That is not entirely correct. A car can be cut in half by a motorcycle with that much speed difference. Even if the bike somehow didn't penetrate the car far enough to reach the passengers, the rider (or his remains) will penetrate the windows easily.
Any single lane change by any one of those cars would have made that bike and rider a projectile towards any of the other traffic, with a HUGE amount of kinetic energy. Bike and rider probably mass out at 15 to 20 percent of most cars, but kinetic energy is factored by the square of the velocity.
If the rider loses control and runs into a bridge abutment or concrete wall, then yeah, it's just the rider who gets cleaned up with a wet-vac. But at triple the speed, even with 1/6th the weight, he has 50% more kinetic energy than a car.
But that difference is more of a factor in surface streets rather than freeways. A bike running a red light at 130 will not be a pretty thing to see, or be part of.
Yea, I understand the concept of kinetic energy. My point was that from behind is not
likely to kill anyone. Yes if there's someone in the back seat, or the driver goes flying through the rear window, it's possible someone else will die, but I don't find it particularly likely. 9 times out of 10 I think what happens is that the cyclist slams on the brakes to avoid something, or swerves, loses control, and goes flying off the road altogether. A friend of mine got t-boned by a bike. The biker flew over the roof of the car, friend was ok. If a car gets t-boned by another car, generally people aren't ok.
I just envision a lot of circumstances where trunks get caved in, or a truck driver wonders what that "thunk" was from the rear, or motorcycle and driver are sliding along the freeway. Not
too many circumstances where other drivers or passengers get hit.
Agreed and the other thing besides him crashing is that imagine an older lady driving a car and seeing somebody on a bike flying past them, what are they going to do? Slam on the brakes? Swerve? Maybe he cuts somebody off and they swerve to avoid and hit the person beside them.
Having had this done to me many times (I live in LA afterall), I can tell you that you don't generally have time to swerve. LA is the land of motorcycles splitting traffic at 40 mph speed differentials while traffic is doing 80 mph. They do it here all the time because the law says motorcycles are allowed to split traffic (at no more than 20 mph total and no more than 10 mph speed differential, but they forget that part).
Generally when a motorcycle is closing on you at 40 mph you don't see him until you're looking at his tail lights. After that, you don't even think to swerve because he's past you (that's usually when his 3 buddies go past you). If you
do see him before he passes you your first instinct will generally be to hold still.