Passes & Canyons Blog

I got the update on Sunday as to the revisions in the MOST legislation that are in the works.

MOST, as you may recall, is Colorado’s Motorcycle Operator Safety Training program and it has been under attack from various sides for a variety of reasons. Most recently the issue has been that the state administrators of the program have wanted to direct most of the money to motorcycle awareness programs and the like, away from the rider training programs for which MOST was created.

After attempts to bring about changes administratively, it was decided that the only way to deal with the situation was through legislation. According to Terry Howard, state coordinator for ABATE of Colorado, all of the training organizations who work with the MOST program, “including one of our enemies,” as well as the Colorado Confederation of Clubs, have agreed on some proposed wording for revision of the law. Now the folks who work to ensure that language is right before it gets enacted into law will take a crack at it and it is hoped that two legislators, a Democrat and a Republican, will introduce the bill in the two houses of the legislature.

Here are the changes, as proposed. I have put the new language in italics:

In the paragraph where it spells out the purpose of MOST, language would be added to say “that promotes motorcycle safety awareness including but not limited to, share the road and impaired riding programs and supports courses . . .”

Next it tweaks the mandates for how the money will be spent. The strike-out represents a change to the current language:

(e) The office shall not expend more than fifteen twenty percent of the total cost of the program for administrative costs, and not more than ten percent for promotion of motorcycle safety.

A new paragraph would be added that reads:

(f) Seventy percent of the total program funds shall be used for tuition subsidy for all MOST-approved courses, with the intent of keeping training accessible and affordable, thereby enabling more persons to enroll in and complete such safety training and to encourage persons to seek continuing training.

So now we’ll see where this effort goes. Terry says that, being bipartisan, there should be no reason it fails to pass, but who knows about anything these days.

Biker Quote for Today

We can’t crash an infinite amount of times, so you better learn from every one!

ABATE of Colorado hasn’t given up on the badly crippled Motorcycle Operator Safety Training (MOST) program yet, despite its being twisted out of shape by the bureaucrats charged with running it.

ABATE State Coordinator Terry Howard told me Sunday that “the program is a mess.” She said they have cut reimbursements for riders seeking training and the person charged with overseeing the program has been burdened with so much paperwork that they don’t have time for any quality assurance visits that are the key to ensuring that the program functions as intended.

In discussion with Sen. Lois Tochtrop, a close ally of ABATE, the idea of lobbying for removal of the $2 per year fee that each of us pay when we renew our plates was dropped because that would mean no program at all. Of course, I thought killing the program was about the point Terry had gotten to in her thinking but I guess she’s not ready to give up.

Instead, the plan now is to work with the legislature to try to mandate how the money is spent. According to Terry, the folks at the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) are saying the 15 percent of the dollars that are now allocated for administration are not enough to do what is needed. The bill that ABATE hopes to have introduced by Democrat Tochtrop in the Senate and by a Republican member in the House would mandate 20 percent of the money go for administration, just 10 percent for motorcycle awareness programs, and the other 70 percent for rider training cost deferral.

Of course, the whole point of the MOST program from the start was to make it less expensive for new riders to take training classes, thereby–hopefully–resulting in better riders and fewer motorcycle fatalities on Colorado roads. But the way things have gotten twisted, very little of the money now goes for that purpose, which is why the people who have always backed the program are so upset. CDOT wants to use almost all the money for motorcycle awareness programs. Never mind that similar programs for people in cars and trucks do not get paid for by extra fees on car and truck license renewals.

What’s going to happen? Who knows. Stay tuned. But Terry hasn’t given up hope.

“We’ll fix it one way or another,” she assured me.

Biker Quote for Today

The most dangerous times on a bike are the first month when you don’t know what you’re doing, and the fourth month when you think you do. — Bill

I was asked to put in a plug for this and I will because it seems like a good thing.

Allstate, an insurance company that would love to have your business, is holding a competition to select five motorcycle safety initiatives to receive $5,000 to help them become reality. They got nearly 300 submissions and have narrowed it down to what they consider the top 15. Now they want you and me to vote on the ones we want to see get the money.

Of course the immediate question is, what are the proposals? I went and looked.

One is called “Support Your Local Bike Mechanic.” I’m not sure where that name came from but what the guy is proposing is to have four events, one per month during prime riding season, to bring together riders and vendors, with a safety theme and presentation for each: rider safety and awareness; safety riding apparel; basic proper motorcycle maintenance; and safe group riding. The $5,000 would be split equally between the events to cover costs including music, food, etc.

You get the picture. Others include:

• A look twice, save a life billboard campaign by the parents of a young rider who died in a crash.
• Taking cars and bikes to schools and doing presentations on safety.
• Distribute small stickers with the image of a motorcyclist to paste on your car mirror to remind you to look for motorcycles.
• Another billboard campaign also including brochures and organizing safety and awareness runs.
• Conduct a test with blue roadside delineator stickers, rather than white. The guy says white looks too much like deer eyes in the dark.
• Public service announcements and rallies to bring the biker and non-biker communities together.
• Create, implement and administer a Teen and Young Adult Safe Riding Campaign.
• Produce and distribute materials for driver’s ed courses promoting motorcycle awareness.
• Pay for schwag to be handed out that reminds drivers to watch for motorcycles.
• Help to fund an extensive motorcycle safety effort.
• Create an instructional aid that identifies the sections of helmets most likely to sustain damage during a crash.
• Produce and distribute “Look twice, save a life” yard signs for bikers to put in their yards.
• Promote a game called “Count Motorcycles, The Motorcycle Awareness Game.”
• Create a website to serve as the hub for skill-building awareness and enjoyment in the motorcycling community.

There they are. You can go vote for your favorite at the link I provided above, or if that won’t get you there for some reason the indirect route is to go to Allstate’s Facebook page (http://facebook.com/allstatemotorcycle), click on the Allstate Good Ride Grant button toward the right, and then click “View Finalists” on the next screen. And, oh yeah, this voting ends at the end of October.

Biker Quote for Today

Go soothingly on the greasy mud, for therein lies the skid demon.

I didn’t coin the phrase but I’ve repeated it plenty of times: If you don’t ride in the rain you don’t ride. Recently this topic came up for discussion in an online group I belong to and I figured I’d share some of the more interesting remarks.

The person originating the discussion (David Bayer) is a rider trainer and one point he made was that, “Typically a bike will hold traction much better than most of us can ride it! Even in the rain!! You need to trust your tires. Try using your rear brake when it’s wet to test how much traction you have available. Keep in mind that your mentality can be your worst enemy. You should be relaxed and be as smooth as you can on the throttle and brakes. Trust is a learned behavior so if you acquire some experience with the available traction in the wet then your trust of your tires (and your bike) will improve.”

Here are some of the responses (edited for brevity):

Eric Levy: Unless it’s a crazy deluge, leaving an inch on the roadway, there’s really nothing to be concerned about. However, on the highways, puddles and standing water tend to make autos hydroplane, so I worry a bit about that.

K Cavaliere: I look for the tell tale “sheen” on asphalt, or beading, that would indicate some level of oiliness. In more rural areas, leaves can be slippery.

JT Pedersen: Personally, on any multi-day road trip, I figure if rain is anything <50% it was a good trip:).

Eboton “Reggie” Jackson: Rain or shine I’m on mine. I just throw on my wet gear and keep going!

Johnathan Wilkinson: I grew up in Wales where it rains far more often than the sun shines. Ice, snow and slush are good fun to learn on, too. However, growing up in such a bike-unfriendly climate… Nowadays I’m scared of sunshine, dry roads and grippy tyres!!! Holy sh*t! The bike actually does what I tell it to in the sunshine….. I had always thought riding was supposed to be like riding a horse that needed to be ‘encouraged’ to go, stop, make a left, etc.

Axe DeKruif: personally was never wise enough to pull over in rain in over 20 years of riding, and generally yell unkind comments at those hiding under overpasses when i drive by soaked. i know, i know. i don’t mind straight line riding in the rain. i rode most of a 90 mile stretch at high speeds on the ape in a downpour years ago, no worries. however, i hate having to lean or corner in it. long as i can keep the bike upright, i’m ok.

Rainer Schade: High powered sports bikes with more track focused rubber were a real problem – saw a riding buddy lose it at speed just changing lanes when he crossed the white line.

Dave Larson: When the cats and dogs start coming down, this old man pulls over.
______________________________

Yeah, well–from the weather forecast it doesn’t look like rain is going to be a major concern for us here in Colorado in the next few days. We’re supposed to get snow. But then we’ll have Indian summer and it should be some great riding. And seeing as how I’m out of work right now with the federal government shut-down I’m figuring to get in quite a bit of riding time. Could be a lot worse.

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Biker Quote for Today

Motorcycle cornering – Survival reactions and proper body positioning

I was in my car on my way to work Tuesday when a guy on a sportbike blasted past me and a bunch of other folks as well. We were on west 6th Avenue, which is a freeway, so we weren’t going slowly, but he wanted to go faster. With the fairly thick morning commute traffic this meant that he was doing some serious weaving in and around a lot of cars and trucks.

I watched him go and wondered if he was just having a good time or if he was in a hurry.

Back when I was first getting into riding my friend John gave me what I have always considered a terrific bit of advice. He told me that weaving in and out like that was a dangerous thing to do and the best thing I could do in traffic was to stay put so that the guy in back of me and the guy in front of me both knew I was there. Of course, that still leaves the people on either side who are only there momentarily and may decide–without looking–that they want your lane. That’s a whole other issue.

Still, zipping in and out like that can be fun, and you have the speed and the agility to do it on a sportbike. So I hoped the guy was having fun.

It wasn’t long and he was out of sight up ahead and I forgot about him. Then I got off at the Union/Simms exit and there he was, waiting for the light. The light turned and we all turned south onto Union and once again he wove in and around the other traffic. Four blocks later, at 2nd Avenue, we got stopped by a red light and I was right behind him. Then he turned off at 1st.

The point here, in my mind, was that for all his zipping and weaving and efforts to get ahead, he hadn’t accomplished a thing that I hadn’t also accomplished by taking it easy and just staying put in one lane. And to the extent that it is a risk to ride like that, he had put himself a lot more at risk in the process. Again, I hoped he was at least partially doing it because it was fun, because it sure didn’t get him where he was going any faster.

What I did notice when I pulled up behind him was that the bike was new, with a dealer tag still on it. That tends to support the idea that he was doing it because it was fun, but it also suggests he may be an inexperienced rider. That’s not a good combination. We’ll wish him luck and hope he lives long enough to look back and shake his head about the silly things he did a long time ago.

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Biker Quote for Today

New bike beats having medical issues hands down!

You can tell I’m either feeling lazy or uninspired–or maybe just in a humorous mood–when I fall back on this ADV thread: “What is the strangest thing you hit/almost hit?” But I am, so I must be one of those three.

So here we go once again into the wacky world of the stuff you don’t want to encounter.

• Late one night I was heading north on the 405 in Lake Forest, riding in the car pool lane. I have no idea what happened on the south side, but a car wheel came bouncing over the freeway divider and bounced not more than 10 feet in front of me. I was probably about half a mile up the road before I was able to clearly comprehend what had happened.
• Ridin’ along with a group of friends and we are bored just covering miles. We started playing “Catch” with an imaginary ball. I “Toss” the Ball to my Bud Mario and he stands up on the Pegs and “Catches” it. We were going past a golf course and he had in Reality CAUGHT a Golf BALL!
• Big wet wad of chewing tobacco right on my left shoulder with spray over my jacket and helmet. I do not like following pickups to this day. That was 40 years ago. It may have been different if it was my brand.
• Kitchen Table, between Bismark and Fargo. Car in front of me swerved and there it was….
• Riding along under the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto a couple of decades back in December after a snow, and the snowplow on the elevated section above me pushed a real nice windrow of snow off the edge of the expressway onto my lane. Got stopped, but it took awhile and I was horizontal. No injury, minor scuffing.
• Hit in chest by an exploding boat trailer tire as it passed me going the opposite direction. Ouch!
• During a group ride in the Fingerlakes region of NY a friend on a VTR ran over a squirrel, it stuck to his tire and was flung up in the air over the guy behind him only to land flat and soggy in my lap.
• Of course the scariest was the time I was following a pickup with a shell camper on it – the shell flew off and I swear it went over my head. On the other hand I believe my helmet was buried in the gas tank as I tried to hide behind the bikini fairing on the GPz550 so I didn’t actually see it go over my head – wonder how much protection that would have been?
• Meeting a smallish farm tractor, noticed it wobble and the rear wheel came off and rolled across in front of me.
• I rode through Portland just to take a look around and find a place to update my website. I was downtown in traffic, going about 30 mph lost in a strange city when a gust of wind picked up a newspaper page from the curb and wrapped it around my helmet. My thought was “oh no deadly cartoon moment!”. Coming to a stop blind in moving traffic was interesting as was the looks on the faces of people on sidewalk.

Yow! I’ll be happy to get through life without those sorts of experiences. But here’s one I did experience.

This was back in about January and I was in my car, not on a bike, but I was getting ready to go south on I-25 off of 6th Avenue. In the lane to my left just ahead of me was a pick-up with a load of logs these guys had probably spent the day cutting and trimming the limbs off. Then the tailgate gave way and almost all the logs poured out on the highway, right to my left. The guy right behind these guys was in a high-clearance four-wheel-drive and he had no choice but to go right over several of them. He was lucky he was able to.

The guys pulled over and secured the few remaining logs and took off in a hurry. I’m sure they wanted to get gone quick in case someone got hurt and they were held responsible.

So yeah, we don’t really need reminders, but do be careful out there. You never know what kind of craziness is just around the corner.

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Biker Quote for Today

“Me and gravity, we are really, really good friends.” – Streetbike Tommy

The following post is sponsored by CentralContracts.com.

I rode my Concours to work on Wednesday, and figuring that on the day before the holiday the traffic was likely to be light, I went up I-25 to 6th Avenue (the northern route).

Normally when I ride I don’t like taking that route because of all the stop and go you can run into on the highway, and that’s just murder on your clutch wrist. I prefer to go across on Hampden, which turns into freeway past Santa Fe, and then north on Kipling and then some winding through the neighborhoods to my destination (the southern route). It’s actually a mile or so shorter on that route, too, but it’s a little slower than the northern route.

Of course the other reason I avoid I-25 most of the time is that it is simply inevitable that someone in that jammed traffic will decide to pull into my lane, never bothering to turn their head to check and see if perhaps I’m there. I know better than to hang in someone’s blind spot normally, but when you’re on a packed superhighway there’s just no way to avoid it again and again the whole time.

So it was no surprise when this woman started coming my way. I laid on the horn–fortunately the Connie has a loud one–and I had to laugh seeing her swing sharply back into her own lane. Hopefully feeling quite chastised.

That never seems to happen when I’m in my car, but on the bike it is inevitable. Bikes just get hidden too easily in the blind spot. And people trust their mirrors too much.

For the rest of the ride, though, and for the ride home there were no other incidents. As a motorcyclist you have to pay extremely careful attention all the time in heavy traffic like that and you learn to read people and what they’re probably going to do. At the very least, you hypothesize that they’re going to do something and while they don’t always do it, when they do you’re ready.

And one thing I noticed this day was that there were several drivers who I firmly believed were intending to come my way but just before they made their move they saw me. They did what every driver ought to do. They were good drivers. You can’t avoid noticing the bad ones–they’re flagrantly putting your life in danger. But it’s easy not to notice the good ones. On this day I noticed the good ones.

In other words, they’re not all idiots out there. It just seems like it some times.

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Biker Quote for Today

Life is a highway . . .

Colorado’s Motorcycle Operator Safety Training (MOST) program faced extinction last year but survived, on the condition that an advisory committee oversee its operations.

So here’s a question: Who is going to serve on that committee?

The answer to that question might be spelled out in three letters: Y-O-U.

Here’s the deal. The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) put out a notice today that it is seeking parties “interested in participating in the creation of the aforementioned board.”

What will the committee’s responsibilities be?

The Motorcycle Operator Safety Advisory Board’s legislative charge is to meet at least quarterly to:
• Recommend training methods to increase safety reduce motorcycle crashes and injuries;
• Recommend training methods to increase program effectiveness;
• Recommend improvements to the program and training;
• Make recommendations on expenditures of fund moneys.

OK, so who are they looking for?

Two year term positions:
• Two members who represent most vendors;
• One member who represents retail motorcycle dealers;
• One member who represents third-party testers;
• One member who represents instructor training specialists.

One year term positions:
• One member who represents the motorcycle riding community;
• One member who represents motorcycle training providers not affiliated with the program;
• One member who represents law enforcement agencies;
• One member who represents motorcycle insurance providers.

OK. If you’re in the industry there are a lot of options. If you’re just an everyday Joe it seems to come down to just the person who “represents the motorcycle riding community.”

So what do you do if you’re interested?

If you represent one of entities identified as Advisory Board Members and you are interested in serving on the Advisory Board to meet the legislative charge, please send the following information to Mr. Glenn Davis at
glenn.davis@state.co.us. This information must be received by June 15, 2013 in order to be considered.
• Name
• Membership Position you desire to fill
• Phone number(s)
• Contact Address
• Email address(s)
• Qualifications for the membership position in a Word document

It is encouraged that this information be forwarded to other qualified membership candidates.

The information will be collected for review by the Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Transportation for Advisory Board appointment. The first meeting of the Advisory Board will have the first meeting will be scheduled in August of 2013. If you have questions regarding the process please
contact Glenn Davis at 303-757-9462.

So that’s the deal. If you ever felt you ought to have more say in how the state deals with motorcyclists you’ve never had a better chance than now. I’ll be interested to see who ends up on this committee.

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Biker Quote for Today

Throw off those comfortable chains that the U.S. consumer society has burdened you with, go and ride solo into places far outside your comfort zone, and learn interesting things about yourself.