I Saw An Accident

A few months ago, in late 2024, I saw an accident. It haunts me to this day. This is one reason why this motorcycle blog has received little attention; seeing the aftermath of a fatal accident evaporated the last of my lust for riding — in this city, at least — in an instant. I still love bikes, and still have a Ducati I’m working on in my garage, but the cons of riding in Melbourne, Australia, now far outweigh the risks in my head.

Because I’m honoured to have a small but loyal reader base — I’m truly grateful for the people who write in and ask how I am, or who tell me they appreciated the work I put into one article — I want to give an explanation for what has been going through my head. Really, seeing the accident was the last straw, the culmination of a process of winding down riding in Australia that had taken over a year.

Just in case you’re wondering, “Is that it?” — well, no. I’ll still ride elsewhere. I have a date planned for Italy in 2026. The Islas Canarias will have me as an uninvited guest. I’ll spend more time in the mountains between Italy, France, Austria, and Germany. Basically, I’m just saving motorcycles for a couple of years from now when I have a chance to spend more time in countries with winding roads, no traffic, and less-than-ridiculous traffic enforcement. They’re still making bikes, a lot of which I like. That time will come.

How I Started Riding in the Early 2000s

I started riding in my early 20s. My rationale was that I liked cars, but fast cars were too expensive and hard to maintain by myself. So bikes made more sense.

My first bike (after the mandatory “learner’s” bike in Australia, which back then I didn’t have to own for long) was an ex-police Honda CB900 Bol d’Or.

I really loved that bike. I rode it through rain, heat, cold, and everything in between.

But I had a few tumbles on it and got scared, thinking my nine lives were up. So I sold it for much less than I bought it and moved on. (I was intrigued to realise recently that it has become a sought-after classic…)

Decades later, I learned to upgrade the rider, not the ride, but I was too young for that lesson. At least I survived!

Finding Love Again in California

After a 10-year hiatus, I got back into riding when doing a stint in San Francisco, California, in 2016-2018. My first apartment in the Mission was a two-minute walk from a well-respected Ducati and Triumph dealer. I’d walk past every day and lust after the pricey machines in the shop. But a little-known secret about San Francisco is that you can be earning $200K a year in a tech job and still barely save anything. That was me.

Still, I got worn down and eventually picked up a very used Ducati Monster 900 off some guy on Craigslist, on which I learned to service the valves and diagnose carburettor problems. Then I bought another Ducati from “Moto Mike”, from whom I bought a few more machines. I had around eight bikes in the three years I was there. I got the bug, hard, and started learning everything about bikes, and that’s how this blog was born.

Riding in California is amazing. I’m sure other parts of the US are similar, but I don’t know them first-hand. It’s not just the roads — it’s the cocktail of factors including a laissez-faire approach to law enforcement, the complete absence of speeding cameras, and, of course, the roads. And the scenery. Oh, the scenery!

Apart from California, I’ve rented bikes and ridden them in Italy, France, Kenya, Nicaragua, and some other places I can’t remember right now. Italy, of course, was special. Yes, you can be dinged by cameras catching you unwittingly going into a zona a traffico limitato, or going over 50 km/h in a town. But that’s easy to avoid. And once you’re out in the hills, there’s nobody there, and nobody cares what you can do. Other than other riders, with whom I could definitely not keep up.

I’ve had bikes in Australia over the years, but most in Queensland. There are some beautiful roads in Queensland. Still, it’s where I got all my speeding tickets. I got one for doing 75 km/h in a 60 km/h zone (that’s about 50 mph in a 40 mph zone) — a whopping $300 or so and a quarter of my “demerit points”, a system I don’t want to get into. I got that ticket for passing some cars in the middle of *$&%ing nowhere who had been slowing down around every corner, and of course, speeding up in the two-lane passing zone when it opened up, meaning I had to speed up to get past their inane driving. The copper didn’t care and wrote me up. To hell with riding in Queensland, I thought.

I thought I’d try to relive my California days and rented a bike in California from Riders-Share. I loved doing this. I’ve ridden some pretty cool bikes on that platform.

The First Crash

Unfortunately, the last time I rented a bike I crashed it. I wrote off some poor soul’s Harley-Davidson Night Rod. I did it at about 10 mph, and I still have no idea how it happened (maybe I hit a pebble — I don’t know).

I was fine, and it was just a $1K deductible, and insurance paid me back for my damaged gear even. I managed to ride the bike home, even though the frame damage made it a write-off. But still — I was shook up. I wasn’t able to fully enjoy the next bikes I rented, because I had the fear it put in me.

Since then, I haven’t been able to quite shake the feeling that a crash is around the corner. Riders always know they might crash. Most of us wear gear for that reason. But we still make a calculated risk every time we ride. Ideally, the risk should easily be outweighed by the reward. What started to happen was that I realised the risk of riding in Melbourne, Australia, outweighed the reward of riding here.

The problem with riding in Melbourne is that speeds are low, there are cameras everywhere, the roads are terrible, and drivers are careless. It’s savage. Almost every day (or so it seems), I get a notification of some poor soul dying out there, doing nothing but commuting along a traffic jam-packed freeway. It’s not even like they were living their best life flinging a supermoto around corners in the countryside. Nope! Usually, it’s just some person in a ute (that’s Australian for “truck”) or SUV who causes them to bite the dust.

In most parts of Melbourne, there’s about an hour of urban jungle to escape before you get to the countryside. And even there, there can be cops lurking around corners of the most deserted, easy-to-ride roads, which can have absurdly low speed limits.

Even if I don’t die (which I usually don’t), I don’t want speeding tickets. They stink. I thus don’t like the Sword of Damocles hanging over my head around every corner.

Besides that, I really don’t want to lose the use of my fingers, because I love playing the guitar, or the use of limbs or pain in my back, because I love jiu jitsu and boxing.

These thoughts began to haunt me. And then I saw the crash. Ah, you thought I was talking about the crash above, didn’t you? Nope.

The Second Crash

I saw a crash — well, I arrived on the scene minutes after it happened — on an intersection I was walking past but through which I regularly rode. I saw a Ninja 300 on its side, wrecked, and a body on the street with a sheet over it.

The helmet had flown off (hopefully without the head in it). And what haunts me to this day is seeing the rider’s shoe, alone, in the middle of the road.

I wanted to take a photo of it, but that seemed disrespectful. But the image is seared into my head, so instead, I leave you with this AI-generated artist’s impression of the scene:

I stood there looking at it. I realised how much I had to live for, and how little I really enjoyed riding in this city.

I truly don’t get why people ride in Melbourne (the urban part). I regularly hear of accidents on the busiest roads. Lane splitting is legal but tightly controlled. Lanes are so narrow that it’s often harrowing anyway.

Sure, if you live out in the east, you can get to some really beautiful countryside roads. I mean, Phillip Island is out there! But I don’t, and am unlikely to for a while, and have other things that occupy my time.

Other Hobbies

I sometimes hear people say things like they don’t know what they’d do if they couldn’t ride. The thing is — I wouldn’t say the same thing. I have lots of other hobbies. I like combat sports (I’m no MMA pretender, but I go to an MMA gym and enjoy light sparring), beating on my guitar (which is a similar thing to motorcycling, in many ways, but which I can do in my home office), and travelling and learning languages (I speak eight on a good day). Those things occupy a lot of my time already.

Guitar is a particularly good one. I know a lot of motorcyclists would really understand the appeal of guitars. They’re beautiful, old instruments, often built with “vintage” specs. There are collector’s items out there worth many thousands. And playing the guitar is “cool” in a similar way to motorcycles. (It’s superficial, I know, but it’s true!)

But you don’t have to register guitars, you can’t get speeding tickets, and you can’t die. Some distinct upsides. The downside, of course, is that it’s much harder to get OK at playing guitar than it is to get OK at riding bikes. Still, I’m trying!

Wrap up

I still have one last motorcycle in my garage — a Ducati Monster 900 I’m trying to bring back to life. It’s a work in progress. Garage time these days is more rewarding than riding in this part of the world. And the day after I sold my Honda Hornet 900, I went out and bought a gravel bike (a new class of bicycle I only just heard about). So I will still get outdoors on two wheels, and go places where motorcycles can’t take me, and get exercise, to boot.

But I’ll get back to Europe soon and rekindle my joy for riding.