SHAG-ging for Safety
Sep 23 '00
There are two parts to riding a motorcycle. The first are the technical skills of knowing how to make the bike go, turn and stop. The other half is knowing how to apply that knowledge in specific situations to keep yourself alive. They work together but having "midwifed" over a dozen people through the Motorcycle Safety Foundation RiderCourse program, I've noticed an interesting pattern in the learning curves for each. When a rider is in the first few thousand miles, the technical skills of riding are more intimidating than the application knowledge. It makes sense if you think about it. The new rider comes to motorcycling with the cultural opinion that the bike can (or will) hurt you and the skills of countersteering and threshold braking are different than what they've used in a car. By comparison, the MSF does a terrific job of applying the technical knowledge in a way that is easy to understand. It all comes down to SIPDE-Scan for potential hazards and threats, Identify them, Predict what they are going to do, Determine your response or escape from the threat, and Execute your plan. Compared to trying to master the clutch with one hand while the other works the throttle, SIPDE is easy.
When the mechanics of riding no longer feel foreign the new riders I've worked with notice that their SIPDE awareness takes off. They begin to identify hazardous situations before they develop into a full Maalox moment, it feels like you are looking a few seconds into the future. This is when it all starts to make sense and it is the most enjoyable time of the rider education process. But it is also the beginning of a process where the rider can begin to put himself (or herself) at greater risk. As SIPDE becomes as ingrained as the physical parts of riding the bike, it is very easy to become complacent because you only recognize the threats you already know. If it continues this way you will also start to miss situations you once picked up and your skills will degrade even as you become a more experienced rider.
I noticed this in myself after I'd put up more than 10,000 miles of daily urban riding. The close calls began coming too frequently. I wasn't picking stuff up like I once had, and I knew it was because my head wasn't in the game like it was just a few months earlier. I tried to go back to the mindset I had when I came out of the MSF school, always Scanning and following the rest of the SIPDE rule. Then it would slip again. Talking with friends who were professional pilots, I discovered this wasn't uncommon at all. Very few pilots are able to trick their mind into maintaining the kind of adrenalin-fueled awareness present in their first solo for thousands of hours of uneventful flying. Airline pilots are regularly put into simulators to train for what might go wrong and smart private pilots use check rides with more experienced pilots to keep themselves honest. But neither would work on a bike.
For a few months I tried to create a way to keep my awareness up. What I found surprised me. When I picked up a threat as I had when I started, it was because I noticed the threat potential in the place before the actual threat came along. It was one of the great Duh! moments of my life. If you almost get nailed in one intersection once or twice, of course you're going to pay closer attention when you go through it again. But what makes that place unusually hazardous? When I started looking and paying attention to the answers, I began seeing the ride in more depth than I ever had before. I'd found an early warning system. It was applying the experience I'd built to raise my awareness to the next level.
To make this as manageable as SIPDE, I had to come up with a system I could consciously use while riding. Thus was the creation of SHAG, or the Situational Hazard Assessment Grade. The system I set up is a scale from one to five, with one being a situation with the absolute minimum of conditions that could produce a threat and five where I need to take immediate action. Both extremes are very rare, the rides where nothing can go wrong don't come along very often and if I'm doing my job it should never get to five.
What constitiutes a Situational Hazard has been the beautiful part of the system. In a nutshell, it is anything that makes you nervous. Construction zones because of reduced traction and limited escape routes, busy interchanges for obvious reasons, shopping malls around the holidays, grocery stores on Friday afternoons, you name it. And it also goes beyond the threat from cars. Weather will play a large part in deciding what options you have available to respond to a threat, and it is factored into the score. If I'm hauling the mail, getting picked off by a radar gun is a situational hazard and the extra speed reduces my time to put SIPDE into play. The condition of my bike can be a situational hazard if the brakes need some work or the tires are getting a little thin, as is being on a bike I'm not familiar with. And I can be a situational hazard if I'm not feeling well or came into the ride with other things on my mind.
This might be a little to dweebish for most, but when the grade changes I say it out loud-"Shag Two" or "Shag Three". Along with singing to myself it is another good reason to wear a full-face helmet, but the real reason is reciting it focuses my mind on what I've picked up and need to be aware of. The changes come most often in the city, but SHAG has been of the greatest benefit in freeway and rural riding where it is easiest to get sucked into a sense of complacency. For example, on a backroad I'll raise the SHAG a point if there are trees or tall crops near the road that could keep me from picking up a deer until its in my path, and an interstate ride will get another point over the previous conditions when the next exit sign indicates a cloverleaf-style interchange. Using SHAG isn't making every mile an exercise in overt paranoia but in my experience it is a great way to maintain a real-time macro evaluation of your situation and prepares you for the threat of a risk before it arises.
And it has stuck. I came up with this almost ten years ago and it is as effective as keeping complacency at bay today as it was during the first month. (I should note that it did take a few weeks to get comfortable with this, but once it was incorporated into my riding mindset the system itself became transparent. I don't feel like I'm riding the program when using SHAG, the focus is on the situational awareness.)
Because SHAG is developed from experiences you have built I cannot recommend it for novice riders. Take the MSF course if you live in the US, develop your rider skills and SIPDE awareness, and when you find yourself looking for more, give SHAG a try.
-Brian Igo
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