anagallis_arvensis – Member
none of which is as important as planning your views, avoiding nutters and anticipation.
An experienced cyclist already has those skills, or he’s pushing a wheelchair. The most important skills after that are the bike control skills. Best learned offroad IMO.
cynic-al – Member
…I’m still curious as to whether bigger bikes are safer solely due to the better brakes or is there another reason?
Brakes and suspension.
The ratio of sprung to unsprung weight is one of the critical factors in making suspension work properly.
A small bike does not have much weight, so getting the unsprung weight to an optimum amount is difficult. It can be achieved by a bigger spend on the unsprung components or by having a highly sophisticated damping system. That is unlikely to happen on commuter style bikes.
A fat lardy rider can improve this ratio. In fact some bikes have suspension so woeful that the riders have to pack on great big beerguts to make the suspension work – check out any Harley-Davidson rally. 😆
It is easier to get a decent ratio on a bigger bike because the suspension can still be reasonably basic, but because there is a better sprung/unsprung ratio, it will work ok.
My opinion is probably out of date, but I used to reckon on about 320lbs as about right for a single cylinder bike.
The best suspension in small bikes is usually found on trail bikes.
Actually apart from race replicas, that is probably across the board.
For example, I had one of the first Ducati Monsters in Oz (right after Barry Sheene who got the very first 🙂 ) and while it was a great bike, I was much faster on tight rough winding roads on my Suzuki DR650SE trail bike because it could cope with the frequent potholes and corrugations on corners much better.