Geezer with a Grudge: Splitting in the News

Mar 15, 2015

Splitting in the News

Here are a couple of decent articles about filtering and lane-splitting in the news, including one from the Wall Street Journal (thanks Paul):

Wall Street Journal WSJ.COM Motorcycle Lane-Splitting Could Move Beyond California

Bikewriter.com Lane-splitting in the mainstream? Here's a two-step program to get those laws passed

If you are in favor of splitting/filtering, prepare to be disappointed by the comments in the WSJ article. There are some really timid motorcyclists out there. The video on the WSJ article is absolutely worth watching. The article pitted a splitting rider vs. a non-splitting rider on a 1 hour (caged) commute while discussing the advantages and disagreements about splitting.

Being the conservative bastion that we’ve become, Minnesota is not part of the conversation. We should be, though.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: You have to be suicidal to split lanes. Filtering is less crazy.; 3/22/15, 9:22 PM
T.W. Day said...: I disagree. Splitting lanes in slow moving freeway traffic is the best reason for riding a motorcycle. Filtering is just simple logic.; 4/4/15, 10:09 AM

The Geezer Story

I stumbled upon this column name (Geezer with a Grudge) almost 20 years ago, in 1999. The first Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly editor I worked with, in late 1999, complained that the magazine was getting no mail and the editors wanted to know if any readers were still out there. I fired off a sarcastic note, as a joke, intended to provide a little humor and some feedback. He published it as an article and later called me to say he'd received more mail on that letter than he'd received in the past year! I followed that with an offer to write a monthly column attempting to piss off a particular section of the magazine's readership to see if that tactic would generate some mail.

It did, probably more regularly than the magazine wanted at times, and I wrote a monthly column for MMM until the magazine died in 2018.

I plan to post an occasional old Geezer article into the blog, followed by short comments about the current status of my perspective on our activity/sport/vehicle of choice.