Every time motorcycles come up in any topic ever, you can tell within the first three words of a post if the author has even the faintest idea of how to ride. It's very frustrating when people who don't even drive try to tell me how the laws should be to "make me safer", despite the fact that virtually all of the danger while riding a motorcycle responsibly stems from the fact that damn near everyone driving a car in 2020 is staring at their phone more often than not.
My father-in-law hates that I ride a street bike, and he frequently texts and drives. I'm like, you are directly creating the scenario for me which you are warning me about. The complete lack of realization of this makes my eyes bleed.
Let's be honest, nobody really believes doing wheelies, lane-splitting or being able to go at 130mph actually make us safer. That's just what we tell our moms when they're worried about us, and we know they won't be reassured by the truth - which is that we know what we're doing is dangerous but we're going to keep doing it anyway because it's fun.
There's also a huge difference between recklessly doing all of these things, and responsibly doing these things. Not necessarily 130mph wheelies, but lane-splitting is perfectly safe as well as practical, when done at a normal speed and practicing good distancing. It's far more dangerous to be sandwiched between two idiots staring at their phones in traffic.
Most if not all of the inherent danger of motorcycles is due to the existence of cars, driven by distracted people. You can mitigate just about all risk of riding a motorcycle. When I want to be an idiot on two wheels, I'll go mountain biking, or downhilling, or ride my dirt bike. On the street I keep my ass as safe as possible.
I've ridden a motorcycle for years, seen countless riders, and yet never once have I seen a single person ride down the highway at 300mph with the front wheel at 12 o'clock like (apparently) everyone else in the world. People really seem to hate motorcyclists because "oh I saw one time on Facebook in some video where a guy wheelied his bike" blah blah blah. All those events are, are anecdotes.
Bikes a) take up less space, b) don't cause traffic jams, c) are only more unsafe than cars because of people in cars not paying attention. Funnily enough, bad behavior on a bike is regarded as 10x worse than bad behavior in a car, despite the fact that a distracted driver in a car can easily cause 10x the damage, and that no one on a motorcycle is scrolling through their Instagram feed while riding. Let's be realistic - more people are distracted in cars than on motorcycles because you need all of your limbs to operate a bike.
You say you've seen someone pulling a wheelie and it "needs to be banned" (it already is illegal, so I don't know what your plan is here), well I have seen easily hundreds of distracted drivers of cars who can actually end my life because of their actions. No one in a car is going to get killed by a motorcycle, but the exact opposite happens all the time.
My father-in-law hates that I ride a street bike, and he frequently texts and drives. I'm like, you are directly creating the scenario for me which you are warning me about. The complete lack of realization of this makes my eyes bleed.