How to Stay Safe Riding a Motorcycle in the Rain

While it’s best to avoid riding your motorcycle during a heavy downpour, you never know when you’re going to get caught in a sudden storm. To ensure you’re prepared for a tough ride in the rain and know how to keep yourself safe from common bad-weather hazards, check out our helpful tips below.

Low Traction Obstacles

Be prepared to identify and avoid road conditions that pose a particularly hazardous problem. Consider steel plates, often used in construction zones to cover holes. These provide virtually no traction to a rider, so making a sudden change like accelerating, braking, or turning may cause you to slide.

Intersections, where cars idle and drop oil that mixes with rain to form a slick patch, can also be a threat to riders. Even fallen leaves can form a slick paste when they get wet. There are a number of potential disaster zones when you’re out riding in the rain, and you won’t be able to make adjustments as quickly as you normally would. Avoid low traction areas if you can, and if you can’t avoid them, carefully maneuver through and keep your eyes on the other drivers so you can anticipate a possible accident, rather than be forced to react to it.

Ride a Dry Line

If you can, find a dry spot on the road that will help you gain traction again. Most roads wear down to a “W” shape, with two trenches formed by years of cars driving over them. Water often pools in these trenches and creates a hydroplaning risk, so instead, ride down the middle hump where there’s less likely to be water. This will give you more traction, even more so sometimes than flat pavement.

While you should stay home on days when you can expect torrential rain, we know you can’t always avoid riding in the rain, so you should make sure you’re prepared for it. Here at Mission City Indian Motorcycle®, we offer a wide variety of helpful motorcycle safety and rain gear to ensure you’re prepared for bad weather. We also proudly serve the nearby cities of San Antonio, Austin, and Corpus Christi, TX, and are located just nearby in Boerne, TX!