Passes & Canyons Blog

I no longer write for Examiner.com, but I did for about eight years. During that time they went through numerous tech upgrades, with the result finally that all the work I did for the first nine months or so was no longer compatible with their latest software. So all that very early stuff was removed and is no longer available. I consider that a shame because some of that was very good (my own not so humble opinion).

So I decided the thing to do would be to put some of the best stuff up here on this blog, and here’s the first. I will make note that one thing has changed radically in the interim, which is that the price of gasoline has plummeted. It’s a good indicator of how the future may not be at all like we currently envision it.

I Have Seen The Future And It Seems To Work Just Fine

The middle-aged woman, wearing three-inch heels and a black cocktail dress, paused next to the little scooter. Popping open the storage compartment, she stashed the black shawl she was wearing and put on the denim jacket she took from the compartment. Pulling on a helmet, she shut the compartment, and shakily, on her high heels, rocked the scooter off its center stand. Finally, she unfurled the scooter’s protective skirt and draped it over her in order to ward off dirt or water and to maintain her modesty. Then she drove away.

Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more. Heck we’re not even in the U.S. My wife and I witnessed this vignette last week in Paris. Clearly they do things differently over there.

Welcome to the land of $11 gasoline. While we moan about $4 gas, the Europeans paid that much and more for years. Now we pay $4 and they pay $11. Scooters are king on the Continent and you really know that’s true when you see this sort of scene.

Of course, it’s not as if I didn’t know about this, but our recent two weeks in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands brought home a number of points I didn’t realize.

For one, you really see the most bikes of all sorts in Paris, at least of the places we spent time. In Toulouse there are many, many scooters, too, but a really phenomenal number of bicycles. In Bruges, Belgium, bicycles constitute an even greater majority. At the train station in Bruges they had racks and racks and racks of bicycles, thousands of them, apparently parked there by their owners who were taking the train in to Brussels or Ghent to work.

In Rotterdam, the city center was destroyed during World War II and has been rebuilt with wide streets. Consequently, there were nowhere near as many bikes, motorcycles, or scooters. Still, rather than sharing the streets with cars and trucks, bikes and scooters have a separate lane of their own on both sides of the street.

The key in all these cities, however, is public transportation and two-wheeled transportation. The Europeans saw the need for fuel-efficient transportation long ago. Now that we’re feeling the bite in gas costs we’re finally seeing the light, too. I have seen the future and it appears to work just fine.

Biker Quote for Today

The only thing better than a motorcycle is a woman riding one.

We all know the story. Your buddy riding behind you or in front of you has forgotten to cancel his turn signal and so you ride along mile after mile with that thing flashing. Maybe you hold out your hand and open and close your fingers, trying to give him the signal that his blinkers are on but he’s not paying attention to you, either. Why can’t motorcycle manufacturers come up with self-canceling turn signals?

Actually, they have. Yamaha has had self-canceling signals for years, but they’re only based on riding a certain distance and then they shut off. Which is not bad, all in all, and definitely better than nothing. And there are also after-market producers who offer relays you can wire into your bike that will shut the signal off after a certain amount of time. But nobody has ever come up with a signal that works like those in cars, where it continues blinking until you make your turn and then shuts off.

It’s not hard to understand why–the physics of it all are very, very different with a car vs. a bike. We don’t have steering wheels that rotate one way and then rotate back the other way.

Abcs Sistem Ltd., a company out of Slovenia, has announced that it has cracked this nut and is now offering its Smart Turn System (STS) for use on any bike.

According to the company’s release, “The STS is a device that analyzes more than 300 different types of data to automatically cancel turn signals if a rider has forgotten to turn them off after making a turn or lane change. . . . The Smart Turn System is a small device directly wired into a motorcycle’s existing turn signal system and its internal sensors capture and send data through a complex algorithm to help determine the bike’s lean angle, heading, vibrations, and acceleration to detect if the turn has been completed and if the turn signals need to be canceled. All of this is done automatically, allowing the rider to focus on the road and enjoy the ride.”

The STS is supposed to be available for pre-order right now, at a price of 140 euros. That works out to about $170 at today’s exchange rate. They say installation is easy and you can do it yourself. I don’t know about you but I think this is a very welcome development. That said, am I going to pay $170 times three to put these things on each of my bikes? Not likely. But if it really works I have to believe the manufacturers will soon all either develop their own systems or perhaps license this one and put it on all their bikes. And that element of motorcycling will finally enter the 20th century.

Biker Quote for Today

Just once I would like to wake up, turn on the news, and hear “Monday has been canceled. Get out and ride.”