Passes & Canyons Blog

I am struck by the number of bikers being killed. If you search the web, as I do, for motorcycle-related news items, the reports of biker deaths are endless.

On most days there are several. Of course, today, when I planned to copy in the headlines here to make my point, there are none. Today is not a typical day.

I try not to take it out of proportion. If you did a similar search for automobile-related stories I’m sure you would be buried in accident reports. And being more conscious of these fatalities does not make me feel more at risk, as it might some people. If anything, I feel perhaps less at risk because my awareness keeps me vigilant.

Nevertheless, the daily barrage can’t help but make me think. Why are these people dying? What mistakes are they making? What mistakes are other motorists making? How can these deaths be prevented? What can I learn from this?

I’m not the only one asking these questions. A new motorcycle accident study began recently that promises to update and expand on the understanding derived from the Hurt study of 30 years ago.

In a recent issue of American Motorcyclist magazine there were a couple letters from readers arguing that another study was a waste because thanks to the Hurt study we already know the reasons for the crashes. The AMA responded saying “. . . the traffic environment has changed dramatically in the 30 years since the data were collected . . . a new study of U.S. motorcycle crashes can have far-reaching effects on how we teach motorcyclists and drivers, and shed new light on exactly how to reduce the number of crashes.”

But it will be several years before this new study yields its wisdom, so in the meantime we ought to at least make use of what we know already. And that includes these three points:

• Untrained riders have more accidents
• New, inexperienced riders have more accidents
• Riders who have been drinking have more accidents

Now, there’s only one remedy for being a new rider, and that’s to get out there and ride and gain experience. The other two are simple–get some training and don’t mix booze and bikes.

I’m no pollyanna, I know people will have a beer at a stop on the ride. I’ve done that myself. But don’t have four. We all need to remember that “Live to ride, ride to live” presupposes one crucial point: You’ve got to stay alive or you can’t do either.

Biker Quote for Today

Don’t argue with an 18-wheeler.

If you pay to have roadside assistance for any of your vehicles you need to know about what the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA) is now offering. Free roadside assistance for all your vehicles as a no-extra-charge part of your membership. And membership is only $39 per year.

Compare that to the American Automobile Association (AAA), where a basic membership is $73 per year and that won’t cover your bike. You can go with a premium membership that will cover your bike and that will cost you $177 per year.

How can AMA do this? You only get this benefit if you sign up with a credit card and agree to automatic renewals. They say they spend nearly $1 million on renewal notices each year and they’re looking to save a lot of money there. Plus, you know they have to be expecting a lot more renewals when it’s automatic. It’s just too easy when you get that notice to put it aside and forget about it, and then they’ve lost a member.

So even if you don’t ride it would make sense to join AMA just for the roadside assistance. Why pay more to AAA and get less?

Here’s the list of particulars of the program, straight from the AMA website.

* Coverage for bikes, cars, pickups, motorhomes and trailers registered to you, your spouse, and dependent children under the age of 24, living at home or away at college.
* Coverage in all 50 states, plus Puerto Rico and Canada.
* Towing up to 35 miles.
* All dispatch and hook-up fees.
* Flat tire assistance.
* Mechanical first aid: minor adjustments (excluding parts) to repair the vehicle.
* Emergency fuel delivery.
* Wheel and tire road hazard coverage for the member’s vehicles, including trailers.
* No exclusions for older motorcycles.
* Up to five dispatched service calls per year.
* Towing a disabled motorcycle or other vehicle to a shop or the member’s home.
* Emergency Trip Interruption Service: Up to $100 a day for three days ($300) in reimbursement for meals and lodging if a member’s car or motorcycle is disabled in an accident, and/or while the member’s vehicle is being repaired far from home.
* Toll-free assistance available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, from two national call centers.
* AMA Roadside Assistance pays first. No need to pay and wait for reimbursement.
* Free trip-routing service.
* Free limited legal services.
* Free online rewards mall.

Do I think this is a good deal? I learned about this on Sunday, after mailing my AMA renewal on Saturday. I went online and signed up for another year with a credit card and agreeing to automatic renewal. You bet I think it’s a good deal.

Biker Quote for Today

Classics are great, built to last, but when they don`t wanna run they’re a pain in the ass!

And we’re back once again with tales of the things bikers have hit or barely avoided. Again, I give credit to this thread at Adventure Riders. Let’s do it.

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A huge owl when i was a teenager. It swooped down in front of me my little bro was on back. I ducked and it hit him right in the head busted his faceshield and gave him two black eyes.

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Was stationed in the Panama Canal Zone in early ’70s. Came around a corner and a very large buzzard took flight, hit me in the chest and knocked me right off the back of my Yamaha RD350. Fortunately I was only going about 20mph or so. Took three other guys to help me get the bike out of the jungle and back on the road. BTW buzzards really stink!

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Early in the morning 280 freeway out of san jose. fast lane coming up on a construction truck with your normal shovel, rakes and wheel barrel in the back. the latter decided to come out of the bed. changed lanes cause i saw it tumbling. but in its tumbling the wheel hit i think at an angle and sent it tumbling across the lanes. was able to avoid it though. didn’t need any coffee that morning when i got to work. wide awake.

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Last summer, I took the bike down CA-1 to the SocalSVRiders.org Gathering of the Masses. I spent Friday riding down the coast, and started out early from my hotel on Saturday morning to head through Ventura and on down. I was in a pack of traffic when there was a sudden huge cloud of dust ahead. Cars started swerving – out of my lane – yep, I was headed right for it! No room to swerve to another lane – hit the brakes as much as I could before I got to the dust cloud. Blew through it, and saw the remains of… a SHOP VACUUM, rolling along on its wheels next to me at 40 mph like R2-friggin-D2 joined the Hell’s Angels.

I giggled all the way to San Clemente.

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Got hit with an Egg McMuffin last year.
Almost ran over a roadkill porcupine coming out of a dusty corner, that would’ve stung.
Lost count of how many snappers I’ve seen.

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A rabbit- it had idly hopped out on the road when it saw my headlight ( 1 am) – it seemed frozen by the light. I was doing a little over 100mph and I did try to get around it- it would have worked but the rabbit decided to jump into the light. Took out the light and I found out that no light is a bad idea at this speed ….But nothing major happened, was already quite slow but still vertical when I left the road. The RG500Gamma did not like it.

A soccer ball coming from a garden – bounced off my head. I scored a goal! (The ball went directly through the glass of the door of the house… Talk about some explaining to do. (The owner of the house wasn’t too pleased)
Nothing happened to the bike, I had a sore neck.

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Hiway 154 Ca. Northbound. Windy Twisty road going by Lake Cachuma on my 92 K75s. 2 am in da morning. Riding into a long left sweeper going 75 to 80 leaning offf the bike to the left as I am half way into the sweeper that is blind due to a hillside on the left I miss a human head! The head is at my helmet height and we see each other EYE to EYE! Miss by inches!

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Couple weeks back dropped the Strom as I crested an uphill blind tight left hander. As the road came back into view all I have is a face full of Bicycles. Ran wide off the corner into the gravel and the front tire folded – Bamm hit the deck. Now this is a road 25 miles from where I live.

One of the bicyclist comes running over and helps me pick up my bike and says: “Sorry If I caused you to crash.”

I looked at him and said: Jay?

He looks back says: Chuck?

We know each other… What are the odds?
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So be careful out there! Here are the other flying object posts:
Motorcycles and Flying Objects
More Flying Object Tales
Latest Tales of Flying Object Encounters
Even More Tales of Flying Objects

Biker Quote for Today

Catching a yellow jacket in your shirt @ 70 mph can double your vocabulary.

What’s the strangest thing you ever hit, or almost hit, while riding your bike? I love this thread on the Adventure Riders forum, and I’m here today with another batch of tales. Read and cringe.

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my garage door – when my ex partner put it down on me as i rode through it…

was really happy that day

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A buzzard
A Cow
A dead brown christmas tree (in August)

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I was hauling a friend on the back to get his bike and hit a concrete block in the middle of the road at about 70 mph. Shoulda seen it and all that but things happen fast. This was back in the sixties and we were not wearing helmets. The bike did a sorta flip thing and when we hit the road I landed on top of him. Here we were sliding down route 92 out of tampa at probably 65 or so and he keep yelling “get off get off.” I swear I tried my best to roll off of him but we end up getting into the median first and doing some ground gymnastics before coming to a stop.Cars stopped and we both got up and picked up the bike. Straightened the forks a little, got back on the bike and went to the hospital. He didn’t want to go but, man, he really had to. When they got done with him he looked like a mummy but other than a ton of pavement rash was okay. Bad day but he still kids me about wanting to ride him out to keep from sliding on the road myself.

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I had a close encounter with a hawk. I was riding down I-70 towards the lake of the Ozarks from St. Louis on my brand new R1100 and a hawk took flight from the median.

Damn thing hit my windshield dead center, broke through it, hit me square in the center if my helmet and knocked me onto the highway doing 70 mph. I was AGATT and glad of it. First thing that hit was my head on the pavement and I rolled I don’t know how many times before ending flat on my back and sliding off the highway.

Good thing too, an 18 wheeler ran over the bike shortly after I cleared it.

I was only bruised and sore for a month, nothing broke, nothing cut.

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Birds, yeah, birds.
Two bird stories:
1) Had a bird hit me in the chest one time and I just about dumped the bike getting off the road gasping for air. Not good.
2) Following a friend, Richard, and his wife, Miriam, up rt192 here in Pa. They were on their sidecar rig. I saw a big bird up ahead coming in from the right and darned if it didn’t hit them. Man, feathers instantly all over the place. Richard weaved back and forth a little and then pulled off the right side of the road. He jumped off the rig and ran to the sidecar. I pulled over thinking maybe his wife Miriam was hurt, got off and ran up to the rig. To my surprise Richard was laughing pretty hard and so was she. Then Miriam held up a tube of lipstick with feathers all over it. She was just fixing to put on some lipstick when the bird hit and like I said feathers were all over the place. No damage except to the bird….kinda goofy.

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A motorboat.
Night on I95 in VA. Came over a rise and there it was. Across both lanes.
How do you say SWERVE?
Missed it(!) somehow.
A couple hundred yards ahead is a car with an empty boat trailer in tow parked on the shoulder and two guys standing there apparently trying to figure out what to do next.

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A few nights ago I was riding around midtown in Manhattan. Bitterly cold, below freezing, Friday night, me with under 300 miles on my bike…perfect night for ride! Anyway, I made a left onto a side street from 5th avenue…I had the green light but noticed that there were about 3 cars in front of me, most of them honking, some yelling in unrecognizable accents…so I stood up to see what the hell was going on. Turns out some yahoo in an escalade thought it might be a good idea to stop in the middle of the street, with a green light, and just go ahead and start pissing. So he uh, zips up, and gets back in his blinged out land monster just before the light turned red. A few cars managed to get through, but I missed the light, and as I was waiting for the next one I look down and low and behold I am standing in some beefed out Jersey boy’s pee.

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I hit everything from bugs to dump trucks. I’m glad I was young when I T-boned an LTD and ran into the rear of a dumptruck.

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I was on a KLX 650 w/ my brother on a tiger in Dinosaur Nat’l Park, Yampa River bench road. an eagle hears us coming and lifts off but isn’t gaining enough elevation so it drops the HUGE rabbit that it was feasting on from about 15 feet into the air right (almost) into my windshield. A dead HUGE rabbit falling from the sky! My little bro laughed and laughed. I could see the look in the Golden Eagle’s eye!

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OK. Enough fun for now. You’ll find the other flying object posts here:
Motorcycles and Flying Objects
More Flying Object Tales
Latest Tales of Flying Object Encounters

Biker Quote for Today

Who cares? I’m riding…….

This is great. I got the answers I was looking for on the issue of tiered licensing, which was raised several times at the Meeting of the Minds awhile back.

The person providing the information is Don Creamer, who is the state Legislative Affairs Specialist for ABATE of Colorado. Rather than paraphrase Don, I’ll just present his info directly.

First Don gave a better synopsis than I have of what tiered licensing can look like. Here’s what he said:

Tiered licensing consists of restricting riders to certain size engines on their bikes based upon their age. As an example, a 16 year old may only be able to ride a bike with 50cc’s or less, and this would be noted in some way on their operator’s license. In Europe the “unlimited” class (i.e., any engine larger than 650 cc) is limited to those 24 or older. For that reason many riders wait until they are 24 before they consider getting a bike.

This type of licensing relies upon the flawed assumption that age equals maturity and ability to handle a larger/more powerful machine.

When I asked Don what the issues were, as far as ABATE is concerned, this was his reply:

Fairness is also the driving issue (sorry for the pun) when it comes to tiered licensing. When you look at the numbers of fatalities involving automobiles as opposed to motorcycles, the “need” for tiered licenses for only motorcycles is not supported. It is surprisingly rare for a young person to be killed on a bike that has a large engine – kids can’t afford them! However, kids are regularly killed (usually in bunches of two or more) in cars that have large displacements when compared to bikes. So, who do the lawmakers go after? The motorcyclists of course. We are an easy, visible target. Down here in the Pikes Peak region, the kids who can afford to buy the hot crotch rockets (Ninjas, etc.) are the military troops who want additional excitement after spending 15 months in Iraq or Afghanistan getting shot at. Those 19 and 20 year olds can afford it because of their regular paychecks, sign-on bonuses, etc. College and high school students can’t.

Look at student parking lots at schools, and you won’t find many motorcycles. Most of these kids drive cars to schools and to their jobs. They can’t afford a bike for nice weather and a car for when it snows or rains. Their parents would explode if the legislature required those kids to drive small cars which provide less protection (but can still go pretty fast.)

If the legislature wants to get serious about doing something for kids they will require the wearing of helmets by children when they are riding in a car! The traumatic brain injury per capita rate is 14 times higher there than from motorcycle accidents. Now THAT requirement would cause some yelling!

I hope that this helps.

So that’s the scoop. Thanks Don, I really appreciate your help here.

Biker Quote for Today

It’s simple—Just Ride!

I discussed the recent Meeting of the Minds conference that was held recently here in Denver by the Motorcycle Riders Foundation. At the time there were a couple issues I was unfamiliar with that I wanted to learn more about. I now have more to report.

First off, I was apparently a little off in my description of the issue of mandatory rider training. I said that MRF members “are concerned about a move to make such training mandatory, because they fear that the capacity does not exist to offer that training to that many people.” That was what I thought I had heard, and maybe to some extent that concern exists.

However, I spoke last week with Terry Howard, State Coordinator for ABATE of Colorado, and she gave me a totally different take on the topic. Speaking strictly for ABATE of Colorado, Terry said the only issue she has with mandatory training is that it apply to motorcyclists AND to motorists. That was really a “Doh!” moment for me. Of course. It would be totally discriminatory to require motorcyclists to have rider training while not requiring drivers to have driver training. We’re both operating motorized vehicles on the same roads and highways. And lord knows we all know that those folks in their cars need better training on avoiding those of us not enclosed in steel cages.

But it occurs to me as well, that as much as we talk about how many motorcycle accidents are caused not by the biker but by the rider, the same is actually true of car on car accidents. Probably in most two-car accidents, only one of the drivers is significantly at fault. The other is probably just as much a victim of the other driver’s carelessness as we are when it’s a car on bike accident. So absolutely, if our legislators want to impose mandatory training on bikers, we have got to ensure that ALL motor vehicle operators have the same requirement. Of course, then we really get into the issue of training capacity, as I mentioned originally.

The other unclear issue from MotM is something Terry was not as able to clear up. That was the idea of tiered licensing. She said she doesn’t really know the issue because Colorado doesn’t have it. The only thing she could tell me is that she thinks it is possible Colorado could move in that direction because of the upswing in popularity of scooters. Anyone on a scooter bigger than 50cc has to have motorcycle validation on their license, but below 50cc there is no requirement. Terry told me that some ABATE members have raised the issue because they see these low-maximum-speed scooters as hazards slowing down traffic on busy arterials. But there is no such proposal currently and ABATE is not pushing for it. So I guess for now tiered licensing will remain an issue for other states, not Colorado.

Biker Quote for Today

Bikes parked out front mean good chicken-fried steak inside.

I saw an item recently about how the legislature in Massachusetts was considering prohibiting anyone under the age of 14 from riding a dirt bike. This ban would apply to snowmobiles and ATVs as well. My research suggests that 10 is the age currently set by law there. Other states range from no legal restrictions to various other ages.

I have real problems with these laws. I was out at Thunder Valley Motocross Park last week and there were racers of all ages. Take a look at this photo of a dad working on his son’s bike in preparation for the race. This is family togetherness, parents and children out doing really fun things together and building strong family bonds. (Also notice the camera attached to the top of the kid’s helmet!)

I can’t tell you how much I wish this would have been my father. My dad was a good father but he was a bit removed and there wasn’t much we actually did together. I was nuts about motorcycles and saved money and planned to buy my first bike when I turned 15, which was the legal age at that time. The day arrived, I had the money, and my mother told me there was no way I would ever have a motorcycle while I was living in her house.

Contrast that to a dad who buys his son a bike and all the gear, takes him out to ride, and spends all that time with him. I loved my father and I miss him but I would have given anything for him to be more like the dad in this picture.

So the idea that the nanny legislators of any state think they have to protect children from their apparently idiot parents just does not set well with me at all. Sure kids on dirt bikes fall down. So do kids on bicycles. And skateboards. We all had our share of bumps and bruises while growing up. That’s what childhood is, a chance to learn what works and what doesn’t work so well. You do something stupid and it hurts and you think twice before doing it again. Protect your child from all injury and what happens to them when you’re no longer there to protect them?

Biker Quote for Today

It’s like this: Whenever there’s a car accident, people go, “Oh, it’s a car accident.” Whenever there’s a motorcycle accident, it’s outrage.–Jay Leno

What Mary Peters started, others seek to continue. I’ve given considerable coverage to the proposal by U.S. Sec. of Transportation Mary Peters that funds earmarked for motorcycle rider training be diverted to lobby for mandatory helmet laws.

Pretty much all major motorcycling organizations have opposed that, and I reported in a report from the Meeting of the Minds that Peters has backed off on that proposal. Motorcycle Riders Foundation (MRF) President Kirk “Hardtail” Willard cautioned me that despite her statements in that regard, he was still waiting to see her send the letters to that effect to the states.

Well, now the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA) reports in the latest issue of American Motorcyclist that a group called the Governors Highway Safety Association has now taken up the issue. American Motorcyclist says:

Christopher Murphy, chairman of the Governors Highway Safety Association, which represents state highway safety agencies, made the request in testimony to the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s Subcommittee on Highways and Transit this summer.

The opposition to this misuse of funds stems from the conviction that the key to lowering fatality rates is not in having safer crashes, it is in avoiding more of those crashes in the first place. As Doc Ski noted at the Meeting of the Minds, you will die if you get in a bad enough accident, regardless of whether you’re wearing a helmet.

So Mary Peters may have heeded the outcry and reversed her stance, but now that the genie has been let out of the bottle it may not be that easy to put it back in. This is why we need to support organizations like the AMA and the MRF.

Biker Quote for Today

Thin leather looks good in the bar, but it won’t save your butt from road rash if you go down.