#safety

Anyone who has had the pleasure of filtering their way between lines of slower traffic can attest to the beauty of lane-splitting. Last year, we reported on California Assembly Bill 51, a bill attempting to codify lane-splitting into state law as opposed to keeping it in current unwritten enactment. Well, yesterday, another attempt at drawing attention to the idea of legal lane-splitting nationwide was started on the White House web site. While California motorcyclists have been lucky enough to have filtering between the lanes as one of their urban riding tools for years, we’d like to share it with the rest of the country since it’s impossible to export our year-round riding season. Think of this as a green initiative that can help the environment by freeing motorcycles from wasteful hours of idling away our planet’s precious bodily fluids while waiting for the cars in front of them to move. Think how much happier riders will be after their commute. Songs will spontaneously erupt in the workplace instead of mass shootings. The divorce rate will drop. That barking dog will be given the love it craves from its owner instead of a shout and a kick. Presidential elections will revolve around actual policy discussions instead of merely tapping into voter rage. All because of the breath of fresh air provided by the implementation of national lane-splitting.

“Motorcycle fatalities are not only our No. 1 source of organs, they are also the highest-quality source of organs, because donors are usually young, healthy people with no other traumatic injuries to the body, except to the head… [a mandatory motorcycle helmet law] could put us out of business – or at least the business of organ transplants.”

Riders who have cut their teeth in the urban jungle don’t understand the fear that can grip a traveling rider when the fuel light comes on while deep in the American Southwest. I’ve seen stretches of road with no fuel for over 100 miles, and on the  Dalton Highway in Alaska, I undertook a section of road that I knew was too much for either my  Harley-Davidson Electra Glide Ultra or the hardy  Kawasaki Ninja 600 my companion was riding on the final gravel stretch to  Prudhoe Bay. In most instances, a little common sense can go a long way towards making sure you aren’t stranded by simply filling your tank when it gets less than half-full while riding remote, unfamiliar roads.

We know that lots of riders give lip service to wearing All-The-Gear-All-The-Time (ATGATT), but we thought that it was time to check to see how the numbers really shake out. Because MOrons are smarter than your average bear, we expect them to score highly on the gear usage list. Still, we know that, while everyone on earth has a reason for existing, some people are destined to become a bad example. Don’t be one of those guys! OK?

Outer space carries no sound. If George Lucas hadn’t bent interstellar rules and added sound effects, Star Wars would cease to be a sci-fi masterpiece. Imagine a silently exploding Death Star with a subtitled “Bang!,” Han Solo mouthing “pwew, pwew, pwew” for the Millennium Falcon’s laser guns, and TIE Fighters screaming by without making whatever that super cool sound is they make.

It is the Spanish MotoGP round at Jerez in 2011 that comes to mind right now. Valentino Rossi, aboard the nearly unrideable Ducati, dove to the inside of Casey Stoner and his Honda, hard on the brakes into the first turn. What would have been a spectacular pass resulted in Rossi tucking the front, lowsiding and taking the Australian out in the process.

The wait is almost over. Introduced in 2011 to European consumers, it took another 4.5 years for the D|air technology to reach our shores. Early adopters can pre-order D|air Racing suits now with an expected arrival date sometime in September.

We all know we should perform a pre-ride check, but let’s be honest, we tend to skip them from time to time (or more frequently), don’t we? We’re only human, and that silly little check before we hit the road isn’t that important, is it? It’s not like we’re flying an airliner thousands of feet above the ground with hundreds of people on board. While we may think that only our lives are at stake when we ride, what happens to us can affect others both directly and indirectly.

How much is enough? When does a rational person look at what is available in motorcycle showrooms and say, “Okay, that’s enough for me.” Or even more paternalistically, that’s enough for you, too. What is too much? Is there too much?

May is National Motorcycle Awareness Month, and while we should do whatever we can to make sure other motorists don’t run us over, ultimately it’s our responsibility as motorcyclists to make sure we do everything we can to stay safe. With that, we present 10 safety tips that we often overlook or take for granted.

In honor of National Motorcycle Safety Awareness Month, I’d like to take this opportunity to say thank you to all the automobile drivers who don’t try to kill us every day. “Clueless cagers” is a common theme wherever motorcycle people congregate and with good reason, but I think the vast majority of car drivers (of which I am one) mean us no harm and actually wish us well. If they do plow into us, most of the time it’s just an accident with mitigating circumstances. It really is human nature to become less than hyper-vigilant when you’re safe, warm, comfortable and entertained inside a nicely upholstered soundproof box the government mandates must be able to bang into things at speed without injuring the occupants. I wonder how much the government spends crashing perfectly good new vehicles every year? Maybe if cars were less up-armored, people would pay more attention?

The month of National Motorcycle Safety Awareness got underway last Friday, and according to a quick internet search, we’re off to an abjectly horrible start to the riding season. After typing “motorcycle crash May 2015” into Google, my browser looked like this:

In one of my favorite lines from the movie The Big Chill, Jeff Goldblum’s character uttered what summed up something I’ve always suspected about myself – and all other humans:

It’s a cute, fuzzy lil’ harbinger of the end of Life as we Know it: the Google self-driving car. Seriously. Right now you may think of it as a curiosity, a gimmick, but it could alter the physical, economic and cultural landscape of America in a way we haven’t seen since … well … the invention of the car in the first place. But what will that do to poor little us on our motorcycles?

We have met the enemy and he is us – Pogo