Lane Splitting Gone Kind Of Wrong

There is a right way to lane split and this is not it.

Kate Murphy

By: Kate Murphy

Feb 22, 2019 at 2:35pm ET

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Motorcyclists who use their bikes to commute and for actual travel, and those of us who have ridden where lane-splitting is legal and expected, will argue all day that it works really well and is safer than sitting in traffic waiting to be rear ended. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t work out so well.

Often, a mishap while lane-splitting happens because a car or truck driver doesn’t see the bike and cuts off its path of travel. In this case, however, the bike had quite a lot of forewarning and should have known better than to try to thread the needle between two tractor trailers, especially on a narrow 2-lane highway at speed.

The trucks were stopped in traffic and the motorcyclist tried, and failed, to squeeze between them. It is obvious that the truck on the left had no idea that the bike was even there, or that the rider had binned it, because the rear wheels of the truck then roll right over the downed bike, which looks to me like an early-oughts Suzuki Bandit–does anyone out there have a better eye for the bike?

Lane-splitting definitely takes practice. When you start out it can be extremely intimidating. If your bike has big blobby saddlebags it may not work at all. Eventually, though, a rider learns to read traffic like eddies in a stream, and the drivers who are either malicious, or are distracted and paying no attention to traffic at all, become blatantly obvious and are generally avoidable. We learn where to exercise extreme caution, where to slow or stop, and where to safely pass. We also learn that an extreme speed delta versus the traffic surrounding you seldom ends well, as evidenced in this fun little film. When things go wrong, the faster you’re traveling, the faster they go wrong, and the wronger they go.

What do you think?

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Comments

The real disappointment in this video, though, is the lack of creativity when it comes to the invectives spewed by the rider. He needs to spend some more time around Brits.

Source: Reddit