Do you realise how many holes there could be if people would just take the time to take the dirt out of them?
I have heard this put forward so many times, the we must change or die fix all philosophies. Actually cant bring myself to disagree with it, BUT (always a but) nobody seems to put forward how to create the change. Lots of this needs to change and that needs to change but no how.
The current system we seem to favour is beatings until the lesson is learned eg speeding tickets, or just raise the bar, eg 250cc and raised age before you can attain a license. That explains all the mid forties males killing themselves on bikes.
Its a bit like the drinking age, everyone thinks if we raise the drinking age all our problems will disappear overnight, after all we had no problems before they lowered it
My solution (yes I have one that I think will work) is to "Motivate Change" As a bike rider I learned to ride by riding, talking to others and falling off. Went to a couple of track days and found a lot of what I had taught myself and heard from others was tripe (I have perfected falling off though).
How to motivate change? Well in my experience money is a bloody good motivator. Graduated ACC fees dependent upon levels of training acquired? Insurance incentives for training? There are two quick ones. As for ATTGAT, you will never force people to be safe, get them to "think safe" and they will start to act safe.
Either that or we can just continue with the beatings until the lesson is learned.
Hope your right
certainly better than passing a law requiring you to wear gear all the time. which no doubt NZ will someday (hopefully I wont be here when it gets that bad)
One of the problems with such high targetted ACC levies is that people feel entitled to do what they want and be payed for if something bad happens. happens in the rest of our society except for road motorcyclists.
--------------------------------------
Knowledge is realizing that the street is one-way, wisdom is looking both directions anyway
I agree with that, proper courses that have tests at the end (no pass, no reduction in levy). It won't force people to ride safe, but being properly educated is likely to make most think twice. The only problem I can spot is the money, discounts are unlikely to be huge (if we can convince tptb to give any at all) and training cost are likely to be pretty significant, doing a $300 course to save $50 bucks a year isn't a lot of motivation.
"A shark on whiskey is mighty risky, but a shark on beer is a beer engineer" - Tad Ghostal
The first step should be to work out how to improve the basic handling skills course.
We need to be sending learner motorcyclists out onto public roads with adequate skills to comfortably survive - not just with enough skills to barely be able to ride a motorcycle.
This thread http://www.kiwibiker.co.nz/forums/sh...driving-school. has me wondering whether we should implement a similar approach to training motorcyclists as the Japanese have.
Imagine if we turned out riders capable of even half that skill.
How about take the $200 ACC increase or whatever it was off of the rego, and make it a compulsory $500 addition on all motorcycle insurance policies two years from now. If you have an advanced training certificate no more than 5 years old, you don't have to pay for it. No, I don't advocate compulsory insurance. It won't capture everybody, but it might capture a few of the people with unregistered vehicles like off roaders?
Or at least something along the lines of 'Get training and you don't pay the big ACC sub, but you don't have to, and thus you would'?
Hahahah, no no... but seriously, I could spend my entire life trying to fix up the standards of other peoples driving, but I'd be doomed to failure. What I can do though, is fix my own shitty habits, and if everybody did that (Tui?), the first bit would be moot anyway! Win win
And a big dollar carrot as an incentive would make sure that I didn't procrastinate on the matter.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Bookmarks