Archive for the ‘Biker Issues’ Category

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Support Your Biker-Friendly Establishments

Thursday, March 27th, 2014
motorcycle parking only

This is the kind of sign you want to see.

My Mom is turning 90 soon and we’re planning to take her to the beach down in South Carolina. Arrangements have all been made but I was very interested to see in the reservation confirmation for the hotel we’re staying at that they’re a little picky about their clientele.

In the description of the unit we’re renting there are some no-nos: non smoking / two car parking / no motorcycles / RVs / boats / etc.

OK, I understand non smoking. I can see that RVs might take up too much space in the slots they have marked out, although they might specifically designate some larger spots for those. And I understand boats because then you’d probably end up parking your car in another space. Besides, that’s what marinas are for.

But no motorcycles? Really, why? If Judy and I showed up on the Concours you wouldn’t let us park? It’s not like we would be taking up a lot of space. I assume it’s the noise of some bikes and it’s just easier to issue a blanket prohibition rather than say no loud bikes. Jerks.

It’s too late to change plans; the money has been paid. So just in case you’re heading to Myrtle Beach anytime soon, let me just advise you that you may want to avoid the Beach Club at Windy Hill–they’re the jerks.

Which breathes new life into my efforts on this website to provide a listing of biker-friendly motels and hotels in Colorado. I had been thinking recently that it maybe wasn’t all that much of a service because it seems like everyone accepts bikers happily these days. Well, I guess not everybody. It’s good to get a wake-up call now and then.

If you’re going to be traveling in Colorado and want to be sure you’re welcome, the list is a good place to start. Every one of those places either contacted me to ask to be listed as biker-friendly or else I have stayed there or someone else has stayed there and found them to be welcoming to bikers. They’re not all great; I’ve panned a couple, but they were biker-friendly nonetheless. I put places on the list for no charge, so if you have some you think should be added please send me the information. And I’ll also point out that I have two advertisers who actually pay money to get their promotions in front of motorcyclists, so you know they’re biker-friendly: the Hotchkiss Inn, in Hotchkiss, and the Rabbit Ears Motel, in Steamboat Springs.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll have a few words with the management of this place in Myrtle Beach when I get there. If it’s an interesting discussion I’ll tell you about it afterward.

Biker Quote for Today

If it ain’t dirty you ain’t riding enough.

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Posted in Biker Issues | 1 Comment »

Motorcycle Bills Dying on Both Sides of Us

Thursday, February 13th, 2014
motorcyclists riding without helmets

Can you tell these folks aren't in Nebraska?

If you live in Colorado there’s a good chance you occasionally ride in Utah and Nebraska, east and west of us. This current legislative session they’ve both had some potentially good bills introduced that have to do with motorcycles, but it doesn’t look like anything will make it into law.

In Utah they have a bill that would allow lane-splitting. Lane-splitting is when bikes go down the road between cars when the cars are stopped or slowed way down in traffic jams. California is the only U.S. state that currently allows this, and it works fine there. More than that, the rest of the world does it and it works fine all over the world. Go to Paris or Rome or just about any place of your choosing and see how well it works. Why do we have to be the dummies who think there’s something wrong with this?

Well, Utah is going to stay a dummy. According to a story in the Deseret News, “Several members of the House Transportation Committee said they had safety concerns about HB281, and they voted 7-1 to table the measure until more study is done.” Can you say “dead”? Why this euphemism about “tabled”? Well the guy who introduced it–a Republican I will note–said he’ll reintroduce it next session. Till then . . .

Over in Nebraska they’ve been kicking around the idea of repealing their helmet law. I don’t care how stupid you might think anyone is to ride without a helmet, I simply believe it should be the rider’s choice. I always wear a helmet these days (not true in my younger days) and so this law would have no effect on me, but I just don’t think it’s the government’s place to forcing us to be “safe.” Why don’t they outlaw using cell phones when you’re driving? They’d save more lives that way, if that was truly what they cared about. Of course they’d save even more lives if they just outlawed motor vehicles. You know what they say: If it saves even just one life . . . !

So will you be able to ride lidless in Nebraska soon? Not likely. As in, fat chance.

They do apparently have the votes to make it happen, if it could just come to a vote. But guess what? The opponents are filibustering it. Who cares what the majority wants, if we can keep it from coming to a vote the minority rules! I couldn’t have been more pleased when the U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid changed the filibuster rules there. The Republicans screamed bloody murder but you better believe they’ll be overjoyed for what Harry has done the next time they’re in the majority.

But hey, it’s just like baseball: There’s always next year.

Biker Quote for Today

“The motorcycle, being poorly designed for both flight and marine operation, sustained significant external and internal damage,” police noted.

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Posted in Biker Issues, Helmet Laws, Motorcycle Safety | 2 Comments »

New MOST Legislation Taking Shape

Monday, November 25th, 2013
Rider Training Course

Revised legislation may help keep costs lower for beginning riders who want training.

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!

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Posted in ABATE, Biker Issues, Motorcycle Safety | 1 Comment »

Odds And Ends

Thursday, November 21st, 2013
V-Strom in the snow

Not a day to go riding.

It’s snowing out so probably no one other than Dom Chang is going to be out on a motorcycle around the Denver area in the next few days. Check his blog and you’ll see he rode to work today.

For the rest of us, it’s a bit of down time and that makes it harder to come up with things to write about here. So it’s time for a few odds and ends that I’ve been hanging onto but that don’t have enough to them to make a full post.

Plug Pulled on Sugar Pine Ranch Rally
I never made it down there and now it’s too late–the Sugar Pine Ranch Rally is no more. This rally was down in the Mancos area, west of Durango, and every year I thought it might be a fun one to go to, but I never did. Maybe that’s the same for a lot of people, and that’s why they pulled the plug.

I had some email communication awhile back with a guy who is a volunteer working the rally and I’m sure he’s pretty disappointed. He told me that, “We have put in hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars to build a 1/2 mile of road and clear all the deadwood on this two hundred acre working cattle ranch.. it is all worth the effort.” I see from the email that that was way back in July of 2007. Well, at least they had a decent run. Here’s a full story in the Durango Herald.

Enterprise Will Now Rent Motorcycles
Do you remember when nobody rented motorcycles? A long, long time ago I was living with another guy, a roommate, and we decided we’d really like to do some motorcycle riding. So clueless us, we went to a nearby dealership figuring we would just rent a bike for a few months. They laughed us out of the store.

Times have changed, haven’t they? Now you’ve got the big guys like Eagle Rider and nearly every Harley dealership, plus all sorts of small-time guys like, here in Colorado, Colorado Mountain Moto, Sports Rent Colorado, and Western Dual Sport Motorcycle Adventures, and those are just three that advertise on this website.

Well, I guess it had to happen: Enterprise Rent-A-Car is now renting motorcycles. As the email I received with the announcement says, “This launch marks the first entry by a major car rental company into two-wheel rentals in the U.S.”

Initially, it’s just in Las Vegas where this is going on, and they’re only renting Harleys. It will be very interesting to see if the program rolls out across the country. Eagle Rider, you may have some competition.

Trying Out VikingCycle Warrior Motorcycle Jacket
I’ll have more about this later but just a mention here. I get contacted a lot by online motorcycle gear sellers wanting to send me stuff to try out and write about. Of course I’m happy to try out new gear and pass the word if I like it–or not. Although there have been a few times when the products I received were such crap that I decided not to waste my time or yours writing about how bad they were.

Well, most recently I’ve been in touch with some folks at MotorcycleHouse.com and they sent me a leather jacket. The brand and model (I guess) is VikingCycle Warrior. Having, as I said, received some real crap at times, I didn’t know what to expect. I have to tell you, when I opened the box and pulled this jacket out I was pretty impressed. At the very least, my first impression is that this is one heck of a nice jacket. As I say, I’ll tell you about it in detail once I have a chance to really try it out.
_________________________________

OK. Now we just need for this snow to stop and for the weather to warm up a bit. I want to go riding this weekend. I have a new jacket to try out, and I received my cord to use my electric vest on the V-Strom. I have some motorcycling to do, for pete’s sake!

Biker Quote for Today

Crap! I think I got non motion sickness.

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Posted in Biker Issues, Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

More on ScooTours Denver

Thursday, June 13th, 2013

I was talking before about ScooTours Denver and David Howard, who just set up this business and is getting it rolling. (Yes, that pun was intended.)

ScooTours David Howard

David Howard and the two Vectrix VX-2s we rode on Sunday.

As I said before, making a living renting scooters can be a hard thing to do, and it is not David’s regular job. That other one pays the bills but this one is more fun. He talked about how often someone will work a job for years that they don’t really like, and then retire and take up an interest, which then becomes a business where they make as much or more than they did on that other job all those years, and this one is so much more fun. David decided not to wait that long, but to cut right to it now. Who knows if he’ll be successful; right now business is “inadequate.” But he’s only been at it a very brief time, and meanwhile he does have business.

In addition to the simple matter of renting scooters, it is David’s intention to offer guided scooter tours of Denver, primarily historical tours. One that he has in mind is “Cold Facts on Colfax” tour, starting out west around Kipling and working east perhaps to Monaco. The guide would pull the group over periodically to talk about the history of the area they were in.

I asked if the plan was to have everyone connected by an intercom system but David said no, he had thought about that, but it just didn’t seem a good idea to offer that sort of distraction to a lot of people who were not experienced riders. Those folks need to be paying attention to where they’re going and to traffic around them, not turning their heads to look at some building as they ride past it. I had to agree. Strongly.

Another tour idea would be an arts district tour. He has people lined up who would be good guides for these tours. It’s just a matter of getting the business running so that he could be confident that there would be people actually signing up for the tours. At what point do you turn the switch, he’s wondering.

Actually, here’s an interesting thing. I just got an email from David while writing this and he tells me, “It is actually my wife’s business, truth be told. She has been a substitute teacher up through last week and is just turning her attention to this beginning tomorrow. I have helped get it up and running.”

Well, whoever’s running the show, I wish them well. We’ve just been recently on vacation where renting scooters to tourists is big business, so why shouldn’t it be a viable business in Denver. Lord knows we get plenty of tourists coming through here. And the rate is a heck of a lot cheaper than renting a motorcycle. Motorcycle rental can easily set you back more than $200 a day. At ScooTours the rate is $65 for the first two hours, $85 for the first three, or a daily maximum of $95. And I know in the places we were recently I would far rather have had a scooter than a motorcycle.

I’m rooting for you guys.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Ride report: Spending time on a Vectrix VX-2

Biker Quote for Today

I never fail…sometimes I succeed in finding out what doesn’t work.

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A Look At The MSF ‘Naturalistic’ Motorcycle Study

Thursday, February 21st, 2013
clip from a video about the MSF 'naturalistic' motorcycle study

A clip from a video about the MSF 'naturalistic' motorcycle study.

Time passes and things slip our minds but out of view from the rest of us things do get done. In this case I’m speaking of the two different motorcycle safety studies currently under way around the U.S. One is the new version of the Hurt study that is being conducted by Oklahoma State University. I haven’t heard anything at all about that one since the guy running it, Samir Ahmed, announced that he was leaving the project, and said he had doubts that it could achieve its intent.

The other is the “naturalistic” study being conducted by the Motorcycle Safety Foundation, and it is moving along on schedule.

I got an email recently from Mike Ginocchi, a guy I ran into who was interested in the OSU study. Mike is a retired accident investigator and he felt he was a natural choice to be brought on the team but the OSU guys apparently had other ideas. So he petitioned the MSF to be one of the 100 riders they would equip with tracking devices so as to observe their riding behavior, particularly when it comes to getting into or avoiding crashes. The MSF was interested, so every time he rides now he is being recorded.

A local TV station thought this was pretty interesting so they did a piece on him and the study. You can go watch it here and see just what it’s all about. I agree with the TV staion–it’s pretty interesting.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Lojack announces top five motorcycle recoveries for 2012

Biker Quote for Today

Everyone I know predicted my death when I bought my bike. I say it’s done just the opposite. Even if it does kill me, it wouldn’t take too many days like today to make it worth it.

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Posted in Biker Issues, Motorcycle Safety | No Comments »

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