Pretty much anyone can jump on a motorcycle and make it go down the road. Most people can even get it stopped and turn it around with very little guidance.
The issues only show up once you try to move past that point. There are a lot of things about riding motorcycles that are counter-intuitive. For most people, the physics of motorcycles doesn’t make much sense, and they never do fully understand how to ride them properly. That’s all fine and dandy when you’re just riding up and down your block, but what about when things go wrong?
What about when a car pulls out in front of you?
What about when you come around a curve and there’s a bear in your path?
Do you really know how to deal with situations like that, or are you just hoping that they never happen?
No matter how good a rider you are, if you spend enough time on a motorcycle you’re going to encounter dangerous situations. The options you have available to you are to either just hope for the best, or learn how to handle those scenarios properly, well before they happen.
You can just jump on a bike and hope for the best, or you can have a friend teach you.
You can do those things, but motorcycles are often counter-intuitive, and are you sure that your friend even fully understands things?
Motorcycle instructors are trained to watch what you’re doing, understand what’s going on, and be able to explain it and how to improve.
If your friends don’t have that skill set, it doesn’t matter how good they are at riding, they will never be able to teach you to ride properly.
So there’s no better way to learn the finer points of the physical act of riding than to get proper training, but what if you already know how to ride?
The odds are that even if you do know how to ride, there’s probably going to be plenty of room for improvement. But even if you have everything sorted out perfectly; you’re braking is world class, and you have never made a mistake in a turn, that’s only half of the equation.
Learning how to ride in traffic, how to deal with other drivers in all sorts of different scenarios, and how to read the road for clues about what you need to watch out for is at least as important as the physical control of your bike.
Look at it this way; would you rather have awesome emergency braking skills, or be so good at reading the road and predicting traffic that you never have to actually test your emergency manoeuvres?
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