I don't want to get too far off subject, but...
To preface my comments, I must explain my background. I have been successful in multiple motorsports disciplines, as both a driver/rider, and as a builder, crew chief, and so on. Part of my background is as an expert-licensed motorcycle road racer, motorcycle road racing instructor, and motorcycle road racing official. I have been paid at the rate of $1,000 an hour, as a rider and model for a major motorcycle manufacturer's advertising campaign. I also am a retired police officer fully trained and with significant experience in investigating motor vehicle collisions (to include motorcycle crashes), and with advanced DUI training and TONS of experience in DUI cases (often involving Harley-Davidsons). And finally, I have also been ASE certified in multiple disciplines of vehicle repair, and have been scored easily in the top 1% in the nation within the profession. So I think I'm up to speed on this stuff.
I am very careful in my application of the word "rider". The word "rider" implies that a person actually knows how to ride, and in my experience (as cited above), I have NEVER met a Harley-Davidson operator on the road, that actually knows how to ride. And unfortunately, when you tell someone on a Harley that they don't know how to ride, they act like you told them that they had a small wiener, which I personally don't understand, because I don't know how to golf, and if someone told me that I don't know how to golf, I would agree with them, instead of getting all butt-hurt.
Riding a vehicle with two inline wheels (like a motorcycle) is very counter-intuitive. Almost everything works the exact opposite way that a lay person would assume that it does. For example, most lay people assume that you push the handlebars left to turn left, and most lay people assume that the rear brake has some material role in braking. So the chances of just "figuring it out" apart from competent professional rider training, is just about zero. Competent professional rider training has never been more accessible than it is today, but you'll probably never see a Harley-Davidson at a track day, because that would involve them admitting that they had something to learn about riding, which to them, would be like admitting that they had a small wiener.
The typical process of a Harley-Davidson operator ending up on public roads, is that they started out on a bicycle as a small child. Small children are incapable of understanding things like counter-steering and gyroscopic precession, so they generally learn how to steer through trial and error. They fall down. They fall down again. Eventually, they SUBCONSCIOUSLY learn how to keep it upright. But they have no idea how they're doing it, or the principles involved. Forty years later, they are fat, balding, and impotent. They are greeted by the "Chrome Consultant" at their local Harley-Davidson boutique, and assume that since they sort-of learned how to subconsciously keep a bicycle upright, that they are ready for a 900-pound whoopie-cushion. Again, just like when they were a small child, they learned through trial and error, how to manage the clutch well enough to get it rolling in first gear without stalling the engine...and then they just stop learning. What they assume is an advancing skill set, is simply them becoming more and more comfortable over time, with not knowing how to ride.
Unfortunately, many of them learn in the last instant of their life, that they didn't actually know how to ride at all, so they aren't around to admit it.
And the remainder of them are simply alive because no one has killed them yet- they literally don't have enough skill to have any role in their own survival. Periodically you will encounter one that the laws of statistical probability have not caught up to yet, often with some claim that they've been "riding" for "50 years", when in reality they haven't been riding at all.
