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Brighton Ave. crash sends motorcyclist to hospital with head injuries

Jim reports on, photographs the aftermath of 2:30 a.m. accident on Brighton Avenue, in which the motorcyclist skidded out and wound up with his motorcycle on top of him.

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Comments

Motorcycles fun in the GTA games, especially since you can use automatic weapons to fire forward as you're chasing someone.

Personally, I'm not willing to accept the injuries that tend to come from riding motorcycles in real life.

I hope the guy isn't too badly injured.

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As folks can probably guess from the userid, I'm a motorcyclist. It was raining a bit around that time of the morning. My guess is that his back tire skidded on something like a manhole cover, or pavement markings, while he was accelerating. Rubber on wet metal has about zero coefficient of friction, and that white paint they use for marking zebra crossings and turn arrows can get pretty slick when it's wet. Back end probably fishtailed and went out from under him.

In any event, I hope he makes a speedy and full recovery.

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It was wet and at that time of day in that area of the city, I'm gonna just take a random guess and say that he was probably not in a condition to drive. I just drove down that section of road on Friday and it really wasn't all that pleasant on 2 wheels. There's a lot of rutting from resting buses and double parked cars. The road is patched pretty heavily too. You also get the feeling all the lights are timed against you, so I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he gunned it to either make the light at Cambridge or out of frustration for not being able to "open it up" all the way from International Bikes to there or something.

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The Motorcycle Safety Foundation runs courses on dealing with maneuvering, obstacles, road conditions, and general training. Check the link for details and courses in the area - they tend to run them out of that large skid pad in Bedford known as Hanscomb AFB.

Some of the intro courses have their own bikes - you don't need to bring one, or even own one. Great for finding out if motorcycling is right for you.

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+1,000,000

For some reason I get lots of people asking me "So how do I learn to ride a motorcycle, anyway?" And this is where I point them. What you learn in that class could save your life.

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While we're mentioning courses, I'll throw out Bob Johnson's name for Streetwise Cycle School in Hyde Park. The school is MSF certified and is a qualified MREP/RMV training program. Bob recently spoke on safety issues for riders at the end of a ride that my scooter club recently took down in Avon. He's a really nice guy and his school's prices seemed very reasonable. He'll even let you sit in on the classroom sessions for FREE! The school has lessons for both motorcycles and scooters.

By the way, I also saw a pretty bad bike crash a week or so ago on Fresh Pond Pkwy in the zig-zag section between Brattle and Huron. It had also been a bit wet out from rain earlier in the day and there was a motorcycle upside over the opposite side of the guardrail between the road and the fence of one of the houses on Fresh Pond...looked pretty bad, didn't see the driver, had Fresh Pond closed to all westbound traffic for a while. If you're driving a motorcycle, you have to be extremely in tune with road conditions. If you're not driving a motorcycle, you have to be extremely aware of those around you who are.

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I saw a guy have to lay down his bike because some very elderly lady just pulled right out in front of him on college ave. It was clearly a calculated move to scrub as much speed as possible and then lay it down. The guy was pretty much okay, but I knew from the courses that my BIL teaches (and from knowing how not to kill myself on a bike) that this guy knew what he was doing - his other option was to put it into the car side and that meant a big risk of launching over or onto the handlebars. The biker was mostly unhurt do to the side bars on the bike, but his bike was pretty messed up.

The woman was attempting an illegal u-turn at the time, and tried to drive off. Only she wasn't very good at handling her car and bumped the curb on the other side, slowing her down enough for me to force her to stop by standing in front and yelling at her. She was totally clueless and denied having anything to do with the accident because he didn't collide with her. Somebody scolded me for this and I pointed out that her poor driving had just nearly killed somebody so I damn well was going to scream at her to stop and make her exchange information with the biker. I handed the biker my business card as a witness. When I got to Davis and got on a train, I IMMEDIATELY wrote down everything about the time, road conditions, situation, and what I saw on a piece of paper. When the insurance claims person called, I faxed it to her, and then filled out the form and sent her the original.

The guy called and thanked me later - insurance paid for everything without faulting him. Turns out he had taken multiple MSF courses and was now working toward becoming an instructor. Why did I take the time to do this? Drivers like this - impaired by whatever impairs them - also kill a lot of cyclists like me and motorcyclists like my husband. I wasn't about to let her drive away so completely oblivious to the damage she had caused.

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When a Peter Pan bus nearly squeeze me (i do mean squished) against a row of parked cars along Mass Ave in Cambridge and I squared off in front of it, people told me to GTF out of the way because i was blocking traffic. Nobody came to help. I got on the bike. I left . I don't ride Peter Pan buses after that. But that's doing nothing for the next biker to get on the wrong side of the rickety bastard of a bus driver who nearly killed me.

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