04-06-2022, 06:56 AM
Now, here's another angle Kiowa.... The RLETs on the non-Honda may be giving me warnings, by throwing less-than-critical incidents at me - a very minor accident that resulted in nothing more than my bike being laid up in the shop while a new fender had to come from the UK during the opening waves of the pandemic, and now a truck that created an instant threat, but one that I was able to negotiate. I rode this bike for years before I bought my CB1100, met you people, and started putting RLETs on every bike I owned.
Tev, good point about trucks and blind spots. I avoid being near them at all costs for a lot of reasons. Luckily, in California, and it may be nationwide, tractor-trailer trucks on multi-lane highways can't drive in the left-hand lanes, or the two left lanes on a big freeway. Since most motorcycle riders tend to stick to the left side of the freeways, the main points of potential danger are at on and off ramps to the freeways, where bikes are near the right side of the road exiting or entering, and are in the lanes that the trucks use.
Which, to shed a little more light on my situation this morning, is why I was so close to a truck in the first place. This area is a bit of a "spaghetti bowl" of lanes, where two freeways converge into one, and there are multiple off-ramps in play as well.
I'm in the left lane of two lanes which will terminate at off-ramps to the 405 freeway. The truck was in the right lane, and was decelerating on an exit ramp to my right, while my exit was about a mile down. I saw him and processed what he was doing, and since he was slowing and leaving the highway, he was starting to exit my immediate attention. However, at the last moment, he apparently realized that he was not on the exit he wanted, and veered over to the left to get back on the highway, right in front of me.
He was probably more concerned about his closing distance to the hard barrier at the "Y" that separated his off-ramp from my lane than he was about any traffic that may have been to his left, and if he did glance in his left mirror at all, his level of panic probably kept him from seeing me.
Tev, good point about trucks and blind spots. I avoid being near them at all costs for a lot of reasons. Luckily, in California, and it may be nationwide, tractor-trailer trucks on multi-lane highways can't drive in the left-hand lanes, or the two left lanes on a big freeway. Since most motorcycle riders tend to stick to the left side of the freeways, the main points of potential danger are at on and off ramps to the freeways, where bikes are near the right side of the road exiting or entering, and are in the lanes that the trucks use.
Which, to shed a little more light on my situation this morning, is why I was so close to a truck in the first place. This area is a bit of a "spaghetti bowl" of lanes, where two freeways converge into one, and there are multiple off-ramps in play as well.
I'm in the left lane of two lanes which will terminate at off-ramps to the 405 freeway. The truck was in the right lane, and was decelerating on an exit ramp to my right, while my exit was about a mile down. I saw him and processed what he was doing, and since he was slowing and leaving the highway, he was starting to exit my immediate attention. However, at the last moment, he apparently realized that he was not on the exit he wanted, and veered over to the left to get back on the highway, right in front of me.
He was probably more concerned about his closing distance to the hard barrier at the "Y" that separated his off-ramp from my lane than he was about any traffic that may have been to his left, and if he did glance in his left mirror at all, his level of panic probably kept him from seeing me.