Please, ladies and gentleman don’t bash the engineers, scientists’ nor the well intentioned rules makers!
There are some very interesting videos of Bonneville crashes (in vehicle) on U Tube. Please, look at these videos and concentrate on the moments of impact. Those moments are what you build for! Those moments are extremely violent. Sure, you don’t want the vehicle to “grind off” all its bits as it is sliding and injure the occupant. But as the vehicle is sliding or “flying” it and its occupant are doing nothing more than moving in a straight line (vector). If this movement alone was dangerous, humans would not be able to travel! Even by bicycle!
What hurts (especially at higher velocities) is when the vehicle/occupant tries to change the direction of the forward movement (vector)! What a “good” design does is allow that at the moment of impact (change in vector) the energy of this vector change is changed into something that doesn’t injury the occupant. OR, the changes duration (total time) is kept to a minimum. Optimally both!
Does the material that the vehicle is constructed from have a bearing on the ability to safely decelerate the occupant without sustaining life changing or life ending injuries. Sure it does, but to say that bigger will improve safety of the occupant in a sudden deceleration event does not take into account ALL the other variables that occurred prior to the event, the variables during the event and the variables after the event.
From what I have seen, a MC streamliner tends to “pencil roll” and then grind to a halt. It looks like a lot of “little hits” of very short duration in rapid succession.
Now, granted I would not want to try it, but it seems to me that bigger bars are not going to increase rider safety in that type of deceleration event.
