Passes & Canyons Blog

It's soon going to be time to head for the hills for some color.

Judy was gone all last week which meant her car was not in the garage. That allowed me to park my V-Strom right next to my car, rather than perpendicular to both our cars at the head of the garage. That in turn made it so much easier to get the bike out and ride it.

Guess what: I rode it a lot more than I otherwise would have.

Normally, to get it out I need to move one of the cars out and then to get it back in I have to muscle it backward into position, with all the typical jockeying that that entails, although I’ve gotten pretty good at it so there’s usually not a lot of jockeying. The point is that while I might opt to hop on the bike to make a quick run to the grocery store, it’s just not worth it when getting it out and in is such a hassle. When there was no hassle I did use it for those sorts of quick trips. It was so nice!

Getting either of my other bikes out is equally as involved. They are stored next to the garage in a workshop/storage area. I have to go in there from the garage and open the door, then roll a bike out, then go back in and pull the door shut and lock it, then exit through the garage. And if I want to ride the bike that is in front, that means I have to roll the back bike out, roll the front bike out, then roll the back bike back in. Again, it’s just not worth it for a quick run to the store.

This is one reason I’ve thought for a long time that I’d like to have a scooter. I figure with a scooter I could figure out some place and manner for parking it that would make it a lot more quickly and easily accessible, so I could take it on these quick runs.

Now, though, I see that the real answer is just to get Judy to agree to park her car on the driveway all the time. And really not even all the time; she could park in the garage when it’s snowy because I don’t ride when there is snow on the streets. I’m sure she’ll be happy to do that for me, don’t you think?

Right, me neither. Oh well, it was nice for a few days.

And Other Doings
Having this website and this blog mean that I get a lot of email from a lot of different people about a lot of different things. One thing I’m always getting is proposals from people who want a link from my site to theirs. Some of them really make me scratch my head. A recent one was from a guy with a site where they say they will buy your motorcycle from you. “We buy any bike,” they say. Now, that could be something of real interest to many of you except for one thing: these guys are in the UK. It’s true, of course, that some of my readers are just about anywhere you can name. The traffic to the site comes from all over the world. But the majority of traffic is from the U.S. Doesn’t matter. I get a lot of these sorts of requests from the UK. Go figure.

Biker Quote for Today

Riding motorcycles is like taking drugs . . . bikes should come with a warning label that reads “Warning: Riding a motorcycle is addictive. It will change your life forever.”

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.