I work from home, but I still "commute" to get a fresh breakfast every morning - by scooter. It is such a joy to ride a scooter in London traffic that I deliberately go to much farther shops just to extend the amount of time I'm zooming past the traffic...
Quite frugal on fuel (I get about 70 MPG, but I ride a fast 300cc scooter and don't have a light throttle hand), and I can do most regular maintenance (oil & filter mostly) myself.
Not really, no; for several reasons. You need to pick apart those statistics and look at risk factors (e.g. breaking limits, laws, alcohol) and also weigh up how much fun it is. Skydiving is dangerous but fun - I did it for a year, but ultimately it wasn't for me. Climbing mountains is dangerous, but there's a huge sense of accomplishment involved. Riding a motorbike is similar: there's less risk than the previous, but you can do it much more often, and the risk is scalable by how aggressively you ride.
I've had a few ~30mph scooter spills in the past three years - a couple of lowsides from loss of traction owing to cornering too harshly in poor weather and poor surfaces (scooters exacerbate this owing to not having much lean angle to play with), as well as an 18 year old kid in a car who pulled out of a parked position behind a bus and did a u-turn as I was overtaking the bus - but none the worse for wear other than a scratched visor and a slightly scraped elbow (and an insurance payout to replace my bike).
Ironically, I've travelled much further in total on my big bike (but over shorter time periods) with no incidents at all, yet was pushing myself through twisty mountain roads and much higher speeds. But I had the experience to watch extra carefully for road surface quality and dial right back in bad weather.
You've got to die sometime. You only have a short time on this planet. Do you want to live fearfully and protect all that you have until your grave (when you'll lose it all anyway), or do you want to go out and live a little?
At least on a motorbike you're more likely to hurt yourself than other people. I find driving a car, on the other hand, quite a scary experience owing to how large it is and how little vision you have of everything around you. It would be so easy to hit something small while reversing (a child, say), or clip something (like a cyclist) going around a corner.
(I should add that I rarely ever go on my scooter without protective jacket, and almost never on my big bike without protective trousers and boots too. I never ride without gloves or full-face helmet.)
You can say the same about reducing car driving fatality and injury statistics by not doing stupid things like driving drunk too. The relative risk profiles would be the same.
What increases the risk profile with motorcycles is other cars hitting you directly while moving. Inattentive elderly people, young people, people in a hurry, whatever, it's something you don't have control over or an obvious indicator such as bad weather.
I too rode a scooter w/ armor for a year during my student days in a Seattle climate. It is somewhat fun, but there are more fun physical activities out there with less of a risk profile and non-regular occurrence. There were many times I wish I could be driving a car instead.
To me, it doesn't pass the 'Would I regret doing this if a somewhat uncommon screwup happened' test? Especially if I had to do it repeatedly. It's like having casual sex without a condom. It feels better, but your going to regret it majorly if you got a girl pregnant who doesn't want an abortion. Your going to fucking want to kick your past self and tell him to wear a condom. I would feel the same if I got into a major motorcycle accident.
I never said I thought motorbikes were safer than cars; in fact, I explicitly said that they were dangerous, but not as dangerous as e.g. skydiving (IMO - I've seen multiple people break ankles in perhaps 20 days total on dropzones, and three reserve parachute deployments).
The risks apply differently to motorbikes than cars because of how much less there is between you, the vehicle, and the environment. Alcohol affects you worse on a bike; misjudgement affects you worse, because most bikes brake worse than cars yet accelerate far faster. The temptation to twist the throttle and feel the acceleration, and the extra relative width of the road compared to the narrowness of a bike, all make you more likely on average to speed on a bike. Because of the acceleration, agility and small size, you can get away with maneuvers you could never do in a car - if you risk it.
In terms of fun - this is obviously a subjective judgement. You asked if I was put off by the risk profile; I explained why I am not, and clearly part of it is because I find it more fun than you do. It's particularly fun in London, because in the UK it is legal to filter / lane split: you generally skip to the front at red lights, overtake or go down the middle of traffic queues, and generally never have to stop for long because of traffic, even in the narrow streets of central London. The UK equivalent of US double-yellow lines are rare in urban areas; riding on the "wrong" side of the road to skip traffic is common. If I was condemned to ride in the multi-lane highways of the US, and forbidden from lane splitting, and didn't have to deal with London-style traffic, I'd probably drive a car too most days.
(When I ride bikes in California, where I can lane split, it's still not as fun as the UK, because there isn't enough traffic; the highways are too wide, too straight, have too many lanes, while the back roads have poor surfaces and low speed limits. Better than most of the UK again is the Eifel region in Germany / Belgium / Luxembourg, but it's a different kind of fun.)
As to regret, I believe you end up regretting the things you didn't do more than the things you did. I regret not learning how to ride sooner; I wish I'd done it years ago, when I still lived in Ireland. I rode a scooter in the UK on a provisional license for over a year before I got my full license and was able to ride something bigger than 125cc, and regret not passing sooner, having found out how easy it was to pass - it would have lead to lower insurance rates if nothing else. Growing up, I cycled everywhere, and I was always ambivalent about cars. I never had a desire to drive, and didn't learn until I was 29, and it still doesn't appeal to me. I drive reluctantly in rentals, mostly. But motorbikes were different; with every step, I've become more and more convinced that this is the motorized transport for me. It's become part of my identity; it's one of the best things I've ever done, and I regret much of the time I could have spent riding, but didn't.
>You've got to die sometime. You only have a short time on this planet. Do you want to live fearfully and protect all that you have until your grave (when you'll lose it all anyway), or do you want to go out and live a little?
This is pretty much my argument whenever someone takes objection to me flying small airplanes.
Very good point about the statistics. If you really try to drive a motorcycle safely, (e.g., not drunk, not too fast), the statistics practically describe a different cohort.
Motorcycling is easily one of the best things i've done, it puts a smile on my face every time i go out. Cheers!
In Western Europe at least people tend to use protective gear on scooters. So inside the city you're likely to be riding at close-to-bicycle speeds, but with a motorcycle helmet and an armored jacket. Even if you do fall (and you are indeed likely to fall with a scooter) you're probably safer then on a bicycle.
Plus there's a bit of a story with those statistics. Death is way over the charts if you ride either under the influence, or without a helmet. Take away this, and also take away the larger number of accidents which happen in the first year of riding, and you're no longer at 4x.
Quite frugal on fuel (I get about 70 MPG, but I ride a fast 300cc scooter and don't have a light throttle hand), and I can do most regular maintenance (oil & filter mostly) myself.