In recent years responsible motorcyclists have adopted the acronym ATGATT - "all the gear, all the time". Even if you're just going round to the corner shop for some milk, at the very least you wear closed shoes, jeans, gloves and a helmet.
And if you think that sounds paranoid, bear in mind that most accidents - car or bike - happen within four kilometres of home, and that you run the same risk of some idiot jumping a stop street and slamming into you at the bottom of the street where you live as you do on that once-a-year trip to the other end of the country.
But all of this applies as much to car drivers as it does to bikers, which brings me to the point of this rant.
The other day I was on my way to the local garage to fill up the bike (and wearing full gear, I might add) when I came to a stop street a couple of blocks from my home and gave way to an oncoming car.
Granted, he was travelling at little more than walking pace, but the driver wasn't wearing a seat belt and, standing completely unsecured on the front passenger seat, was a toddler of three or four years old. And the only thing that kept the child from falling between the driver and the steering wheel as he turned across my bows was the driver's strategically outflung arm!
All it would have taken was a misjudged kerb, or a dog running out into the street, for that toddler to smash his face on the dashboard or, worse still, go through the windshield. And, to be very selfish for a moment, just how do you go home and explain that to the kid's mother?
Low-speed accidents can be just as deadly for unrestrained small passengers as freeway crashes. Never mind the law (few South Africans do anyway), you owe it to yourself never to be in that position.
Purely out of self-interest, you owe it to yourself never to start your car unless every person in it is wearing a seat belt or securely strapped into a child seat of the appropriate size for their age, even (no, make that especially) if you're just going to the corner shop.
Because, if you get it wrong, you will have to live with the consequences for the rest of your life, every time you look in a mirror or into the eyes of that child's mother.
Every day I'm accused of being irresponsible, just because I'm a biker. I have to put up with insults and derision because bikers are seen as deliberately courting danger. But few bikers would dream of riding anywhere without a helmet and fewer still would let a child do so.
And then I see a four-year-old standing on the front passenger seat of a moving car and I have to ask, who's being irresponsible now?