The Motorcycle Riders Foundation (MRF) sent out a release the other day that will make you just shake your head. They tell about a recent meeting with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) where the gap between the motorcyclists and the safety bureaucrats could not have been wider.

Rather than paraphrase it all I’ll just quote from the release:

The government safety group continues to deny that the recent drop in motorcycle fatalities could have anything to do with education and awareness, instead maintaining that that the decrease was a result of people riding less. However, the Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC) reported that during the same time period, 2008-2009, vehicle miles traveled for motorcycles were up 6.8% or 27.6 billion miles in the U.S. The MIC also reported that tire sales, a unique measure of motorcycle use, were also up 9.6% in 2008-2009.

NHTSA also continued to defend their discriminatory practice of funding motorcycle-only roadside checkpoints, including their recent $40,000 award to Georgia’s Department of Public Safety. The idea is based on no science or research, but simply the notion that pulling every motorcycle off the road at the discretion of law enforcement will “save lives.”

Another interesting note in this broadly focused release is information on how the incoming Republican Congressional leadership relates to the motorcycling community. The MRF says that John Boehner (R-OH), who will be the next Speaker of the House, “has been a long-time friend of the MRF and ABATE of Ohio, and we look forward to continuing working with him in his new role.”

The MRF also notes that “The new chair of the powerful U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure (T&I) will be John Mica (R-FL). Representative Mica has been a constant supporter of the MRF and all of our initiatives, as well as a very staunch advocate for ABATE of Florida.”

That bit about Boehner puts an interesting perspective on things. I know that for far-left Democrats, Boehner is seen as really evil. And yet if you’re a motorcyclist you have to think that maybe there’s more to him than just “evil.” It goes both ways, of course. Far-right Republicans also seem to see certain Democrats as pure evil. Gosh, maybe that’s not really true.

You’ll notice I used the terms “far-left” and “far-right” rather than just “Democrats” or “Republicans.” That’s to make the point that most Americans are much closer to the middle than to the extremes, regardless of which party they’re affiliated with.

Excuse the political interjection into what is normally a motorcycle-focused blog, but just this morning I’ve been watching online the launch of an organization called No Labels, website www.NoLabels.org. The group’s basis is in pushing elected officials of both parties to put aside partisan bickering and do what’s right for the country. Wow, what a concept.

I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll stop demonizing your guy if you’ll stop demonizing mine. And then let’s both push them to get things done to get this country moving again, even if it means compromising with each other.

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Biker Quote for Today

Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today. –James Dean

We were coming down from the Black Hills and had been in Nebraska for about an hour when we stopped at a table along the road. There was another guy there, in a car, and we struck up a conversation with him. Along the way he mentioned, “This is a bucket state, by the way.”

Oh really? We hadn’t known that and we had been riding without helmets on. Oops. We had done the same thing a year or two earlier when we rode into Nevada for the first time. Somehow we got all the way to Las Vegas before we learned they required helmets.

Of course that was a long time ago, before the Internet, and we could be excused our ignorance. Back then it wasn’t easy to know what different state laws are. And if a state does require helmets, why the heck don’t they put up a sign at the border that says so?

There’s no excuse anymore for being ignorant of the laws in a state you’ll be riding to. The Internet does exist now, and one excellent place to check up on all states is a handy page on the American Motorcyclist Association’s website. You go there and there’s a map of the U.S. Click on the state you want to know about and it takes you to a listing of what they require and forbid.

The very first item on the list, presumably because this is the most common question, is the helmet requirements, if any. Other information includes the following:

• Safety Helmet
• State Funded Rider Ed
• Eye Protection
• Daytime Use of Headlight
• Passenger Seat
• Passenger Footrest
• Passenger Age Restriction
• Helmet Speakers
• Periodic Safety Inspection
• Mirror Left(L) Right(R)
• Radar Detector
• Turn Signals
• Muffler
• Maximum Sound Level
• State Insurance Requirements
• Handlebar Height
• Rider-Education
• Accept Motorcycle Endorsement From Other States
• Accept RiderEd Completion Card From Other States
• Motorcycles operating two abreast in same lane
• Lane Splitting
• Lemon Law Coverage

I’ll bet you didn’t even know that some states have requirements or prohibitions in some of these areas. Heck, you might even learn something about your own state laws.

Any by the way, the page also has separate legal requirements for off-road bikes. All in all it’s a lot of good information.

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Biker Quote for Today

Remember when sex was safe and motorcycles were dangerous?

The last time I’ve ridden my 1980 Honda CB750 Custom was early October when I took it to the shop for repair of the electrical problem that has plagued me all summer. It’s still sitting there.

Joel, who runs Mountain Thunder Motorsports, my shop, tells me the issue is a burned out rotor, which is on order. It’s been on order for six weeks now.

That’s a problem those of us who ride older machines run into with some regularity. It’s hard–or damn near impossible–to get parts sometimes. In this case, getting a new rotor is dependent on Honda doing a manufacturing run of this particular part. Presumably they wait until demand builds up and it makes sense economically for them to do it. Meanwhile my bike sits and waits.

The issue for me, however, is that if it’s another month before they do a run it will be sometime in December before I have my bike back. And that would mean not riding the bike even once in November. Anyone who knows me knows that is totally unacceptable.

I’ve been riding this bike for more than 20 years, and when I bought it I made myself a promise that I would ride it at least once a month every single calendar month. It got pretty iffy a couple times but in all these years I have kept this string going. But now it is threatened.

So I did the only thing I could do. I told Joel it is extremely important to me that I have the bike back before the end of November and if that means replacing the rotor with a used part rather than a new one, then so be it. He said OK, he would do that, and he promised I’d have the bike back before the end of the month.

Obviously I’m hoping this doesn’t turn out to be an expensive move. Obviously, a used rotor has more of a chance of dying soon than a new one does. Will I be right back in for another one all too quickly? I sure hope not. And it may be silly, so you can call me sentimental or whatever, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take to keep my every-month string going.

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Biker Quote for Today

I don’t know, it’s kinda weird, but the constant chest pains seem to go away when I let the clutch out on my bike.

It seems a no-brainer that motorcycles pollute less than cars because we get more miles per gallon. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. And tracking down the reality of the matter is not easy, either, as I have been finding.

I’m working on an article for RumBum.com, and a series of articles for Examiner.com, on this topic and apparently the truth of the matter is no one really knows for sure which pollutes more. Or to put it a little differently, which has the greater ecological impact.

Just to simplify the issue, two things are certain. Because motorcycles consume less fuel covering a specific distance than cars, motorcycles emit fewer of the pollutants that bear a one-to-one relationship to the amount of fuel used. At the same time, because most motorcycles do not have catalytic converters, the fuel is burned less completely and bikes therefore emit more of those pollutants. I read in one place that a motorcycle emits more of these pollutants in one mile than a Hummer emits in 100 miles. Wow. Even if that’s a huge exaggeration it’s still something to think about.

But there are other factors that have to be considered as well. Motorcycles use fewer resources to build (they’re smaller), they burn less fuel regardless of pollution levels, they do less damage to the roadway, and on and on. I know I’m not capable of balancing all these factors out to determine which vehicles are the greenest. And apparently no one else is, or at least no one who is capable of doing so has done so yet.

I checked with the American Motorcyclist Association to see if they had any authoritative information and they referred me to the Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC). It turned out the MIC didn’t have any definitive info either. Cam Arnold, their VP for communication, told me that “Obviously it’s a big issue, and there are a million variables. When you start digging into it it’s a huge issue.”

So anyway, this blog is where I often give the back story on the pieces I write for other venues. Usually I do that after the fact, but this time I’ll telling the back story ahead of the rest. I don’t know where this will all lead but I’ll let you know once it’s done.

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Biker Quote for Today

Sometimes it takes a whole tankful of fuel before you can think straight.

“Accidents caused by the infrastructure account for 14% of the total according to MAIDS.”

That quote in a press release caught my eye. I’m signed up to receive press releases from a lot of organizations and this latest one is from the ACEM, the European Motorcycle Industry. MAIDS is the Motorcycle Accidents In-Depth Study which analyzed more than 900 motorcycle and moped accidents during the period 1999-2003 in five sampling areas located in France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain and Italy.

The release went on to say “Poor conditions of many European roads and city streets and the fact that PTW’s specific needs are still often neglected in road engineering are the main reasons for this situation. Rider behaviour in addressing each situation plays therefore a major role in PTW safety.”

PTW, by the way, stands for “powered two wheelers.”

So how often do you think about accidents being caused by poorly designed or maintained roadways? That really doesn’t cross my mind at all, so to see that 14 percent of motorcycle accidents are blamed on the infrastructure is an eye-opener. And it demonstrates the value that can come out of the new motorcycle safety study here in the U.S. If recurring types of such defects can be identified then municipalities and other governmental entities can be more aware of the need to rectify these situations.

At the same time, I consider this argument a little specious. Each of us is responsible at all times for our own safety. If you crashed on a piece of road and someone else didn’t, you did something wrong, while they did the same thing right. We can’t count on all roads we ride being perfect so you’d better ride in control at all times and respond to reality. The life you save may be your own.

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Biker Quote for Today

When in doubt, slow down. No one has ever hit something too slow.

I went to the sources and can now give you the full scoop on the status of the Motorcycle Crash Causation Study. I had reported earlier that the Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF) was withholding the $2.8 million its members had committed because the reduced size of the study–due to lack of money–would not meet their requirement as adequate to the objectives.

What I found when I went looking for answers was that a huge part of the story was being totally overlooked. Yes, the MSF had decided to withhold its dollars, but everything I read suggested this was a final decision. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the words of MSF President Tim Buche, “The MSF has not shut the door.” He said that if new information suggests a statistically valid study can be conducted with fewer than 900 crashes studied, that information will be presented to the MSF board.

The reason this matters is because Dr. Samir Ahmed, the Oklahoma State University researcher heading the study, told me that at present, no one really knows how many crashes must be studied to develop statistically valid data. He and his colleagues are at this time doing a statistical analysis to come up with that number.

I asked Tim Buche whether, if the number arrived at is significantly below the 900 crashes threshold the MSF has demanded, would the MSF be open to reconsidering throwing their $2.8 million into the pot. And he said yes, and the decision the board would make would “depend on the quality of the work and the rationale.” He said the board would also weigh the opinions of other involved organizations, such as the National Transportation Safety Board, which has previously stated its conclusion that a minimum of 1,200 crashes should be studied in order to get useful data.

So that’s it in brief. The statistical analysis should be complete in about mid-December and then it will presumably take some time for the involved parties to study the new information and reach their conclusions. However, even if the MSF is still not satisfied that its dollars would be well spent, the situation will still be open-ended. Dr. Ahmed told me he is continuing to seek additional funding from other sources. Presumably if enough additional money can be raised, that amount might tip the scales such that the MSF’s money will be the capper.

In fact, I suspect that is exactly what the MSF intends. They’re using their substantial dollars as a carrot. This allows Dr. Ahmed to approach other funding sources with the idea that their contribution will be multiplied if it leads to release of the MSF funds. And even if that’s not the MSF strategy, it seems to that it’s exactly the way it will work.

Sure, at this moment, the economy sucks and money is tight, but this study will take several years. Presumably the economic picture will brighten in that time and money will become easier to come by. This is a story that is likely to play out over years, not days or weeks. We’ll just have to watch what unfolds.

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Biker Quote for Today

You know what I like about motorcycles? Ridin’ ‘em!

I’ve never been a dual-sport kind of guy, mostly because I haven’t had the opportunity. Well, I had the opportunity over the weekend.

I hooked up on Friday with Sue Slate, the National Program Chair for the Women’s Motorcyclist Foundation. Sue is in Keystone from now through the end of the International Women & Motorcycling Conference and I dropped by to talk with her about the Adventure for the Cures ride she has organized.

This ride will take a dozen experienced riders with very little, if any, experience on dirt on a tour of the Colorado mountains. The mix is expected to be about 80 percent dirt/gravel and 20 percent pavement. Each rider had to commit to raise at least $2,000 for breast and ovarian cancer research, as well as pay a sign-up fee of $400. The “Dirty Dozen” begin their ride on Aug. 10 and will end up back in Keystone for the start of the conference.

So I met up with Sue, and we talked about the ride and about her motivation for doing the fund-raising that she does, and mostly about her total passion for motorcycles. Sue got her first bike at age 19, used to ride observed trials, and lives and breathes motorcycles. As a public school teacher she used to ride to work every day, would bring motorcycle engines into class as a way of showing unmotivated students that even a motorcycle mechanic needs to be able to read, write, and do math.

Now retired from teaching, Sue works ceaselessly for the WMF and also finds time to be an on-call employee for Kawasaki, working at various motorcycle events around the country.

We covered it all and then she asked me what I was doing that afternoon. I had nothing planned, and was wondering that question myself, because I was in Keystone with my wife, who was there for a conference. “Do you want to go for a ride?” Sue asked.

Of course I did, but I hadn’t planned on doing so and I didn’t have any gear with me. No problem, Sue had extra gloves and a helmet that would fit me as well as a green-white-black Kawasaki jacket. And she had bikes. Lots of bikes. Sue had rolled in from New York the day before in an RV pulling her “toy hauler” with five dirt/dual-sport bikes of various sizes. She would ride her KLR 650. I rode her Versys.

We geared up and off we went. Sue had suggested riding Boreas Pass, which struck me as terrific because I had never gone far on that road, and only on cross-country skis. And I’ve almost never had the chance to ride dirt.

I was sure the road to Boreas Pass ran off CO 9 from a little north of Breckenridge toward the pass but I followed Sue on up to the top of Hoosier Pass, where we pulled off. “Oh yeah, Hoosier Pass, that’s the name,” she said as we dismounted. So no, I didn’t get to do Boreas Pass. Turns out the Versys I was on didn’t have the right tires for dirt anyway.

So we admired the view, chatted with another biker who pulled off there, and then headed back down the pass, up I-70 to Copper Mountain, and then rode to the top of Fremont Pass. Then we headed back to Keystone.

I didn’t get to ride dirt but I did get a chance to ride the Versys, which was a new one for me. It feels a lot different from the inline fours I’m accustomed to but I definitely liked the upright seating position. I was interested to find that the little half windshield did a very good job of blocking the wind blast at speed. I’ve never enjoyed riding without a fairing or windshield for that reason.

The seat was much too hard for me to even imagine taking off for a weeklong ride as we do each summer. Other than that, it was a nice bike. I’d really like to do more off-pavement riding because there is so much of it here in Colorado and I really feel like I’m missing a lot. I don’t have room for a third bike, though, so maybe it’s something to consider whenever one of my current two dies. But that’s not likely to happen soon. There must be another way to work this out.

Anyway, it was fun getting to ride the bike and Sue is a fun person to hang out with. And I’ll have a chance to get some dual-sport riding instruction before the Adventure for the Cures ride sets off. Of course I’ll be reporting back to you on that.

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Biker Quote for Today

You never see a motorcycle parked in front of a psychiatrist’s office.

I picked up a flyer yesterday as I was dropping my Kawi Concours off at Mountain Thunder Motorsports for new tires. It tells me there will be a vintage motorcycle swap meet on Sunday, July 26, 2009.

Vintage Indian motorcycles

That’s cool. It’s free to buyers (or lookers) and I’m guessing there will be some interesting bikes to check out. Who knows, someone may even be selling that elusive left side panel I lost from my 1980 CB750 Custom all those years ago.

The thing starts at 8 a.m. and the flyer doesn’t give an actual address, just directions on how to get there: Take I-70 to the Ward Road exit, go north to 48th Ave. (the north service road), and go east on that to Van Gordon. Presumably you’ll recognize it when you get there.

The event is being put on by Legends Motorcycles, which is a bit of a story in itself. I used to live just off Federal Boulevard, up north, and Legends was a couple blocks south of me. It was a convenient place for me to take my CB in for work, and they were very accommodating. I haven’t lived up that way for 13 years now, however.

Recently I was collecting information for an article I was writing and figured I’d call them with some questions. Turns out, they don’t work on bikes at all anymore, they are strictly an online parts company for older models. And apparently they’ve moved now. I guess you have to adapt or die. Glad they were able to adapt.

So, sounds like fun, but it just occurred to me I won’t be able to go. The OFMC is leaving two days before that on our summer week on the road. Dang. Bad timing. Oh well, that shouldn’t stop you.

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Biker Quote for Today

This one’s interesting because the crankshaft is the front axle, and the motor rotates around it. It’s interesting because if you stop, it stalls. So it says in the manual, when you come to a red light, you should “orbit,” and it shows someone riding around in circles.–Jay Leno on his 1920s Mergola

Judy and I went on the Randy Run on Sunday. After doing the Broken Wings series on Randy and Joan there’s no way I was going to miss it.

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile you know that going on poker runs and such is not something I’ve done much of. My first poker run turned out to be one without motorcycles, due to cold, snowy weather. This was only my second.

The weather was great but I still couldn’t really do it right. We had a conflict. We had tickets to yesterday’s Colorado Rockies game, which they won, for their 11th win in a row. We weren’t going to miss that.

So we gathered at the appointed time and place, greeted folks and chatted a bit, but then in order to get to the game we took off ahead of the group. We barely had time to get to the final destination and then head straight for the ballgame.

The route was nice, down some roads neither of us had ever been on, and we were taking our time and enjoying ourselves. Suddenly I saw in my mirror that a horde of bikes was racing up behind us. I pulled over and waved them around and the Randy Run group, with Randy and Joan in the lead, roared on by. I jumped in behind them and found that I needed to really crank it to keep up with them.

Arriving at the final stop, I heard the guy we parked next to laughing about how they should call it the “Randy Race,” not the “Randy Run.”

So for me, the jury is still out on doing poker runs and all. The truth was, we were having a very nice time riding the route, taking our time and enjoying the scenery. Once we joined up with the group I don’t even remember the roads we took or the countryside we went through. I was just riding to keep up.

I’m going to have to try this at least once more, and try to do the whole thing, without any competing commitments.

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Biker Quote for Today

If you ride for the rush don’t rush for the ride!

How hard is it to go on after losing a leg in a crash when all you did wrong was to take your eyes off the oncoming car for an instant to check the cross traffic? That was essentially the question I asked Randy and Joan Savely while speaking with them for the series of articles I just posted on Examiner.com.

What I seem to be doing with some regularity lately is working on a story for Examiner and then giving you the background here. That’s definitely the case now.

I met Randy when I joined ABATE earlier this year. I’m in District 10 and Randy is the district rep, which is to say, he runs the meetings. It didn’t take me long to notice that Randy was missing his left leg from the knee down.

One reason I like going on poker runs, going to ABATE meetings, and getting involved in other motorcycle-related activities is that every time I go somewhere I come home with new story ideas. That’s a good thing considering that I write a minimum of five articles every week, frequently more. I smelled a story in Randy.

First, let me make it clear that this is definitely their story, Randy and Joan’s, not just his. When I first proposed the story idea it was Joan who replied that the two of them would be happy to speak with me. Up until then I had been thinking solely of Randy, but it soon became very clear to me that this was indeed their story.

What I hadn’t counted on was how powerfully their story would hit me. I met with them two weeks ago today, expecting to spend less than an hour in the interview. Going on two hours I finally said we ought to stop because there was only so much that a reader will read.

The next day Judy and I left on vacation for a week and on the drive to Utah it was practically the only thing I could speak of. And this was after spending hours telling her about it the night before. The lead sentences quickly formed in my mind and they made it into the story unaltered, even though I never wrote the rest of it until 10 days later:

When everything finally came to a stop, Randy Savely sat up, thinking, “Well, I’m alive.”
A couple moments later he noticed his boot laying in the middle of the intersection.
“That boot don’t come off,” he thought. Then he turned to the driver who had hit him and asked for his belt to use as a tourniquet on his leg.

For two weeks now this story has haunted me (not in a bad way) and has been in my mind almost constantly. Not out of some fear that it could happen to me, that’s not it at all. Probably a lot of it is Randy. Can you imagine having your leg removed by a car and having the presence of mind to put a tourniquet on yourself?

A funny thing there: I asked Randy if he was wearing a helmet and whether he had any head injuries. No and no. But he told me that he really believes in chaps more than helmets because it was the fact that he was wearing chaps that enabled him to tend to his own needs. They covered up the fact that his foot was gone, whereas seeing a bloody stump may well have shaken him up enough to go into shock.

I could go on and on. As I said, this story has haunted me for two weeks. But I won’t. Go read it yourself. It’s not that I’m such a great writer, it’s that their story is an incredible story. I just can’t tell you how fortunate I feel to have had the opportunity to tell it.

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Biker Quote for Today

Live every day as though it was your last, but ride to make sure it’s not!