A year ago I decided I was interested in tracking how much I ride my motorcycles. So, on New Year’s Day, I jotted down the mileage on both bikes and my car as well. Now it’s January 1, 2007, and time to see what the year was like. Here’s the scoop.

I started 2006 with 76,820 miles on my Honda CB750 Custom. This is the first bike I ever owned and I’ve been riding it for about 17 years. I put 2,410 miles on it in 2006, ending at 79,230.

I started 2006 with 18,515 miles on my 1999 Kawasaki Concours and at the end of the year that was at 19,011. That’s barely 496 miles for the year. It would have been more — and the Honda less — except that I took the Honda on our trip to the Sturgis rally this year. Still, I’m surprised that’s all I rode that bike.

For the sake of comparison, my 1988 Honda Civic car started the year at 196,093 miles. At the end of the year it had 206,173 miles, for a total of 10,080 miles in the year.

Altogether, I drove or rode 12,986 miles in the year 2006. Of that, 2,906 miles, or 22%, was on my bikes. So although I didn’t put nearly as many miles on my bikes as a lot of people do, or as I would have liked to do, the bike/car percentage is still pretty good. What it really comes down to is that I don’t cover that much ground on or in anything. I know there are plenty of people out there who put a minimum of 20,000 miles on their cars each year.

This year will probably be different. I now have a job that is quite a bit further from home so that overall figure is likely to go up by at least 50%. What I really want to do is make sure that the bikes get their fair share of those extra miles. Therefore, my new year’s resolution, if you want to call it that, is to ride my bikes to work more often. They say people who establish goals accomplish more than people who don’t, so I’m looking to put at least 2,000 miles on the CB and another 2,500 mile on the Concours. And I hope to limit my car mileage to no more than 12,000. I’ll check back in in a year.

The days are truly gone when anyone riding a motorcycle was assumed to be a bad dude who you wanted to avoid. We all know this already anyway, and Hollister and the bad old days are very much in the past. Still, it is amusing where bikers show up these days.

For example, in the Business section of the Sunday Denver Post, in an article reprinted from Barron’s magazine, there was an article about how Duke Energy is spinning off a natural gas outfit. What does that have to do with motorcycles? Beats the heck out of me, but here’s what they said:

The split-up is the brainchild of Duke’s chairman, Paul Anderson, 61, a no-nonsense motorcycle enthusiast.

That’s it. Nothing else about bikes or riding in the article. What really makes this amusing is that long ago, when I was a newspaper reporter and editor, it was a given that you did not give particular information about a person unless it was central to the story. The prime example was that you did not identify someone by race unless race was part of the story. You would not say “John Jones, a black man, was honored for his contribution to the community.” You would, of course, say, “The alleged rapist was identified as a white man about 5 foot 9 and 190 pounds with a scar on his left cheek.”

So what does Paul Anderson’s passion for motorcycles have to do with the rest of this story? As I said, beats the heck out of me. But hey! We’re everywhere.