Getting a Bike Licence at 55: My Knees Objected, I Overruled Them

Getting a Bike Licence at 55: My Knees Objected, I Overruled Them

Forty-five years of riding, a two-year-old licence, and one piece of advice from a man who used to defuse bombs.

I have a confession that will confuse the RTA: I first sat on a motorcycle more than 45 years ago, and my licence is 2 years old.

Let me explain before somebody calls the police. All of the unlicensed part happened in Pakistan, in the 1980s, before most of you were born.

The Unlicensed Years

I was 11, maybe 12, when my cousin made the mistake of owning a Yamaha 100cc trail bike and the bigger mistake of letting me near it. I dropped it. More than once. The bike survived, my pride survived, and a rider was born — no licence, no helmet, no training, but a rider.

Then my older brother got a Kawasaki KE100, and my education continued. Nobody taught me. There was no instructor, no test, almost no traffic, and no policeman interested in a boy on a trail bike. My missions were mostly local, plus the most important errand of the 1980s: going to the video shop to rent VCR cassettes. Younger readers can google what that is. It was Netflix, but you had to ride a motorcycle to reach it, which frankly made it better.

At university I upgraded to a 70cc, then a 125cc Kawasaki. For 3 or 4 years that bike was my legs — up to 100 km on some days. My safety equipment was simple: a helmet, but only in winter, and only because of the cold wind, not because of my skull. Otherwise, joggers and shalwar. Body armour? My body was the armour. I was 20. At 20 you are immortal — every 20-year-old knows this, and every 55-year-old knows it was never true.

And here is the part I want to say clearly, because it took me forty years to understand it: nothing bad ever happened to me. Not because I was careful. Because I was lucky.

Then a 30-Year Intermission

Life happened. Career, marriage, children, Dubai. The motorcycle quietly left my story, the way hair quietly leaves a man's head.

Then at 55, I walked into a driving school in Dubai with my daughter, and we both signed up for motorcycle licences. Yes, at the same time. There is a whole series about that circus on the channel — the first ride, the yard test, and the road test.

Short version of the scorecard: we both failed the yard test once. She passed her retest before me, which she has mentioned only about 400 times since. Then she failed the road test once, which restored some balance to the family. When I did it, the course was AED 3,984.50 per person, and every retest added about AED 388 more. The meter runs.

So at 55 I became something researchers actually have a name for: a "returning rider", also called a "born-again biker". I thought I was having a personal journey. It turns out I am a demographic.

I Am Not Even Unusual

This was the first small blow to my ego. In America, where they count these things properly, the motorcycle industry's own owner survey put the median age of a motorcycle owner at 45 in 2012, 47 in 2014, and 50 by 2018 — and 2018 is the last time they published the number. Industry surveys going further back suggest it was in the thirties around 1990. Riders over 50 were a small slice of the total in the mid-1980s and had grown into a large one by the mid-2000s; with the median now sitting at 50, we are somewhere close to half.

Translation: the average biker today is not a young man with something to prove. He is a middle-aged man with a good jacket, a sensible bedtime, and a motorcycle worth more than his first apartment. If that stings, I have written about being middle-aged in the Middle East before.

What the Research Says About People Like Me

I did not want to only tell stories, so I looked up the research. Good news and bad news, like most things after 50.

The good news: age really does calm you down. One case-control study found that each additional year of a rider's age is associated with about 15% lower odds of a crash. And in American fatal-crash records, the riders most often marked down for speeding and weaving are men in their twenties on middle-size sports bikes. The researchers call these "unsafe rider actions". I call it being 22. Long-running surveys that follow the same people for decades find the same thing from the other side: willingness to take risks goes down steadily as age goes up. It is measured in laboratories, but any man who has compared how he descends stairs at 25 and at 55 already has the data.

The bad news: we break easier. A study of about 1.5 million American motorcycle crashes found that riders between 40 and 59 were roughly twice as likely to be admitted to hospital as riders in their twenties and thirties, and about 66% more likely to suffer serious injuries. For riders over 60 it was three times. Older riders take more chest, rib and internal injuries. The body has the same crumple zones it always had. The difference is that the spare parts department has closed.

And one finding aimed personally at me. I assumed my 40 years of memory counted for something. But the research on new and returning riders shows the crash rate is highest immediately after you get your licence, and then falls as you actually ride. In other words, my most dangerous year was the one I was proudest of. Age was helping me. Experience I did not really have yet.

So the summary is: I am less likely to crash than young me, and much more likely to regret it if I do. Being calmer does not make me safer overall — it only fixes one half of the equation.

Which brings me to my old boss.

Coward or Dead

Years ago I worked for a retired air force officer who had spent part of his career in EOD — bomb disposal. One day he told me something I never forgot.

"There are only two kinds of people in EOD," he said. "Coward, or dead."

The brave ones, he said, the heroes who trusted their courage — they are the dead ones. The men who retired with all their fingers attached were the cowards: the ones who followed every boring procedure, respected the danger every single time, and never once tried to impress anybody.

I did not understand him at 30. I understand him completely at 57.

I ride with fear now. Real fear. I know injuries hurt more, I know bones heal slower, I know my pain resistance is not what it was. The young me rode as if falling was impossible. The old me rides as if falling is expensive, painful, and fully possible before lunch. Guess which one of us is the better rider.

And the rider who overtakes because he can, who does not need the jacket, who does not need the extra second — he is not braver than me.

"He is just earlier in the story."

Nature quietly took away some of my strength, my balance and my bounce, and in exchange it handed me fear. That is a fair trade, but only if I actually spend the fear. My caution is not a bonus prize for good behaviour. It is compensation. If I ride at 57 with the attitude I had at 20, I get the worst of both worlds: an old body doing a young man's things.

Maturity did not make me brave on a motorcycle. It made me a proud, certified coward. My old boss would be pleased.

So Should You Get a Licence at 55?

If your knees are asking the same question mine did: yes. Overrule them.

But go in with both halves of the truth. You will almost certainly ride more sensibly than your younger self did — and if it goes wrong anyway, it will cost you more than it would have cost him. Nobody has told me which of those two wins, and I am not planning to find out.

So take the training seriously, especially in that first year when the numbers say you are most exposed. Buy the proper gear, all of it, not only the helmet in winter — and in this climate, the summer version of that argument is its own conversation. Respect the machine, particularly if the one you are returning to is three times the bike you left — mine weighs more than the 11-year-old me, the Yamaha, and the video shop combined. And put your ego in the top box, where it belongs.

Sometimes I picture that boy on his cousin's Yamaha, no helmet, joggers on his feet, watching me get ready today. All this gear. All this sweating. Checking the weather, checking the mirrors twice, riding at half past three in the morning like an old man delivering newspapers. He would laugh at me.

And I would tell him one thing, gently: little brother, you were not careful. You were fortunate. I am having the same fun you had, and I am also coming home afterwards. That is the upgrade.

And if you fail the yard test the first time — welcome to the club. My daughter will be happy to tell you who passed the retest first.

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