just a couple of thoughts;manouveres learnt for a test situation can be/are easily forgotten.Can you honestly still do a feet up u turn or drive your car with your hands at ten to two.Experiance rather than learning make things second nature.whose to say that an inexperianced but liscenced driver won't panic or freeze when faced with a swerve situation where as someone unliscensed but experianced will deal with the crisis,probably swearing and gesticulating at the same time!
I don't know if this swerve test is a good or bad thing but anything that makes it even more difficult and expensive to get legally on the road is just going to make more and more people ride illegally which will have the end result of bumping up costs for all of us.
i see your point cass, but on the other end of the debate, if i had someone less in frot of me and they didnt swerve, or froze and brought me off too, i would not be too impressed.
bluesbiker In: Birmingham in th
Posts: 2510
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In an emergency situation your going to do what is instinctive. Usually by grabbing the brakes. You would have to practice this all the time for it to be instinctive. Not just once. I think test for test sake its a waste of time in the real world. You might as well push kids out in front of buses for them to practice jumping out of the way.
, all i am saying , is, if the person is not able to swerve , then they should not be on the road, what if it was a child that ran out in the road, or a animal and you were coming in the other direction and that took you off
ok Ian - where you 'taught' how to swerve or did you learn it by experience & instinct?
The thought of having to go through it in a 'false' situation phases me a bit - ok - if I'm taught how to do it - slowly at first & build speed up to get to the 31mph, then maybe ok - but as has been said earlier this is bumping up the price of learning & taking your test..
Are car drivers asked to do a high speed break/swerve test though a speed trap?
bluesbiker In: Birmingham in th
Posts: 2510
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It's a fair analogy i think.
If something ran out from your near side and you carried out that swerve. ie swerving to your right. becouse of your direction of travel and of what ever is running out your going to hit it anyway.
ok, I think the thing to do maybe to have the swerve bit 'taught' but not to have it in the test. Just read the discussion in MCN & as was said - under 'test' conditions some people go into a panic mode & can therefore have an accident - apparently there have been 16 accidents so far & a number of them serious!
Now, as 'training' to ride a bike is not compulsary, maybe it should be a case of take/pass your test & then within say a period of 'n' months produce a certificate that says you've been 'taught' how to do the swerve bit...but 'taught' as in instructed & practised it..but not under such 'strict' conditions as you HAVE to do it at 31mph or fail, or that if you slightly 'touch' one of the blue cones then that's a fail..so not a pass/fail situation, but at the discression of the instructor?
I believe the swerve test is carried out in both directions isn't it? (HFG, help me out here?)
I am still talking without actually having tried the 'swervey thing' yet but I guess it differs from obstacle avoidance in a car in that balance is involved, and if it happened in an urban environment then you would be using a cold area of your tyres which complicates things too.
Do you think this test has been constructed so that you should have a degree of training before you take it? As I said before, some people were taking it without even knowing how the course was laid out or what was involved. I agree with what both cassie and HFG are saying - I know that training is expensive and God knows that motorcycling is not cheap nowadays anyway and people suffer from nerves on the day and that we should be encouraging people not discouraging them....
but... I have this thing with cars and it is the same with bikes... people have to realise they are in control (hopefully) of a tonne (car) or quarter tonne (bike) of metal which can very quickly turn into a missile when things go wrong and we have a responsibility to others around us to be able to control them. (Don't even get me started on how modern cars totally detach the drivers from the involvement of controlling their vehicle and realising the speed that they are actually travelling at)
However, as HFG pointed out, this increases with experience and confidence and should you necessarily have to pay for that via training before you take your test or is there another way of achieving it?
Hmmm....
bluesbiker In: Birmingham in th
Posts: 2510
Karma:
I only saw the swerve to the right in the vid TC. The speeds involved would meen that you probably would be riding in an urban area where there's a good chance that the near side would be obstructed by vehicles. That would mean swerving into the path of oncoming cars. There are so many variables in any situation that your chance of carrying out what you were taught to the letter are very small indeed. I dont know about you but the amount of times i've had to do a manouvre like that in 30 years of riding are tiny.
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