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We were coming down from the Black Hills and had been in Nebraska for about an hour when we stopped at a table along the road. There was another guy there, in a car, and we struck up a conversation with him. Along the way he mentioned, “This is a bucket state, by the way.”<\/p>\n
Oh really? We hadn’t known that and we had been riding without helmets on. Oops. We had done the same thing a year or two earlier when we rode into Nevada for the first time. Somehow we got all the way to Las Vegas before we learned they required helmets.<\/p>\n
Of course that was a long time ago, before the Internet, and we could be excused our ignorance. Back then it wasn’t easy to know what different state laws are. And if a state does require helmets, why the heck don’t they put up a sign at the border that says so?<\/p>\n
There’s no excuse anymore for being ignorant of the laws in a state you’ll be riding to. The Internet does exist now, and one excellent place to check up on all states is a handy page<\/a> on the American Motorcyclist Association’s website. You go there and there’s a map of the U.S. Click on the state you want to know about and it takes you to a listing of what they require and forbid.<\/p>\n The very first item on the list, presumably because this is the most common question, is the helmet requirements, if any. Other information includes the following:<\/p>\n I’ll bet you didn’t even know that some states have requirements or prohibitions in some of these areas. Heck, you might even learn something about your own state laws.<\/p>\n Any by the way, the page also has separate legal requirements for off-road bikes. All in all it’s a lot of good information.<\/p>\n\n