The Things We Get Used To

I am a lurker with a bunch of local motorcycle guys who pass on rumors and facts about motorcycles and motorcycling. The latest batch of bqack-and-forth was about Hardly’s LiveWire sales; or lack of sales (569 motorcycles last year). Yesterday’s conversation was punctuated with a quote, “At highway speeds, no real motorcycle gets more than 100 miles of range.”

I figured that the WebBikeWorld.com scribbler must have been talking about EV “real motorcycles?” Motorcycle repeaters just seem to become dumber and less literate every decade. I know at least one Zero owner who would disagree with that claim. He commutes 140 miles from the mountain desert to San Clemency several times a week on a 2020 Zero somethingorother. (Don’t know the model.) That rider was pretty jazzed about fuel savings, and bragged about it often, until his electric bills went through the ceiling in the last year. You’d think everyone in southern California would be powering their homes/vehicles with solar, but I guess not.

At least from my fixed-income and old fart vantage point, the price of EV vehicles is still an overwhelming obstacle for most everyone but the idle rich. But that is kind of true for motorcycles over 650cc in general. For example, the 80hp LiveWire S2 at $15k is their “cheap” EV bike, while $30k for the LiveWire One was priced for Jay Leno and his buddies.

As a reference bike that I might consider (if I were a decade younger), at about $12k Suzuki’s 2023 V-Strom 800DE is packed with features, 85hp, a 280 mile range, a Quickshifter, ABS (switchable), three riding performance modes, four traction-control settings, and low RPM assist. Comparing that to the LiveWire S2 still seems like a no-brainer. In every important category, except carbon emissions, the ICE bike wins.

But that is not the point of this rant. To me, $12,000 seems like a LOT of money for a motorcycle. $30,000 is an insane amount of money to spend on a freakin’ toy. And, for 99.99…% of motorcyclists, a motorcycle it’s used so rarely it barely qualifies as a toy.

I’m still stuck where any motorcycle costing more than $3k is “too expensive.” Since 1982, all 10 of my street bikes have cost less than $3,000 (most were under $2k) and, while they were all “used,” most of the were barely broken in after 2-10 years with their original owners. Granted, my current motorcycle is a 2012 250cc “beginner’s bike” that had 700 of climate-controlled-garage-stored miles on the odometer after 10 years with the original owner and the TU250X wasn’t expensive new ($4,100). Before my street bike period, all of my dirt bikes cost less than $1100, with a brand new Suzuki RL250 being the most expensive of the bunch (at $1100 in 1974) and the rest costing less than $500, including a new 1974 Rickman ISDT125 and my wife’s new 1975 Yamaha MX100. Those were my first and only new motorcycles and I’d been riding for a decade before that.

My most expensive car, so far, as been $9000 (a used 1988 Nissan Pathfinder in 1994 and our current 2012 Honda CRV). Most of my cars have been under-$2500 beaters and lots of them were under-$500 60’s and 70’s VW Beatles. The most I’ve ever paid for a freakin’ house was $104k in 1997 and our current home cost $88k in 2015 (a repo bank sale by the dumbest bank in recent US history, Wells Fargo). Any vehicle that costs a significant percentage of a house is nuts. But a motorcycle? Not even if I had Keanu Reeve’s money or Leno’s.

The End of . . . ?

With this sudden and unexpected (by the subscribers I know) announcement, Motorcycle Consumer News produced it's last issue in January of 2020. MCN has been around in its reader-sponsored format since 1982, So, 38 years of hard-hitting, unbiased reporting on an industry that has done pretty much everything possible to create a simpering, press-release duplicating news media; from print to YouTube drivel. 

I have to believe the industry and rider participation is shriveling toward becoming ancient history. In the US, we're down to two actual motorcycling magazines, Cycle World and Motorcyclist, and one those two has made a hard bet on eBikes over motorcycles with Cycle Volta. The residue of motorcycle "journalism" is a bunch of biker rags that are more about biker broad pictures and chrome crap than motorcycles and motorcycling.

MCN's Facebook page simply says “MCN is no more. Thanks for riding with us for the last 50 years! Visit MCNews.com for more info. Keep the shiny side up.“ All you will find at MCNews.com is the statement at the top of this blog entry. Not only is the magazine dead, but the MCN's  publication history is gone. That's pretty brutal. 

The Crap Just Keeps Comin'

This damn argument just gets dumber. The only motorcycle magazine I read from cover-to-cover (sometimes) is Motorcycle Consumer News. The editor, Dave Searle, usually pisses me off and his pro-hooligan attitude is not much different than the rest of the motorcycle press, which defeats the best purposes of MCN. This month's issue started well and turned to crap by the letters to the editor. Bad timing on someone's part. My subscription is about to run out and I still have 2-3 back issues I haven't been able to stomach. Now, I might just read the damn thing at the library on the rare occasion I need to know what Mark Barnes or Ken Condon have to say. I was so pissed off, I sent this letter to MCN's editor:
_____________________________________________
From:     T.W. Day [mailto:twday60@comcast.net]
Sent:    Monday, February 18, 2013 9:32 PM
To:    'editor@mcnews.com'
Subject:    Misuse of Statistics

I was pleased to see Dave's "Open Road" this month. It's unusual for a motorcycle magazine to advocate any sort of safety gear and, when they do, it's usually as unscientific and "freedom" biased as crap from the NRA. It didn't take long for that pleasure to turn sour, though. In a grossly incompetent and statistically misleading response to a readers letter on the NTSB's universal helmet law recommendations, the editor wrote, "the number of motorcycle fatalities in the US has been on a sharp decline over the past few years despite the fact that the number of miles ridden has increased. The decline in fatalities is not because more states have instituted mandatory helmet laws--they haven't."

The argument that motorcycle miles ridden has increased in recent years is doubtful. Until recently, the garage candy crowd has been purged from the road as their rides were repossessed along with their eviction notices. From 2008 to 2011, the only good news about motorcycling has been that fewer of us are on the road and fewer of us are dying because of that. Last year, there was a slight upsurge in motorcycle sales and the early and mild spring put riders back on the road and deaths jumped accordingly. If you look at the states' statistics (http://www.ghsa.org/html/publications/pdf/spotlights/spotlight_motorcycles11.3.pdfhttp://www.ghsa.org/html/publications/pdf/spotlights/spotlight_motorcycles11.3.pdf), you'll see a consistent rise in motorcycle deaths from 1997 to 2008 as states repealed helmet laws and riders took "advantage" of that and splattered themselves all over the nation's roadways.

The future of motorcycling is at risk due to autonomous vehicle development and our out-of-line mortality and morbidity contribution to highway safety and our barely-noticeable contribution to useful traffic. If we insist on pretending that we're getting safer and riding more when all evidence contradicts that, we're shooting ourselves in the foot and will deserve our place along with buggy whips, go carts, and horses in the history of discarded transportation options. The AMA and the motorcycle press are absolutely useless when it comes to promoting practical motorcycling. You should do better than that.

Thomas Day
Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly Magazine
http://http://mnmotorcycle.com/
http://geezerwithagrudge.blogspot.com/
thomas@motorbyte.com

A Technological Dead End?

All Rights Reserved © 2008 (revised 2012) Thomas W. Day

I have a theory, born from personal experience and lightweight observation of history.  My theory is that as a technology approaches terminal, it gets really good.  Then it dies.  When a new technology is just finding its legs, the technology being replaced makes a wonderful collection of giant leaps; which will fail to stave off obsolescence, even for a moment.  But examining those last moments of declining technological health can be really enlightening.  

I'm not saying this as someone who has been on the leading edge of a technology shift.  In fact, as a mid-tech transient I've been trailing edge for most of my life.  In the mid-1980's, professional analog audio recording gear began to be displaced by digital recording systems.  The last generation of analog recorders were a huge improvement over anything previous technology.  But it was too late: the convenience, cost advantage, signal-to-noise improvement, and trendy-ness of digital wiped out those last moments of glory and hardly anyone even noticed that most of the problems usually associated with recording on analog tape had been minimized.  Today, professional analog recording systems are practically relics and even the simplest personal computer has more editing and playback horsepower than a multi-million-dollar studio from twenty years ago. In my lifetime, I've seen (or am seeing) electronic tubes, analog computers, magnetic data storage, photographic film, visual artist's tools, payphones, cathode ray tubes, analog television, vinyl records and turntables, carburetors, and dual-shock motorcycle suspensions quickly peak and begin the rapid transition from regular use to museums' shelves [2] . 

I was first turned on to this realization when I was a very young man.  When my kids were toddlers, one of our favorite weekend trips was to Minden, Nebraska to visit the Harold Warp Pioneer Village Museum.  The place is stuffed with all kinds of historic tools and toys, from Pony Express relics to railroad history to farm equipment to early internal combustion vehicles. The thing that tripped my trigger was getting a close look at horse-drawn carriages, especially the high-end, luxury models from the turn of the last century.  Just as the first internal combustion vehicles were making horse-drawn transportation obsolete, the last carriages were becoming efficient, comfortable, and sophisticated.  I studied suspension systems that we wouldn't see on cars until fifty years later.  Some of these vehicles had heating systems, evaporation interior cooling, clever convertible tops, interior and exterior lighting, safety equipment, and finish work that made the next half-century of car design look primitive.  Unfortunately, they also had horses providing the horsepower. 

The other sign of impending obsolescence is nostalgia.  This country is currently being decorated with monuments to the Golden Days of Oil.  To anyone with a sense of history, that ought to be a big, red, flashing sign that something is on the downhill slide.  Folks are paying idiotic prices for Gulf, Esso, Kerr-McGee, and Standard Oil memorabilia.  Oil Century Museums are popping up everywhere from California to Tex-ahoma to Florida to New Jersey.  Ohio is home to the "Society for Commercial Archaeology."  And, of course, we have wads of motorcycle museums littering the country side.  On my last long Midwestern bike trip, I counted ads for half-dozen Harley/Indian museums before they began to fade into the fast food, antique store, and hotel signs. The last couple of decades witnessed a giant blast of the past as Boomers tried to revive their youth with muscle cars and 1950s-styled big twins.  That fad won't last much longer, because Boomers are soon going to be looking for their next hipster thing in prosthetic hips (like mine) and electric wheelchairs. 

Watching what's going on in our culture makes me suspect that we're about to see our beloved internal combustion engine technology vanish.  I don't know if you've noticed, but internal combustion engines have become trailing-edge technology, almost overnight.  There are alternative transportation systems on our highways and all over the rest of the world.  At the same time the technology designed into internal combustion-powered cars and, especially, motorcycles has become absolutely incredible.  The performance, reliability, and even the sound of modern motorcycles has been tweaked to the nth degree.  The only thing that's been stubbornly ignored is energy efficiency and that's probably the only characteristic that really matters in the twenty-first century.

In end-or-year issue, the relatively conservative Motorcycle Consumer News published their "Performance Index" for the current generation of motorcycles. In a summary, they listed the following most important performance categories: ten best 1/4 mile times, ten best rear-wheel HP, ten best power-to-weight rations, ten best top speeds, ten best rear-wheel torque, and ten best 60-0 stops. All but one of those measurements are, essentially, the same sort of 1950's information; power.

Most likely, the only modern statistic included in the data provided would be "average fuel mileage." By this standard, the 2006 Kawasaki Ninja 650R was the winner at 65.3mpg (the 2007 version was 10mpg less fuel efficient), followed by the Ninja 500 (64mpg), and Honda's Rebel 250 (62.6mpg). The Victory 8-Ball at 29.8mpg was the fuel guzzling loser. My daughter's 1991 Geo got better mileage than more than half of the motorcycles MCN rated. From occasional long ride experiences with folks on liter sportbikes, my own calculations estimate that MCN was optimistic about the efficiency of most of the bikes they rated. I wouldn't be surprised at less than 20mpg performance from many of those street legal race bikes. (The new Honda NC700X has upped the game a bit, but I think it's too little, too late.)

While those performance-based qualities are being fine-tuned, the world's oil consumption has rapidly passed world oil production.  Sometime in the last five years, oil demand whipped around oil production capacity and the world's economies will either shift away from burning petroleum or suffer the consequences.  Some experts claim that 2005 was the whipping point; the last year of "cheap oil" and that we're on the downhill slide where production will get further from meeting demand every year.[1]  In 1999, the uber-conservative, alternative-technology-spurning oilman Dick Cheney was one of those "experts" warning that the age of oil is about done.  Cheney told other oil execs, back then, that the reason oil companies weren't building new refining plants was that investment would be putting good money after bad.  We have more than enough oil processing equipment, we don't have much oil left to process.  Some folks estimate that in as little as two or three years, it may cost $100 to fill a compact car's tank.  Filling a bike's tank will be pretty close to half that and it's going to be more expensive every year afterwards.

Let's get real.  A 250hp, liter bike that burns 15-20 mpg is going to be a pretty worthless piece of history when gas costs four to ten times what it costs today.  Everything we use, do, and consume, will be incredibly more expensive when oil bumps against the predicted 2025 $400 per barrel.  If we humans are lucky and put some planning and a lot of resources into the next few years, we might be converting to hydrogen cell vehicles or some other petroleum-less fuel about the time the old technology becomes impractical.  I like to imagine that motorcycles, with their inherent energy efficiency and other advantages will be part of that change.  I'm sure horse lovers hoped horses would find a place in the modern transportation scheme, back in 1906.  Who knows, maybe horses will make a comeback?

Personally, I'm feeling a little nostalgic today, while the majority of Americans appear to be clueless about the future of our energy-dependent systems.  As an example, the dim-bulbs in St. Paul are widening freeways, planning communities that are further than ever from necessary services and employment, and designing government buildings that depend on energy systems that will be disappearing about the time those facilities are put into service.  My sentiments, inspired by that irresponsible bureaucratic inattention to reality, is considerably less upbeat.  Their behavior is more evidence that we always get the government we deserve, just like every other country in the world. 

While there appears to be a fair amount of thought going into replacing the power plant under the hoods of our cars, for a while it looked like that wouldn't be happening for two-wheeled vehicles.  Zero Motorcycles and Brammo have changed all that.  Zero Motorcycle's new Z-Force^tm power pack is pushing electric motorcycle technology fast into the new Green Age. With a 100 mile range, an 88mph top speed, and 3,000 charge cycles (a 300,000 mile battery life), Zero's bikes are beginning to warrant their price premium. Hayes' diesel-powered bike is another cool thing.  A hydrogen-powered turbo sportbike would be beyond hip.

Knowing that this oil barrel is more than half-empty with a rust hole in the bottom has forced me to suspect that the world I lived in is vanishing.  I'm trying not to sound like a reformed whore, but it's hard for me to pretend to any other pose.  I am from a generation that burned gas for almost nothing but recreational uses.  I can "brag" that I sometimes rode my Kawasaki Bighorn, Rickman 125 ISDT, or even the Harley Sprint to the racetrack, took off the street hardware, raced the bike, and, after reinstalling lights and crap, rode back home.  I guess that's something.  But I also trailered, trucked, and station-wagoned bikes to races, took long mind-altering rides in the country, and practiced racing on all sorts of surfaces.  Today, those leisurely rides through the country side feel a bit like immature, excessive exercises in selfishness; and I'm missing them before I've given up doing them.  I know that every drop of oil that I waste is coming out of my children and grandchildren's heritage and I'm becoming more than a little ashamed of the oil I wasted before I knew better.  The days of getting together with a few dozen friends to explore backroads and hang out in the twisties are fading.  I think sports like motocross, road racing, and all of the fun we have had aimlessly and recreationally burning fuel are also coming to a sooner-than-you-think end.  Between declining resources and world-wide pollution and global heating catastrophes, it appears that we have hung on to these carbon-burning handlebars a little too long.

I'm not celebrating this.  I'm not gloating or saying "I told you so" while I write this.  I lived in a gloriously ignorant, greedy, selfish time and it was an incredibly fun period in human history.  I wish I could pass it on to my children and, especially, my grandson.  If we're truly a civilization worth saving, we'll find a way to make a world our kids can enjoy.  If we don't, we deserve any misery we receive. 

---

[1] A depressing, but complete site for all sorts of links to information about the coming energy crisis is http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/.
[2] Paul Young added this note to my list of vanishing technologies from my own lifetime: "One of the guys I work with had his 11 year old son come up to him and ask 'Have you ever heard of something called a landline?' Something else to add to your list of disappearing technology. "

Motorcycle Magazines & Me

[I wrote this one a long time ago, as you can see by the copy-write date on the header. It's still mostly the way I feel about the leading motorcycle magazines.]

All Rights Reserved © 2008 Thomas W. Day

In looking for product to review, I realized that one of the most arrogant things a writer and a magazine could do is review the competition. Since they don't know we exist, I decided if the cynical Shakespearean adage "discretion is the better part of valor" was catchy enough to gain traction, arrogance and courage might hook up as well. Another motivation for doing this review is that lots of new riders don't know what the rest of us read when we are not reading MMM. With that in mind, I thought it might be sort of a public service to describe our rivals. With that as my guiding light, I decided to do an analysis of the major motorcycle rags. (This is my definition of "major" magazines, your mileage may vary.) There are some pretty good on-line magazines, but I'm not going to look at them on this pass. I decided to list the magazines in order of my opinion of their value, so you'll probably have another bone with which to pick.


#1: Motorcycle Consumer News (www.mcnews.com)
The advantage MCN has over the competition is that this little magazine (practically printed on rag paper) doesn't accept advertising. So, MCN's reviews should be uncontaminated by commercial influences; as if that is possible in corporate America. Sometimes, though, MCN's reviews are the best you will read when the product has serious problems. Unlike the glossy, advertiser-driven rags, MCN writers will occasionally tell you about the things they don't like in a bike, gear, or even the industry.

David Hough's criticism of the MSF's political tactics and training deficiencies, a couple of years ago, was the only voice in the woods. Since the MSF is sponsored by the motorcycle manufacturers and the organization exists to put a happy face on the sad world of motorcycle mortality statistics, the woods were thick. None of the other rags would have touched that subject, but MCN took it on for a series of articles.

Like most of us who review bikes, MCN wastes time describing the technical characteristics of the bikes they review. Anyone who is capable of cutting and pasting data from the manufacturers' press releases can look like a technical wiz by doing this and, since everyone else does it, MCN is wasting precious space in repeating that tactic. Skip the marketing drivel and go straight to the "riding impressions." MCN costs $41/year, so wasting time and space doing what everyone else does for $7/year makes me reconsider my subscription every time they do it. I do, however, hang on to MCN copies until I'm sure I've gleaned all value from each issue.


#2: Cycle World
There is one great thing about every issue of Cycle World, Kevin Cameron. The brilliant author of Sportbike Performance does a technical article, TDC, in which he takes apart yet one more complex idea and re-describes it so that the rest of us have a useful understanding of what is going on inside the mechanical world. Funny thing about CW. In writing this column, I looked all over the house for the magazine and was unable to find a single copy. After working my way through Cameron's column, I rarely spend any time on the rest of the magazine and give it away almost immediately. Kevin is worth the $7/year I spend on CW. No, I am not a Peter Egan fan. Apparently, making that statement alienates lots of local CW readers because Egan is a Wisconsinite and while Minnesotans hate the Packers and successful Minnesotans, we're supposed to love our neighbor motorcycle pundits. I find Egan to be long-winded and a little like listening to Paris Hilton describe her jewelry and makeup.


#3: Motorcyclist
I go hot and cold with Motorcyclist. I, often, love the articles contributed to this rag from outside of their staff. For example, Ed Milich's article, "Field Guide to Common Internet Motorcycle Wackos" was as good as funny motorcycle articles gets; and accurate. The editors of Motorcyclist are thin-skinned, a little reactionary, and highly sensitive to their advertiser's needs/demands. I rarely read the bike reviews or "shoot-outs." Everything is wonderful and you should buy them all is the gist of those puff pieces and I can't afford the time to "read in-between the lines" to sort out what they really thought about the stuff they rode. I can't tell the reviews from the ads and there are pages and pages of ads. Motorcyclist's photo shots cater to the hooligan crowd and that doesn't do much for me, either.

Kenny Roberts mans their "MotoGP Desk," but rag's index is so badly laid out that I usually hear about what he's written from other readers long after I've discarded my copies. Sometimes the mag reminds me of those webpages designed with black text on a dark purple background. Sometimes it's too much work to fight through the format to see what the writers had to say.


#4: Rider Magazine
Rider has vanished into a weird marketing scam (Riders' Club), but it used to be a rider-based, rider-written touring magazine. I have hopes that someday it will return to that standard. I bump into Rider about a half-dozen times a year and in recent years that experience always reminds me of the magazine I used to like, but the current magazine is not it.

What's with Stopping Distance Tests?

Motorcycle Consumer News publishes a Performance Index summary on all of the bikes they have tested over recent years (for example: 2007/2008 and 2010). There are always some interesting statistics in those evaluations. For those of who are lazy and looking for an executive summary, skipping the list and heading for the Ten Best categories at the end of the article is the easy way to get a look at the year of motorcycling products.

One of the stats I've been most interested in is the 60-0 stopping time measurement, since that directly relates to safety performance. 0-60 is interesting and 0-100mph is information only for squids and racers, but stopping distance is a big deal for all of us. So, I manipulated the MCN data into a spreadsheet and played with it for a bit. what I found was an indirect correlation between what I expected and what actually happened. The ten quickest stopping bikes MCN tested in the last 5 years are:

Triumph Speed Triple 1050 '06	104.8 ft.
BMW Megamoto	106.4
Triumph Speed Triple '99	106.7
Honda F6 Valkyrie	107.4
Honda Marauder 800	107.6
Honda VFR800FI Interceptor '98	107.9
Yamaha YZF600R '97	108.2
Suzuki SV650 '99	108.8
Ducati Monster 750	109.1
Suzuki TL1000S	109.4

None of these bikes were among the lightest tested. In fact, five of the 50 fastest stoppers were over 700 pound porkers. All of those were metric cruisers (Honda's F6 Valkyrie, Valkyrie Tourer, VTX 1800, and Kawasaki's Vulcan 1500 Classic FI and Suzuki's VL1500 Intruder LC). Even Harley's 620 pound VRSC V-ROD puts on the brakes in 109.5 feet. The lightest of the quick stoppers is the '99 Suzuki SV650.

There is some connection between the lightest motorcycles and fuel efficiency. MCN's ten top fuel misers were:

Yamaha XT250	67.8 mpg
Yamaha Virago 250	66.9
Kawi Ninja 650R '06	65.3
Kawi Ninja 500	64
Honda Rebel 250	62.6
Honda CRF230L	61.6
Suzuki SV650S '07	58.3
BMW G650 Xcountry	56.4
Buel Blast	55.4
Moto Guzzi California	55.2

The Hondas and Yamahas were in the 10 lightest bike group, too. The Moto Guzzi was the heaviest miser at 540 pounds. You have to filter down to 45 mpg before you see the first over 600 pound bikes show up in the efficiency column. That was no surprise. Suzuiki's DR650 was the only light bike to push 40 mpg, which isn't a huge surprise, since the DR is also the quickest 0-60 mph bike in the group.

MCN does a lot of testing and collects all sorts of data on the bikes they test. I'm marginally embarassed to admit that I only care about one other measure; weight. MCN's ten lightest bikes were:

Yamaha XT250	288 pounds
Kawasaki KLX250S	294
Yamaha WR250X	301
Yamaha WR250R	302
Kawasaki KLX250SF	305
Suzuki DRZ400SM	319
Yamaha Virago 250	325
Suzuki GZ250	334
Suzuki DR650SE	358
Suzuki DR650SE '07	368

All things considered, the Virago 250 and the GZ250 are the only bikes of that bunch that I wouldn't like to own. So, maybe my first big issue is weight. If I only get to pick one value, maybe that would be the top of my motorcycle values. MCN doesn't rate suspension travel, turning radius, off-pavement handling, street vision (seat height), visibility, reliability, winter starting, ease of maintenance, parts cost, fuel tolerance, LD comfort, or many of the things I try to look at when I review a new motorcycle. Sometimes, I wonder if including a "can I pass a BRC on this thing" category would be helpful This was, however, an interesting experiment and I'm going to put the resulting Excel spreadsheet on my website.

My Picture of Over-40 Riders

For a year, I subscribed to Motorcycle Consumer News. I like the concept of this magazine and I really wanted to like it, but I mostly was disappointed. Many of the articles are poorly written, some are as silly as the advertiser-based magazines, and a couple of the regular writers are downright irritating (kettle calling the pot "black," I know). However, some of the reviews are not only super-detailed but MCN will look at bikes the other magazines barely notice (like this month's review of Suzuki's TU250X).

As I was digging through the crap in my MSF classroom bag, I stumbled on an old issue that cemented my disinterest in renewing my subscription back when that subscription was about to run out: "A Portrait of the Over-40 Rider." This article, written by Wendy Moon, was supposedly an analysis of a survey pasted inside a previous issue. The survey received 122 respondents and Moon makes some amazing conclusions from the results. This was a survey placed in an out-of-the-way spot in the magazine a few months back. So out-of-the-way that I had to paw through my old issues to find it. I hadn't even noticed the survey while I was reading the magazine.

With her tiny collection of responses from MCN's odd group of subscribers, Moon attempts to dispute the findings of NHTSA's crash data (and several other studies) from previous years. According to her survey results, 57% of motorcycle riders are in their 50s and 23% are in their 60s, leaving 20% of riders for the 16-49 and 70-up year-old categories. I'm not even close to buying that. Since she concluded that such an overwhelming percentage of riders are geezers, the fact that 50% of all fatalities are old folks doesn't bother her. Her conclusion was that, "In contrast to the media's portrayal, they could be said to be the safest riders on the road."

A statistic that is missing in all of the significant studies' data is miles driven, but Moon's average of 11,968 miles per year is so far from NHTSA's 2,411 and anything any reasonable person could believe that the rest of the article loses what little credibility it might have had. A substantial number of her polled riders claimed an average of 50,000 miles per year on their bikes. Hell, I don't even believe NHTSA's 2,600 mile estimate. I think most US bikes barely collect 2,600 miles before they hit the scrap heap. Asking a bunch of geezers how many miles they ride is as useful information as asking SUV owners about their gas mileage. People lie and people really lie about stuff that they think points out superior strength or weakness.

Moon and MCN's other conclusions were:

• 83% "always wore a helmet"
• full-face helmets were the "overwhelming" choice
• 75% said they "never" drank and rode
• 85% were self-taught and 60% had "some kind of training"
• 70% rode year-round in spite of the weather
• only 14% rode with a group of any kind
• 54% claimed to be daily commuters
• 40% claimed to be crash-free

Somewhere in all that silly data, common sense was totally lost. In everyone else's data, many of the douchebags getting killed on motorcycles are over the alcohol limit. While it's true that the majority of motorcyclists in the US are over 40, I doubt that they contribute much to NHTSA's average 2,600 miles traveled per year. The garage candy crowd aren't dressed well enough to experience more than a 2 month riding season in most of the country, It's tough to put on big miles when you have to self-medicate yourself every 50 miles because of your crappy suspension and awkward riding position.

Like hearing the mpg data from an SUV owner, I put very little faith in the big mileage claims of most cruiser characters. The best someone claiming 50,000 miles a year can expect from me is a polite smile. I work on that expression often. I am a firm believer in disbelieving practically amazing story I didn't witness. [How's that for a convoluted sentence?]

How does a wide range of motorcycle riders manage to put on 11,000 miles a year and while 40% of them manage to avoid any sort of crash? Not buying that, either. If you ride, you crash. If you ride a lot, you crash a little more.

She also quoted a study that concluded, "those individuals who took beginning rider training courses were more likely to be involved in an accident than those who did not, and that those who took the beginning course more than once were much more likely to be involved in an accident."

Now, that I believe. If you can take the MSF BRC and fail the test afterwards, you are incompetent as a motorcyclist. The test is insanely simple. Honestly, I suspect that most folks who are forced to take the BRC to get their license are a bit handicapped in the hand-eye coordination skills territory, anyway. There is no such thing as a "difficult DMV" test in these United States. If you can't pass that test, you are either riding a worthless pile of crap or you are not capable of managing a motorcycle. The test ought to be 200% tougher, if anyone ever really wants to reduce motorcycle deaths. For those of us over 55, it ought to be re-administered ever couple of years to check the decay of our skills.

What MCN proved is that getting useful motorcycle data is tough and that publishing sketchy data is a formula for losing credibility.