I've been meaning to make this post for some time, and finally have the time to sit down and do it. It's going to get into much more of the theory around safe riding as opposed to the hands on practical skills. That said, I think there's stuff of value here for riders of all skill levels. This model is a simplification of reality in pursuit of a way to better help folks avoid getting in accidents, and to hopefully help the conversation along when it comes to discussing what makes more experienced riders safer vs. newer riders.
Risk
In this post, I'm using the word risk to refer to our chances of ending up on the ground. Easiest to conceptualize as "If I were put into a bad situation 100 times, how many times would I make it out upright?". It's worth noting that risk can never be taken to zero except by not riding a motorcycle. It's also worth noting that someone can ride in a very risky fashion and be lucky for an extended period, and not crash. However, regardless of your skill level, you ride in a high risk fashion for long enough and it will eventually catch up to you.
I generally categorize risks into two categories: Environmental and individual. Environmental risks are the broader risks that are present in the world out there, everything from pavement quality, the weather, the density of traffic, the chances of road debris, etc. These are the things that determine my "baseline pace". If I'm on a back road in the middle of nowhere with no cross streets, on a sunny day, with good pavement, and I haven't seen a car in 20 minutes, my pace will likely be higher as the environmental risk is relatively low. If it's raining, I'm in SF with city traffic, pedestrians, etc, my pace is going to be much slower. The amount of environmental risk determines my baseline pace. If you're riding at a pace where nothing that you come across surprises you, chances are you have established an appropriate baseline pace. If you're riding at a pace where a completely unexpected hazard comes up, you should re-evaluate if that hazard was completely unexpected or if your pace was too fast to allow you to identify that risk.
Individual risks are individual, tangible things that are increasing risk right now. That can be a pothole, gravel, bonzai pedestrians, an erratic car, and other things that directly increase my risk by potentially knocking me off my bike. Individual risks are also things that contribute to higher risk by robbing me of situational awareness and visibility or otherwise reducing my chances of identifying a hazard. Individual risk is a thing that determines if I'm going to be going faster or slower than my baseline pace on a per situation basis. If I've got good sight lines, excellent situational awareness and visibility, I might go significantly faster than my baseline pace through a corner, despite high environmental risk. If I can see a couple of potholes on approach to a blind corner, I'm going to be going significantly slower than my baseline pace.
There is also a dedicated skill of identification of risks in the environment. I'm going to just leave that out for the moment, as that's a complete conversation unto itself, and I want to focus this post more on risks and mitigations than I do identification.
Risk Mitigations
So now we've got a baseline for our mental risk model - environmental risk as a broad, large scale thing, and individual risk as situations that expose us to additional risk. With that baseline, we can move on to the important thing: Risk mitigation.
The first form of risk mitigation is "reactive mitigation". Reactive mitigations are when you have to do something or you will have an accident. It's the additional lean angle to avoid running off the road, it's panic braking to avoid colliding with a car, or swerving into the gap to avoid a car doing a sudden lane change while you're splitting. This is the last ditch effort that relies on reaction time and individual skill and motorcycle performance to prevent an accident.
The next way you avoid risk is by what I will call "predictive mitigation". Predictive mitigation is when you have identified the situation in advance, and you have taken the appropriate action to reduce the chances of that situation requiring a reactive mitigation or causing an accident. These sort of reactions are things like pre-emptively hugging the white line on a blind right hander in case a car comes around the corner, slowing when you see gravel signs, slowing when the vanishing point is closing down, and other actions you take in anticipation of risks, as opposed in reaction to them.
The final forms form of avoiding risk is to not ride at all. This is strong risk avoidance - choosing not to ride because you are sick, tired, or under the influence. It's an important tool when you don't feel like you are capable or your bike isn't in a functional, safe state. For some people, this is the only acceptable way to deal with the risk of motorcycling, and as a result they do not ride at all. For me, it's a decision I make when I'm not confident I can effectively avoid risks by predictive mitigation.
Putting It All Together
The reason that I categorize risks this way is because it simplifies safe, quick, and fun riding. Thinking through the environmental risk before I even swing a leg over the bike helps me get my baseline pace right. Once I'm riding, that baseline pace gets modified based on the encounters with individual risks I have. If I'm on a long ride and encountering minimal individual risks, chances are good I can turn up the pace a little bit and be just fine. If I'm on a ride and encountering many individual risks, I can back the pace down to reduce the chances of any of those individual risks knocking me off the bike.
Furthermore, as a new rider progresses in experience, their risk mitigations should be moving from more reactive mitigations to more predictive mitigations. Reactive mitigations are easy to mess up, rely on the performance and skill of the rider to be performed successfully, and if you fail to perform a reactive mitigation, you are highly likely to crash. Predictive mitigations are low risk, low skill maneuvers that are taken in advance of a hazard becoming highly risky. Obviously, this relies on predictive thinking and anticipation of situations in advance, such as predicting the conditions that are going to show up around a corner, or the actions of a car in front of you, and using techniques that allow you to maximize your space cushion and awareness.
The goal is to put you and your motorcycle in such a position on the road that you have pre-emptively taken any needed actions to avoid an accident. Performing predictive mitigations is a continual process that will be constantly changing as you move through traffic or up a road, as you take into account new information, discard old information, and identify new hazards. It's a very good idea to think through your history of reactive risk mitigations, and consider how those could have been pre-emptive mitigations instead.
The other thing that I would strongly encourage riders to consider is to look at each encounter they have not on an individual basis, but as an average for the number of miles they ride, and the number of years they expect to ride. I expect to be riding for at least another 40 years, so that means that if I have a single high skill required reactive event while commuting every 2 months, I will have to successfully navigate 240 high skill events over the next 40 years to avoid crashing while commuting alone. That isn't a particularly acceptable risk level for me, so I have adjusted my riding, speed, and approach to lane splitting and traffic to keep the number of reactive events down. As it is, I've managed to successfully move the vast majority of my risk mitigations from reactive to predictive, and as a result, have a much lower chance of being involved in an accident.
I hope my perspective helps other riders have a new tool for approaching the risks of riding a motorcycle safely - as always, remember, all models are wrong but some models are useful, and I've found this one very useful over the years. I hope others find it useful as well.