when approaching an intersection. There is a lot of potential danger within. You can’t afford to give up any unnecessary footage.
Ride safe, Dominick
