Passes & Canyons Blog

I wrote an unfavorable piece about U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters that you may recall, about her efforts to divert money earmarked for rider training to promote helmet use and state laws requiring helmet use. Randy Bingner replied to that and I’d like to share our discussion.

Randy’s initial response was this:

I suggest step back from your focus on helmet laws and look at everything Mary Peters is doing for the motorcycling community. It is very difficult to be critical when you look at the big picture.

I was interested and wanted to know more. I sent Randy this reply:

I appreciate your comment on my Mary Peters post. I’ll be completely honest with you and say I don’t know much at all about what she has done or tried to do except what I read in American Motorcyclist. I would be really pleased if you would write a guest post addressing that topic. Something to balance out my frankly more superficial take on the matter. Are you interested?

Here is Randy’s answer:

I have been at the Sturgis rally the past week and just got home. You could Google and find no end to information. Basically, in my opinion, the most telling quote from Mary Peters, and I will paraphrase, is that when highways are designed, constructed, and maintained, the motorcycle should not be an afterthought. I am attaching a recent article I wrote for the back page of another newsletter. The fact that this initiative exists is due in large part to the fact that we have a rider at the head of the USDOT. I am an AMA member, but I do not agree with all positions it takes. Motorcyclists are a comparatively small group when you look at all users of the transportation system. The more we get divided, the easier it will be to lose rights and privileges. I am for freedom of choice. I chose to wear a helmet and leather.

So that’s a starting point. I intend to follow Randy’s suggestion and do some research to learn more about what Mary Peters has done, and I’ll pass that along to you. And I want to thank Randy for offering his take on the matter.

I do want to make one other point, however. I stand by my original argument that taking money from rider training to push for helmet requirements is inappropriate. Helmet usage becomes moot if accidents are avoided in the first place. I think rider training is the most important of the two.

Biker Quote for Today

Ride as if your life depended on it!!

I ran across this thing, the Biker’s Credo, on the VTX Range Riders site, but then I found that it is posted in many places. It’s interesting, at times thought-provoking, at times perhaps corny. Have a read. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Biker’s Credo

I ride purely, and only, because it is fun and offers me the opportunity to meet others of like mind.

I ride because I enjoy the freedom I feel from being exposed to the elements, and the vulnerability to the danger that is intrinsic to riding.

I do not ride because it is fashionable to do so.

I ride my machine, not wear it. My machine is not a symbol of status. It exists simply for me, and me alone. My machine is not a toy. It is an extension of my being, and I will treat it accordingly, with the same respect as I have for myself.

I strive to understand the inner workings of my machine, from the most basic to the most complex. I will learn everything I can about my machine, so that I am reliant upon no one but myself for its health and well-being.

I strive to constantly better my skill of control over my machine. I will learn its limits, and use my skill to become one with my machine so that we may keep each other alive. I am the master, it is the servant. Working together in harmony, we will become an invincible team.

I do not fear death. I will, however, do all possible to avoid death prematurely. Fear is the enemy, not death. Fear on the highway leads to death, therefore I will not let fear be my master. I will master it.

My machines will outlive me. Therefore, they are my legacy. I will care for them for future bikers to cherish as I have cherished them, whoever they may be.

I do not ride to gain attention, respect, or fear from those who do not ride, nor do I wish to intimidate or annoy them. For those who do not know me, all I wish from them is to ignore me. For those who desire to know me, I will share with them the truth of myself, so that they might understand me and not fear others like me.

I will never be the aggressor on the highway. However, should others be the aggressor towards me, their aggression will be dealt with in as severe a manner as I can cast upon them.

I will show respect to other bikers more experienced or knowledgeable than I am. I will learn from them all I can.

I will not show disrespect to other bikers less experienced or knowledgeable than I am. I will teach them what I can.

It will be my task to mentor new riders, who so desire, into the lifestyle of the biker, so that the breed shall continue. I shall instruct them, as I have been instructed by those before me.

I shall preserve and honor traditions of bikers before me, and I will pass them on unaltered. I will not judge other bikers on their choice of machine, their appearance, or their profession. I will judge them only on their conduct as bikers and as a human being.

I am proud of my accomplishments as a biker, though I will not flaunt them to others. If they ask, I will share them.

I will stand ready to help any other biker who truly needs my help. I will never ask another biker to do for me what I can do for myself.

I am not a part-time biker. I am a biker when, and wherever I go. I am proud to be a biker, and I hide my chosen lifestyle from no one.

I ride because I love freedom, independence, and the movement of the ground beneath me. But most of all, I ride to better understand myself, my machine, the lands in which I ride, and to seek out and know other bikers like myself. –

–Author Unknown

Biker Quote for Today

Respect the person who has seen the dark side of motorcycling and lived.

Are you aware that your insurance company may be excluding you from coverage on accidents where you are on a motorcycle? It’s a crock of bull but it’s a reality. Some insurance companies refuse to cover injuries incurred while doing totally legal things, like riding motorcycles, even if you are in no way at fault.

How would you feel if you were sitting stopped on your bike at a stop light and some drunk who has already lost his license for driving drunk hits you. You were completely legal and he was completely illegal, and yet your injuries are not covered while his, if he has any, are. It can happen!

This is an issue raised more than 10 years ago by the American Motorcyclist Association, and it was presumably resolved by legislation passed by Congress in 1996. But a funny thing happened on the way to implementation: the federal agency charged with formulating the rules around the legislation wrote rules that directly contradicted the intent, making it absolutely legal for insurance companies to do this.

Well, Congress is trying again. The HIPAA Recreational Injury Technical Correction Act, Senate Bill 616, is now under consideration, and we all need to let our Congressional representatives know we want them to pass it.

The AMA makes it easy for you to tell your senator what you want. This page on their website lets you click to bring up a form letter addressed to your senators. We all need to press to make sure this legislation gets passed. Do it now! This is really important.

The OFMC went on our summer trip last week and it was a great week of riding. We stayed primarily in Colorado and many people (not me) were surprised that we could see so much of interest and make so many nice rides without going far. I knew this. That’s what this website is all about. I know that people come from all over the world to ride in Colorado. So we live and learn.

Anyway, this isn’t about our trip except for a couple things that happened along the way.

One of our guys, Jason, was riding his very new Harley-Davidson Road King. It’s less than two months old. So guess whose bike was the only one that had problems. We were close to Durango when Jason decided he needed to visit a dealer so he checked and found that Durango Harley-Davidson opened at 9 a.m. He planned to be there at 9 a.m. so they could work on it right away and he could get back on the road.

Well, it turned out that they opened at 8 a.m., and when Jason got there at 9 a.m. he was told they couldn’t get to his bike until about 1 p.m. because six other traveling Harley riders had gotten there before him and they also needed priority service in order to get back on the road.

Now, in our group this year we had five Hondas and three Harleys, and as I said, Jason’s Harley was the only one to have problems. And six other traveling Harley riders also had problems that day? I’m sorry but we couldn’t help but conclude that does not reflect very favorably on the Milwaukee folks.

And then there was Dennis’s issue. Dennis has owned a lot of bikes in his day, including Harleys, but recently he has been riding Hondas. Part of the reason for that has to do with Harley salesmen. It would appear that with their product in such high demand, many of them have never had to learn to actually sell. They do a great job of handing you the papers to sign when you’ve made up your own mind, and they’re happy to sell you the extras, but working to close a deal is apparently a different matter.

Let’s back up a few years. Dennis was riding a Big Dog but decided to replace it with a Harley. He went to a dealership knowing they wouldn’t take the Big Dog as a trade-in but figuring he could arrange some consignment deal. The salesman was brief: “Get rid of your clone and come back and I’ll sell you a real motorcycle.”

More than a little annoyed, Dennis headed straight for a Honda shop and bought a Honda.

Dennis was equally put out in Durango. He and several others went with Jason to the dealership and, as he puts it, the four of them were a captive audience for half a day. Bill, Brett, and Jason all ended up spending money there but the thing that really caught Dennis’s eye was one particular bike. A salesman noticed this and approached him. Dennis explained that he rode in on a Gold Wing and would need to get the right amount out of it in order for a deal to work. And the salesman dropped the ball. All he could offer was that Dennis could buy this Harley now and fly back to pick it up, and what he did with the Honda was his issue.

For hours afterward Dennis went over again and again how it could have been handled. “All he had to do was say ‘toss me your key and I’ll go over to the local Honda dealer and see what they think you can get on consignment.’ Or he could have just picked up the phone and called the Honda dealer and asked what they thought they could get for the bike. But he didn’t do a thing! I’m not going to buy it and fly back here to pick it up!”

Dennis had been extremely close to spending quite a few thousands of dollars but once again the Harley salesman blew it. So what if your dealership doesn’t take trade-ins. If you want to make a sale, and the sale is contingent on unloading the current bike, doesn’t it make sense for you to go an extra mile to try to grease those wheels?

Biker Quote for Today

When you look down the road, it seems to never end – but you better believe it does.

The middle-aged woman, wearing three-inch heels and a black cocktail dress, paused next to the little scooter. Popping open the storage box, 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 rocked the scooter off its center stand, a little shakily thanks to the high heels. Finally, she unfurled the scooter’s protective skirt and draped it over her in order to keep the dirt and water off 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, where the city center was destroyed during World War II, it has been rebuilt with wide streets. Consequently, there were a lot more cars and 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.

Continuing with the theme I kicked off two days ago, today I’m going to discuss a couple more differences between the European way of doing things and our way. In this case the topics are bike paths and parking.

We all know bike paths, they’re for use by bicycles and pedestrians. Don’t dare try to ride your motorcycle or even your scooter on them because if you do you risk being cited and you’ll definitely have the bicyclists and walkers screaming at you. I’m not saying that’s wrong but, just to give you a basis of comparison, let me tell you how they do it in Europe.

The biggest difference between bike paths here and there is that in Europe, anything on two wheels can use them, and they are not for pedestrians. What are the ramifications of this? Well, for starters, the bike path becomes a real transportation corridor. Pedestrians stick to their own walkways and traffic on the bike path can really move. With far more people on two wheels over there, this large segment of the traffic is removed from the dangers of the four-wheelers and those four-wheelers don’t get honked off that someone on a bicycle is slowing them down. Of course, the two-wheelers still can and do use the streets when necessary.

Of course, bicycles, scooters, and motorcycles are all allowed to park wherever they can find space. That means sidewalks, medians, bike racks, whatever. I don’t know about you but I got a ticket for parking my CB750 on the sidewalk in Lodo a few years ago. Now you do see scooters parking on the sidewalks a lot but I’m still not sure if motorcycles can get away with it.

My intent here is not to advocate for changing the way we use bike paths in this country, but I do want to point out possible alternatives. If the price of gas keeps soaring it seems very likely that more and more people will be taking to two wheels and if that happens we may need to reconsider the way we do some things. And it never hurts to look at the choices made by others who had to face these issues sooner than we have had to. We can learn from their experience.

Biker Quote for Today

Ride till you can’t.

Of course you assume that people do some things differently in other countries but it can surprise you when you see just what it is they do differently, and how it’s different. We experienced that a number of times in our recent two-week trip to France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

The one theme that seemed to run along with each of these realizations was the thought that “Gosh that makes a lot of sense. Too bad they would never allow that in the U.S.”

Take lane-splitting, for instance. Lane-splitting is where scooters and motorcycles slip past slow-moving or stopped cars, running down the dividers between the lanes of traffic. While it has been officially endorsed and declared legal in California, most other states forbid it or are silent on the subject.

But have you ever seen it in action? Our best chance to observe it was in Paris, where two-wheelers, primarily scooters, abound by the thousands. First the light would turn red and vehicles would begin to stop. Then a scooter would come up and pull right down the middle to the front. The longer the red the more scooters would line up between lanes, and at the turn of the green they would sprint forward leaving the cars behind and racing in a pack on down the street.

Of course there are several reasons why lane-splitting might not work as well in this country as it does in Europe. For one thing, it puts more of a burden on the drivers of all vehicles to pay attention and look out for other vehicles. It would also require a recognition by the drivers of the big behemoths that smaller vehicles have their right to a place on the road as well. Pretty unthinkable, both of those.

But it’s working in California and if it can work in that car-crazed state you would think it could work anywhere. All it would take is some open-mindedness in our legislatures. I mean, think of the benefits: Commuters on two wheels burn less gas, cause less pollution, cause less congestion, and get to work faster. The more these benefits grow, the more people will want to enjoy them, so the more will ride rather than drive. It becomes a virtuous circle, the opposite of a vicious circle.

With gas at $4 now and likely to keep going higher the time to try to change some laws is now. Write your legislator. Let’s get a movement started across the country!

Biker Quote for Today

There are two types of people in this world, people who ride motorcycles and people who wish they could ride motorcycles.

OK, this particular post is not for all of you who already ride, but it might be for some buddy of yours who you’ve been working on to get a bike. Try this logic on them. Tell them it’s really easy to have a motorcycle free of charge.

No, I don’t mean come hop on and ride away with no money changing hands. I’ve done the math so you don’t have to and what I’m going to show you is how $4 gasoline presents an opportunity.

Let’s say you have never owned a bike and you want to start out easy. First, pick a day at random. How about today? OK, I went over to craigslist.org and clicked on the motorcycle link just to see what people have for sale. There are several good-looking bikes that would do well for new riders. Here’s one many newbies might find very interesting:

The owner of this 1981 Honda CM250 with 7,000 miles on it is asking $1,400. From what the guy says, and from the photos, it looks like a very clean, very well-maintained bike. One possible issue you would definitely want to check is that, with that few miles in that amount of time, the carbs may need cleaning. But he says it runs great, so maybe he took care of that already. And he says it get more than 60 miles per gallon.

OK, now let’s do the math. What kind of gas mileage does your car get? I’m going to use some fairly conservative figures here. Let’s say your car gets 25 MPG. We’re hoping to err on the high side. Then let’s err on the low side with the bike and just say 60 MPG. That’s a 35 MPG difference.

Then figure an even $4 for gas. In 1,000 miles it would take you 40 gallons of gas in your car, at a cost of $160. For the little Honda it would be 16.7 gallons, costing $66.80. That’s almost $100 less. Again, for convenience, let’s just round that off to $100. So, in round figures, for every 1,000 miles you drive you could ride this bike and save $100.

How many miles do you drive in a year? Is 14,000 a fair number? If you did that full 14,000 on the bike, in the space of one year you would save enough money on gas to purchase the bike. Your own motorcycle, for free!

OK, we know you’re not going to replace all your driving with the bike. In the winter most of us prefer the warmth of a car. Plus, when you go places with other people along a bike just won’t do, usually. And hauling eight bags of groceries on this bike would not work.

Well then, let’s say it takes you two years to pay off the bike. Or heck, even three years. Is that so horrible? You still get the bike essentially for free, plus, in the meantime, your daily commute has become a lot more enjoyable.

Then, if gas prices continue to go up, you’ll pay off the bike with your savings in even less time. I read yesterday that some “experts” are expecting oil at $200 per barrel in the not too distant future.

Of course, we can’t all buy this one bike. But there are a lot of used bikes for sale out there. And let me say this about buying a used bike: Don’t be afraid of used bikes. You can get some great deals, but of course you have to be careful, just as you would buying a used car. I bought my 1980 CB750 Custom for $900 with 19,500 miles on it. It gets an easy 45 MPG. I’ve ridden it for 19 years now and if I wanted to sell it I’d probably ask $700, so at some point in a bike’s life the depreciation becomes a non-issue.

What else is on craigslist today? You may notice if you look over on the left that I now have an RSS feed from that site, so you can see the very latest listings right here while you’re reading this.

For instance, there’s a 2006 Suzuki M50 with 6,400 miles on it. This is an 800cc bike that is fuel-injected and has shaft drive. I found comments from owners of these bikes and it is considered an excellent starter bike. The owner is asking $5,900 for this one.

Then there’s a 2004 Yamaha FZ6 with 12,000 miles at $4,000. He says it gets in the high 30s. Another good starter bike.

If you’re the Harley type there is a 1999 FXD Super Glide with 11,500 miles for $6,000. He doesn’t say what the gas mileage is but you can do some research and find that out.

And then there’s a 1983 Yamaha Virago 750 with 12,000 miles for $2,000. He says it gets 43 MPG.

You get the picture. Take the numbers and play with them. Maybe your car gets much worse gas mileage. Maybe you drive a lot more than 14,000 miles a year. Or maybe you don’t. I’ll tell you one thing, though. I felt pretty happy today when I filled the tank on my Concours and the bill came to just $16.52.

Biker Quote for Today

Never mistake horsepower for staying power.