Are US Highways Motorcycle Friendly?

The US Federal Highway Administration's Motorcycle Advisory Council (FHWA-MAC) is running a Road Conditions Survey targeted at motorcycles. The purpose of the survey is to help state and federal highway administrators better understand and plan for the needs of motorcycle riders. They are conducting the survey now (during riding season) because riders are most aware of current conditions and can more accurately respond to the survey.

Please take 10 minutes to take the survey before the deadline of August 1st 2008.

You'll be asked to rate a standard set of attributes about highways and rural roads in the primary area where you ride. There's a comment section where you can identify your favorite road hazard, like slipperly toll booth surfaces, or the bad angle of approach to that cattle grating on your Sunday ride in the country, or the pot holes on right side of the off ramp that you have to weave through.

www.surveymonkey.com/MACmembersHighwaySurvey

[Thanks to Dave Gill who provided this information from a recent Motorcycle Riders Foundation (MRF) newsletter.]

Cat kibble - a sure lure

Today was a perfect day to ride to Alice's Restaurant, the Mecca for south bay area riders at the intersection of Highway 35 and Highway 84. On any Sunday you'll find riders in their various flocks, the cruisers parked in the lot next to the restaurant, the sport bikes, enduros and vintage rides on the other side of the street. Some of us are here to have a bite to eat at Alice's, some of us are just sniffing each other's bikes, some of us are just here to watch others sniff our bikes while we stand at a discreet distance trying not to preen or puff when someone says something nice about our bike.

The bike that caught my eye looked to be built on a vintage era boxer engine, joined to a sidecar fashioned in the same vintage style. Everything about the bike and sidecar, the frame, the suspension, the body were beautifully worked. The builder was a gentleman who brushed off numerous compliments on his extraordinary machining skills saying he just just a retired fellow with too much time on his hands. I would have liked to hear the engine, heck, I would have liked a ride in the sidecar, but I was too shy to ask.

Besides looking at bikes, I was counting the number of women riding their own - my guestimate would be between 4%-8% in the sport-enduro-vintage parking area. According a recent survey by J.D. Power and Associates, in 2008, 12 out of every 100 motorcycles are sold to women - that’s a 20 percent increase since 2003. On the highway I am seeing more women on sport bikes but my general impression is that there's a greater increase in women on cruiser-style bikes. Perhaps the lower seat height is a factor; another factor could be that the cruisers often ride as packs, and the safety in numbers offered by these packs is a draw.

I expect that the price of gasoline will increase growth in the ranks of scooter, motorcycle and trike riders - which is great. I do worry about the predictable increase in accidents that will come from this population.

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Saturday afternoon is my shopping day. I was browsing cook books when a young woman asked if that was my bike out front, the one with the yoga mat on the handlebars. If there had been springs in her shoes she would have been pogo-ing without the stick as she chatted about her upcoming MSF class. Okay, I'm shameless. Of course I'm aware that I stand out - I want women to see another woman using a motorcycle for mundane stuff like grocery shopping so they when they see a female butt on a bike they can immediately relate to what I'm doing. In the parking lot I felt a pair of eyes watching me coax two bags of cat food kibble into the bike's pannier. The watcher's fascination increased as I operated the lever that expands the pannier. I heard a slight gasp (which I ignored) when it was clear that the bags of kibble fit into the expanded space perfectly. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to not grin.

Now if I could just figure out a way to get my cats to come with me when I go shopping on the bike, that would really be a story. Here's somebody risking their karma - my cats would not put up with this.

Annette Birkmann and Señor Dakar

Permit me to introduce a riding team, 34 year old Danish rider,
Annette Vibeke Birkmann and her companion, Señor Dakar. About 2 years ago Annette decided that she had waited long enough to learn to ride a motorcycle. She quit her job as an attorney in Denmark and moved to Buenos Aires in Argentina where she found work in a motorcycle repair shop. She did not speak a word of Spanish before she arrived; she credits working in the repair shop with providing her an extraordinary cursing vocabulary. While in Buenos Aires she bought her first motorcycle - a 6 year old BMW F650GS Dakar. Eight months later she began a one year solo adventure ride through Latin America (without a GPS).

She had plans to spend Thanksgiving with friends in Los Angeles, her final destination. She was heading north from Mexico City when her journey came to a screeching, bruising halt. After four months of rehabilitation and rest, she's now at the western end of her new quest: a ride from Mexico City to New York City (via Los Angeles).

She spoke at CalMoto recently, entertaining us all with her dry sense of humor. Rather than head for Africa, Asia, or India next, she is looking forward to riding in Europe and earning a living as a motivational speaker for a while. She's going to rake it in... her presentation, "Adventure riding in Latin America, The Top 10 List of How Not to Do It", is a set self-deprecating rules for how not to succeed, all the while urging the audience to take that first seemingly insignificant step, then set goals, handle risks, overcome failures, celebrate success and achieving fulfillment.

When I arrived for her talk the dealership showroom was already full, about 60 or so riders. I found a seat where you can always find an empty chair - in the first row. As soon as she said, "I found passion in my life", the room exploded into a shared toothy ear-to-ear grin.

You can't but help but admire her determination and her faith in human kindness. You may also wonder at her luck - she was so unprepared in terms of riding skills and gear. She had only summer riding gear and was not prepared for rain. She gently mocked herself for being genuinely surprised when she encountered snow at altitudes. Still, she did it, she left her well-paying prestigious comfortable desk job and put herself on the adventurer's path. I hope to find that path too someday.

You can look at her slide show here.

June Musings

Unlike previous summers, no big trips are planned this year, "big" as in riding the Trans-Canada from Victoria, British Columbia to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island (or PEI) - about 5,000 miles one way. We'll be doing some dirt riding and maintenance work on the house. I'd rather be on a long ride.

On the May ride up to Seattle, While trying to swap the clear visor for the dark one, the plastic bits that enable the removal of the visor disintegrated into my hands. And, it wasn't fitting as snugly as I like it to fit. Time for a new for a new helmet. I thought I was saving money by buying my last Arai on sale. I should have checked the chin strap when I bought it, I would have discovered that it really only had a couple of good years left, not the three I was expecting.
Dainese now has a Bluetooth helmet for the US market, but my hopes deflated when I pulled on the helmet - not the right helmet for my head. Same issue with the Arai XD, an off-road style helmet that looks good with enduro-style bikes. After trying on every size XS helmet in the store, I settled on a Shoei RF-1000 because it fits my head. My new royal blue crown is awaiting the reflective stickers to dress it up a bit, then I'll post pictures of it. Yeah, yeah, the clincher was that this model came in a blue color that matches the bike. If I were really safety conscious, I'd buy one in safety orange, but I'd have to keep it covered when it wasn't on my head or else the color would make me sick.

The new helmet went to Berkeley today to see the one-woman monologue "No Child written and performed by Nilaja Sun. I have three words for this monologue: "go see it". Even if you don't have an interest the down turn in the quality of education in American public grade schools and what is happening to our young people as a result, you will be impressed by how she plays 17 different characters, male and female, young and old. The title of the monologue is reference to the debacle created by the misguided "no child left behind" education program that people thought was going to provide funding for high-poverty student populations but has become more about punishment than improvement. Nilaja Sun was a teaching artist in New York's Malcolm X High School in the Bronx. Berkeley has their own Malcolm X Elementary School. California ranks in the bottom tenth in the country in per pupil spending. With the budget cuts, creating writing, the arts, music, physical education are all tossed out the window and replaced with prescription drugs to keep the kids medicated so that they can sit still for the standardized tests, but are we testing whether the kids can think and reason or just pass a test?

Education has always been a big issue for me. Maybe the royal blue helmet, unlike the white golf balls I've been wearing, absorbs the right wavelength of energy to allow me to stand on a soapbox for a moment.

On the ride home from Berkeley I saw a guy going in the opposite direction on on KTM standing on his pegs. I couldn't tell if he been riding that way for a while, or had just stood up to stretch, but now I'm convinced that standing up your pegs creates a very intimidating image. Even if Nilaja Sun didn't create the monologue as a call at arms I hope people who see her work take it that way, and stand up for change. We don't need another shopping mall; we do need more teacher training, more support for teachers in the critical first two years, and smaller class sizes. [flame off]

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The following is moto fluff, but heck is it summer. Create your own "Visited States" map, or Create your own "Visited Countries" map. If you some free time on your hands, check out these Google Hacks from a Google engineer, Douwe Osinga, originally from the Netherlands.



I'm still trying to figure out how to publish my states and countries visited maps here. The width of the images distorts the blog page layout. See the June 2008 entry of my original site: http://www.balsamfir.com/motorcycle.htm.

The Countries version of this mapping tool doesn't work as well as the one for the US states. Countries that are quite large, like China, India, Canada, and the United States have only a visited/not visited setting. Even though I've only been to the western region of Canada, then entire country from the Pacific to the Atlantic changes color, giving a misleading impression that I've completed the Trans Canada ride. When you look for yourself, you'll see that the choices don't go down to a regional level of granularity. Also, I spent six months on Taiwan, Republic of China. This map would not make the government of the People's Republic of China happy because they consider Taiwan to be a renegade province, not a sovereign entity. Still, the "hack" is fun to play with.

Finally, a video of a silly race between a moped and a TransAlp motorcycle.

For postings from December 2001 to 2008, go to http://www.balsamfir.com/motorcycle.htm.