What You Didn't Know You Didn't Know

© Ken Bingenheimer / RumBum.com

Read this before you get one of these!

Join us each week to get a view from the road in "The Bike Life."

I was cruising easily along a main road, coming to the signaled intersection with another main road. The light was red. I touched my brakes lightly and suddenly the rear of my motorcycle was sliding away from underneath me to the left. In the instant I had I braced my right knee and stiff-armed (stiff-legged?) the asphalt, miraculously succeeding in stopping the bike's downward trajectory and, in fact, bouncing it back the other way so that I now faced the same peril on my left.

Down went my braced left leg and with another powerful impact on the pavement the bike once again was forced back upright and this time I caught it in the middle. Amazingly, I was up and stable. What the hell just happened?!

Two Wheels Are Not As Stable As Four

It's just a given with motorcycles that you don't have as much stability on two wheels as you do in a car with four. In a car, you press on the brake and you stop. Period. On a bike you slow down but before you come to a complete stop you've got your at least one foot down to keep you vertical; otherwise you'd just fall over.

OK, that's simple enough and no surprise to anyone. But what is not as obvious, and what I certainly had to learn when I started riding, was the hazard created by simple things I had long ignored. In this particular instance, it was the patch of dripped motor oil that had accumulated in the center of the traffic lane where I was coming to a stop. When I touched my brake the deceleration put the weight onto the front wheel, and the unweighted back wheel was left to slide lightly across an essentially frictionless surface. Good reflexes and incredible luck were all that kept me from going down.

This scenario played itself out in my early days, when I was still a novice motorcyclist. There were other less dramatic but equally surprising encounters. On more than one occasion I pulled up to a stop, put my foot down, and felt the bike start to tip as my foot slid across pavement covered with loose sand. Other times, I learned that those traffic markers painted onto the road itself are done with slippery paint. You learn to pay careful attention to the road surface when you stop.

Summer Heat Changes Things

Another thing you ignore in cars that is a hazard on a motorcycle is tar snakes. Tar snakes are those twisty tar patches that road crews use to seal cracks in the pavement. They blow the debris out of the crack and then drizzle molten tar in to fill the space. Slick at any time of year, on blazing hot summer days the tar expands and swells up from the cracks. At that point it's soft and semi-fluid so when you hit that with your tires while making a turn it can give way and your tires will slide just as they do on oil, water, ice, sand, or anything else that takes away traction.

I'm well acquainted with the dangers of tar snakes but this summer I've had more than my share of reminders. Three days a week I get on the bike and ride over to they gym and there is one intersection where, in turning left, I run into a crazy quilt of tar snakes. The first hot day I made that turn my heart leapt into my throat as my rear tire started to skid. Fortunately, in that type of skid you usually just roll out of the spot where there's no traction and you're fine.

Then a couple days later, same spot, and I'm not thinking about the last time, until my rear tire skids again. At that point I'm looking all around and realize there are tar snakes all over the place. From that point on I have taken that turn very slowly and steer very carefully in between the snakes as much as I possibly can.

Another thing my buddies and I had to learn about was the effects of heat on asphalt itself. On one of the OFMC's earliest summer trips we arrived in Alamosa, CO, and headed for a coffee shop. It was a hot day but we had been caught in a cloudburst and gotten chilled. We were hypothermic, actually, but that's a story for another day.

We parked the bikes side by side and went in and drank vast quantities of coffee trying to get warm. When we finally walked back out we found Bill and John's bikes lying on their sides. The kickstand on John's bike had sunk into the heat-softened asphalt so far that the bike fell over. Bill's bike was to its left so it had been struck and also knocked over. Mine was to the right of John's and was still standing, but my kickstand was sunken deep into the asphalt as well and it was leaning precariously.

Short of an earthquake, tidal wave, or hurricane, no one ever comes out to find their car has fallen on its side. In a variety of situations it's a different story with a motorcycle. And the surprising part of it is that there is so much you don't even know that you don't know.