I've just let my dog out for a pee. While he was peeing and sniffing a motorcyclist passed by on the main road outside my flat at a fair speed, with the engine making a hell of a racket!! Two minutes later I could still hear him/her going over the fairly steep hill about a mile away. Such noise, so how does he/her feel safe without being able to hear their surroundings?🤔
We have a few noisy ones round our way. You'll probably find it's a young wannabee rider on a 125 with a modded exhaust. You can do longer trips on a 125, or anything really, but with a smallish engine working harder it'll make more noise than a bigger bike round town, so maybe the perception of speed is an illusion. It would probably give the rider a headache if he did longer trips. There's a fine line between a nice fruity sound and being plain obnoxious, and what's musical to some is just plain offensive to others. The same applies to some drivers with drainpipe exhausts. I don't know about "feeling safe". When you are young you think you're immortal. There was a saying among fighter pilots -"there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots" and much the same applies to motorcyclists. Somehow I've survived 57 years of riding some kind of motorbike most days. Probably I was a loon in my younger days, not so bold nowadays.
There doesn't seem to be much enforcement going on in my area, the home of the county police HQ.
With the fashion for full enclosure helmets, having decent mirrors and a flexible neck are useful for maintaining awareness of your surroundings. At round town speeds you can hear things coming, but it's possible that such a rider is too dependent on the belief that by making all that noise other road users will keep out of his way. That doesn't allow for vulnerable people with hearing impairment, or drivers who are oblivious to their surroundings for whatever reason. When you get on a motorbike, it's reasonable to assume that you don a cloak of invisibility, regardless of hi viz, lights, or noisy exhausts as in our car centric world, motorbikes and smaller vehicles slip under the radar of drivers attuned to looking for car sized objects and bigger.
Quite often, you will hear a noisy motorbike coming while driving, but won't be able to pinpoint the source of the sound until you can see him or her. All well and good unless they do something unexpected like turn across you without signalling or overtake inappropriately.
It might be the lesser of two evils to be deafened by someone like that rather than flattened by someone on a silent unregistered e motorbike riding on the pavement, though I'd rather neither thing happened.
