Philip's Ravings

The topic of L Plates comes up frequently, predominately about weather complying with the learner licence conditions and using the L plate increase the danger of the rider on the road.

The best place to start is by considering why we have L plates, and what they aim to do.

When the majority of people first start riding a motorcycle they will have little or no machine handling skills. This includes basic but critical abilities such as counter-steering, emergency braking, brake and evade, throttle control, "looking", etc.
The other key skill they will be lacking is situational awareness. Even if you have had a car licence for 30 years your situational awareness skills for using a motorcycle will be insufficient. That's simply because the dangers of being on a motorcycle are quite different to being in a car.

The other major issue is attention span. Keith Code talks about this quite a bit in his motorcycle books. We have a limited amount of it.
If 80% of your attention is spent on machine handling skills (changing gear, "steering", throttle control, etc), then that only leaves 20% for you to be aware of the situation you are in - and importantly - that you are heading in.

And this is where L plates riders often feeling that using an L plate makes things more dangerous. They think other road users are suddenly targeting them because they have an L plate on.
The vast majority of road users don't want to have an accident with an L plate rider - or anyone else. The vast majority of road users wont suddenly become more aggressive because of a yellow sign on the back of your bike. Why would they suddenly want to risk having an accident because of a yellow piece of plastic?

What tends to happen is the learners rider attention is being consumed by machine handling skills that have not yet become automatic. As a result, they fail to observe the situation around them and take appropriate action, until suddenly they are right in the thick of the action.
It's not so much that the road user has acted aggressively towards the rider - it's that the rider has only just noticed the locality of the road user relative to themselves when they should have noticed it much sooner.

The other common complaint is that it is dangerous to ride at 70km/h on a 100km/h. Think carefully about this. What it means is that the learner rider has chosen to place themselves in that dangerous situation. This is not a choice that any rider should be making - to deliberately place themselves in danger. It reflects on their ability to read safe situations (situational awareness again).

The risky bit is when you are travelling at a drastically different speed to the rest of the road users. So yes, riding at 70km/h on some 100km/h roads can be risky, on others it is just fine. If your riding on a quiet 100km/h road at 70km/h, and you observe another road user approaching from behind at a much greater speed simply pull over and let them pass.

The other option leaner riders choose is to ignore the 70km/h licence restriction and travel at the same speed as the traffic. This does remove the danger created from travelling at a greatly different speed to the traffic - but the reason why there is an 70km/h restriction is because many machine control skills have not been learnt sufficiently that they occur automatically without any conscious thought being required (and hence it subtracts from your available attention span).

Some learner riders say they "have to" ride at 100km/h because that is the only way to get to destination "x". This is simply not true. No one makes you get on your bike and exceed the learner licence restrictions except the rider. An alternative perspective is that the route to the destination is not yet safe for the learner to use until they their skills have become automatic.

The best way to make riding skills become second nature is simply more riding time. Some learner riders will only ride infrequently, while others will commute daily. So different riders making machine handling skills become automatic at different rates.

The aim of the 70km/h licence restriction is reduce the seriousness of an accident should the rider's attention span become overwhelmed with processing information about their machine and the situation around them. Slowly down simply means that the brain doesn't have to process information as fast.

The learner licence restriction is only 6 months. I feel new riders should take the time to enjoy their introduction to riding, and allow the time that is required to for the new skills they are acquiring to become automatic.