Why do cars have seat belts but not bikes? You can fly out of a bike or hit something just like a car right?
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you’re much more likely to need to get off/away from a bike in an emergency. case in point, when i got reversed over by a lorry i was able to fall off my bike to the side of the road and only had a sprained wrist. If i’d been strapped to my bike, i’d probably have been crushed to death. in a moving crash, you want to be thrown from the bike to maintain your momentum for longer and get thrown further from the crash zone.
There is a moped with a roll cage and harness for the driver, but not for the pillion. It’s been considered something of an oddity. I’ve not ridden one myself but from what I understand, its handling isn’t all that great because it’s quite top heavy. It hasn’t really made a huge dent in the market, although I stand to potentially be corrected.
The philosophy is that you are ON a bike, rather than IN a car. A car is armour, so this is the major consideration. A bike is not.
Hit something with a car, or be hit, and someone not wearing a belt becomes a pinball inside the armoured box. With all the techniques and tricks available (SIPS, airbags, crumple zones), being a fixed object inside a car has a massive number of benefits.
A decent biker is wearing his or her armour. Staying with the bike just means you’re going wherever all that inertia wants to go, which isn’t necessarily a great idea. The logic is to get away from that large chunk of inertia, the exposed fuel tank, the risk of having a leg trapped under the side of the bike, etc.
As for the amount of damage we take when we come off, we know we are going to be injured. It’s the nature of the beast. With luck, we come off and slide until friction does its thing, the armour does its job, we stand up, swap insurance, and sob that the ride is bust. If we come to a quick stop, we are almost certain to break something, but losing the inertia or a rider alone is less harmful than losing all the inertia of the bike and rider combination.
There’s even an airbag available that kicks a biker away from the bike in case of an impact, because there’s a good chance we’d tighten up on the bars instead of kicking away.
From a personal perspective, I’ve been hit by a car and a belt would have caused many more injuries. I was T-boned at a junction and sent flying. My right leg was broken by the impact, but my shoulder armour took the impact with the ground and I had no other injuries. A belt would have kept me on my bike as it was thrown sideways into another vehicle, which would have guaranteed injury to my left side too. So now you have a casualty with two broken legs, possible whiplash from the forces, and trapped under a heavy motorcycle. Instead, the paramedics had a casualty with a single break laying on his back in the open with no obstructions.
It’s safer that way. Cars travel much faster and impart much more force on a body during collisions. They are designed to protect restrained people within the passenger compartment. Bikes are not anything you want near you in a collision. You have a greater chance of getting tangled up in the frame and injured worse than if you were thrown free. Most motorcycle riders will tell you the first thing they want to do if they lay their bike down is to kick free of it. If they were restrained to the bike they would end up pinned to the ground under several hundred pounds of scalding hot metal and/or fire. Also you wouldn’t want to skid down the highway with the weight of the bike “cheese gratering” you against the pavement. It’s just generally safer not to be strapped to a bike.
While riding a motorcycle with proper protective gear, it’s far safer to fall off the bike than remain attached. In a car, the car absorbs most of the impact force. If you’re riding a bike (and you’re attached to the bike), you absorb most of the impact force. And die, usually. Falling off and sliding along the road? Most of the impact force turns into kinetic energy. Instead of impact force, you’re sliding along the road, wasting all the energy from the accident.
Because bicycles and motorcycles (not sure which one “bike” refers do) don’t tend to get into the sort of accidents that seat beats help with. When you are driving, you are inside a metal cage, and when that cage stops and you keep going, you slam into it. Seat belts protect against that a lot more than going flying out of the vehicle.
On a bike, no cage, if you get hit, you are taking the full force of the impact, seat belt or not. In many cases, it is better to get knocked off the bike, spreading the energy of the impact over a greater distance, than it is to stay attached to it.
you could but on a bike that’s not the desirable outcome
if your on a bike and using proper protective gear the best outcome in an accident is to fall off the bike instead of being stuck on it and possibly get entangled or injured/impaled on the e wreckage of w*e you just got hit by.
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