I hope I'm not tempting fate here, but as someone who's tried to avoid motorbikes for years, and reluctantly switched to 2 wheels after a move to london a year back.. I'm finding massive parallels between bikes and planes.. and finding the bike surprisingly satisfying as an exercise in observation and anticipiation.
In the greater part you do set your own risk level for either. Yes, on a bike you can get blindsided by the idiot in a car, in a plane there are also the odd unfathomables. But from what I've seen so far the true 'outrageous circumstance' moments are rare - in the main case it's impatience and a lack of understanding. I believe you can manage the risk to a large exetent in either case - the aircraft angle is well covered, on the bike - by hanging back, expecting and leaving room for people to do stupid things. For example, it may not be unreasonable from a motorcyclists point of view to travel rapidly between two lanes of traffic - but when you consider how hard it is for that car changing lanes to a) see you, and b) judge your approach speed when they're thinking at an almost stationary speed, maybe not.. Part of me thinks that bikes intrinsically attract demographic that is more inclined to be impatient and pushy..
