A study from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration titled "Fatal Single Vehicle Motorcycle Crashes" looked at information from crashes nationwide from 1990 to 1999. The key here is that these are single-vehicle crashes--the kind where the motorcyclist wasn't hit by a left-turning car or rear-ended by someone talking on a cell phone. These are the crashes we can avoid all by ourselves.

Topping the list of risk factors is drinking and riding. 53 percent of riders killed in single-vehicle crashes in 1999 had been drinking. That one was easy to see coming. However, would you have thought that half of these preventable fatal crashes occurred when a motorcyclist simply failed to make a curve?

"This latest analysis points to important safety areas that everyone concerned with motorcycling safety should think about and work on," says Ed Moreland, the AMA's vice president for government relations.

Having a place to practice your skills with no cars or trees to hit is essential to being a safer rider on the street. If you can train yourself to ride the right way all of the time, and have a higher degree of control over your machine, you are that much more likely to have superior control in a situation where timing might be critical. Sometimes all you have is a split second; will your reflex reaction be the one that saves you, or will you stare wide-eyed, frozen, with nothing to pull out of your bag to bail you out of this one.

One example, a mistake often made is when a rider comes into a corner going "too fast". I say "too fast", because usually it’s not actually too fast for the motorcycle, but the rider may not have enough experience judging his/her entry speed in corners and now fears that he/she won’t make the corner, they look at the outside and think "oh no, I’m going too fast, I’m going to go off right there" and then they stare "right there" and then they do just that, go right where they were looking. We go through drills so you know where to make your turn in point be, the most efficient way to handle your motorcycle, and where you should be looking at all times. If you take these drills seriously and work on keeping your eyes focused on where they should be and relax and try not to panic, you will revert to these good habits in times of stress with little reaction time available.