Why I Think They Are Wrong

The constant reminder that the “Normalcy Bias” plagues motorcyclists into making fatal and foolish decisions is one of many reasons I decided my Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF)/Minnesota Motorcycle Safety Center(MMSC) instructor career was not worth continuing. Years ago (2006), I wrote one of my all-time favorite essays, “Panic Reactions,” where I described a phrase I came to use almost as often as “good job” in my motorcycle safety classes, "Every panic reaction you have on a motorcycle will be wrong." As part of my answer to every question a student might have had would be my constant hunt for “escape routes.” The latest version of the MSF’s Basic Rider Course (BRC) de-emphasizes risk to the point that instructors were reprimanded for talking about things like escape routes. There, of course, is a reason for that: 1) The MSF is owned by the Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC) and their overwhelming incentive is to put butts on seats; 2) The MMSC is funded by motorcycle license endorsements and their overwhelming incentive is to make it easy for anyone in the state to obtain and retain an endorsement. Years ago, I was asked to present a “This I Believe” talk to the Unitarian Universalist society to which my wife and I belonged and what I believe in is that “Incentives Are Everything.” Sadly, I find absolutely no evidence that humans are anything more than a slightly evolved animal and that 99.99…% of human activity can be explained by self-interest and incentives.

I get why the MIC is uninterested in actual motorcycle safety. Like every corporation on the planet today, today’s profits over-ride any future self-interest; you gotta satisfy those “equity investors” first and everything else be damned. The MSF’s mission statement is pretty clear, “MSF is the country's leading safety resource and advocate for motorcyclists. We create world-class education and training systems for riders of every experience level. We raise public awareness of motorcycling to promote a safe riding environment.” “Public awareness” is not motorcycling’s main problem: incompetent motorcyclists is overwhelmingly the biggest problem, illegal noise is second, and a close third is the outright hostility toward the motorcycle gangs that largely represents motorcycling in the public eye. Neither of the two groups I was once associated with have a reason to care about those problems. The state’s civil servants are all old enough that they’ll be long retired before any change happens and the MIC’s executives will be long golden parachuted out when the economics behind US motorcycling finally drops the coffin lid on motorcycles and public roads.

In the past couple of months, I’ve had to listen to at least a dozen motorcyclists and ex-motorcyclists describe their “had to lay ‘er down” stories. Not a one of those fairy tales was even slightly believable. If you can’t competently use your brakes, you sure as hell can’t pull of that stuntman bit, but what you can do is panic, scream, and fall over and, then, make up some bullshit story about how you planned it all and it either worked out or didn’t. At least three of the goobers telling me their sob story were hobbled for life from their motorcycle episode. Even they imagined doing something other than simply and stupidly fucking up and falling down when they crashed and disabled themselves.

Back to the “normalcy bias,” one of my favorite books (and podcasts) is You Are Not So Smart and the chapter on normalcy bias describes people frozen in their seats as a crashed airliner catches fire and burns down around them, while their brains chant “this can’t be happening, everything is normal” until the air is sucked from their lungs and they are fried or blown to pieces. The only way to avoid being trapped by your disbelief is to prepare in advance, to consider the options in a disaster, to look for escape routes, and to think about the steps necessary if escape becomes necessary. Every place you go and everything you do should be accompanied by this process, especially in Crazyville, USA where the NRA has armed every nitwit, fanatic, and pissed-off momma’s-boy incel with enough weapons to empty an auditorium. On the highway, an intelligent motorcyclist knows that bicyclists and pedestrians are the only road users who present a lower threat than a motorcycle and, as such, we’re invisible. The only protection we have are escape routes and a vehicle capable of using them [sorry cruiser and trike guys, you’re likely dead since your invalid bike can barely manage asphalt].

You could argue that riding while constantly worrying about being run over by a distracted, incompetent, and/or angry cager takes all the “fun” out of riding a motorcycle. You could delude yourself into imagining that riding rural highways minimizes those risks. The only real protections you have are your skills, your preparation, and luck. [Never discount luck.] An insurmountable obstacle for me to consider continuing my “safety instructor” career was the organizations’ discounting risk in favor of “more butts on seats.” I love motorcycling and motorcyclists (not bikers, they aren’t the same people) and my life was greatly enhanced by 60 years on a motorcycle, but filling the roster with untrained, unprepared, and unskilled riders is going to kill this form of transportation and I don’t want to be part of that.

The best guess is that motorcycle crashes cost the US economy $16B and the entire US motorcycle industry produces a gross income of about $5.6B in 2022. The damned industry and our idiot licensing systems and godawful training approach produces an income that is not-quite 1/3 of the cost of motorcycling to the nation. In comparison, the automotive industry produces $1.53T in gross income and the cost of automotive/truck crashes is about $340B, or one-fourth the national revenue from cars and trucks. Any half-rational nation would start purging motorcycles from public roads a few minutes after absorbing those numbers. We are closer to half-witted than half-rational, but that just means it will take longer to happen. But it will happen.

Was It Worth It?

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Thomas W. Day

[As the copyright notice above indicates, I wrote this one in 2013 when I first began to consider the fact that the end of my motorcycling life was approaching. I had just retired from my teaching gig at a music college and my wife and I were planning a retirement vacation trip that might have resulted in our selling off everything except what would have fit into a small camper and going on the road until we could no longer do that. That did not pan out well at all. ;-) I intended for this to be the last entry to my Geezer with A Grudge blog and the odds are good if you're reading this one, I'm dead or incapacitated by age, injury, or both. At the least, I will have sold off my last motorcycle and ended that part of my life. So, this is it. Thanks for reading my thoughts and stories and I wish you all have at least as much fun and luck as I did on two wheels.]

Recently, I spent a fine summer afternoon hanging out with a couple of young friends. One of them is an occasional motorcyclist and the other is not. During a bit of that discussion, we touched on crashes and near-crashes and the odds that getting into serious trouble on a motorcycle are pretty high. Nick, the non-rider, asked, "So, is it worth it? If you are that likely to crash and get hurt, why do it?"

Risk-taking has a bad rap these days, and some of that is for good reason. Bankers, investment brokers, real estate speculators, and the rest of the Vegas gamblers who play with the public's money as if it were a child's toy are a waste of air. They reminded us that hanging out on the edge of sanity is something less than sane. We didn't learn that lesson well enough to accurately apply discipline where it is needed, but we did become more conservative/timid/terrified-of-the-future. That move has been a highlight of failed empires since humans started writing down the steps taken before the barbarians stormed the walls and we all went back to banging the rocks together to make music.

Combine our general decline in courage and intelligence with a brand new phenomena my wife likes to call "old parents" and we're raising a generation of kids who think buying an Android-based smartphone instead of a safe-but-expensive iPhone is risk-taking. These fearful near-geriatric "helicopter parents" are responsible for the collection of pseudo-psychological maladies used to excuse bad manners, poor work ethic, and an education system too terrified to fail even the worst slackers or, even, outright idiots. These low-flying hovering parents think a skinned knee is cause for both medical intervention and systemic overhaul of every playground, school activity, and television program within the 1/4-block territor their child is allowed to free-range. It's also true that the average age of the American parent is increasing and there are some biological reasons why that might not be good news, especially for over-35 men and women. The Genetic Literacy Library summarizes this problem, "As more children are born to older parents, increasing numbers of babies are at higher risk for a range of health problems, many with a genetic basis and possibly resulting from epigenetic changes—functional changes that are generated in the DNA as a product of longevity and environmental interactions." So, we're a nation of declining health and growing conservatism. In other words, we're afraid of everything other than sending other peoples' kids to war. Ideally, other people we don't know. Shades of China, Greece, Rome, Denmark, Spain, England, and every other Empire Gone Bad.

The first part of taking physical risk is physical activity and even the fattest of us knows that physical activity is crucial to good health. The advantages of taking on physical risk is less well known. Freud, that famous couch-potato, sex-deviant, thought that any sort of adventure was evidence of an "innate human death drive." His years of smoking cigars eventually led to cancer of the mouth followed by a successful plea to his own kid for assisted suicide, so his death-drive-drivel was probably just self-diagnosis. More rational psychological studies have found that nature has built in significant biological rewards for risk taking. Endorphins and adrenaline crank out chemicals that give athletes and daredevils a "high" similar to sexual activity. Our hearts speed up and become more efficient, our minds focus, our respiratory system kicks into high gear, and the bio-chemical response to peak moments of excitement can't be matched any other way. Afterwards, we relax and more fully appreciate our everyday life.

Of course, some people get nothing but terror out of almost any kind of risk and they have no way to empathize with any of this. To them, taking physical risks is just crazy and inconceivable. Couple that with all of the characteristics of old parents and it's easy to understand how we "progress' to a conservative state deluded into believing that creating an economically inequitable, unsustainable, always-on-the-edge-of-disaster economy is a rational substitute for actually showing some courage occasionally. This produces stress and stress does not provide the same positive effects as physical risk. They might feel similar to those unused to a physical life, but they aren't.

In the film, Moto 4: The Movie, desert racer Kurt Caselli says, " Do one thing every day that scares you, live your life on the edge. It makes you feel good . . . and alive" Watch him race across the desert, full of life, riding and living on the edge, doing what most of his generation thinks they are doing when they play video games and you will immediately know why we do this crazy thing. In the same movie, WORCS champ Taylor Robert said, "For me, it's my escape to life." For some humans, there is no other way to get this far sideways and getting sideways is absolutely necessary.

My least favorite thing about getting old is the growing fear of getting injured and not being able to recover. It makes me appreciate how the rest of the world spent their whole lives in terror of getting hurt, afraid of taking real chances, worrying about every little thing so they do no big things their entire lives. Life kills us all. Sooner or later, you will be nothing but a memory, if you're lucky. Would you rather be John Glenn, the Marine combat aviator and test pilot who was the first American to orbit the planet or John Glenn, the man who slipped on a bathroom rug and might have spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair or worse from that incident? I know from experience that some pretty boring activities (like working on my house or yard) can result in some awful injuries. So, "I'd rather be shot out of a cannon than squeezed out of a tube." With all of that in mind and a lifetime of injuries from bicycling, contact sports, household chores, motorcycle racing and adventure touring, I can easily say, it was absolutely worth it and still is. Thanks for asking. 

What's Wrong with Motorcycle Safety Training

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Thomas W. Day

I had a rare opportunity to talk with one of the big thinkers in national motorcycle training over the 2013 VBR3 weekend; David Hough. David has written about safe motorcycle riding tactics and skills for almost 25 years, both through his book collection (Proficient Motorcycling: The Ultimate Guide to Riding Well, Street Strategies: A Survival Guide for Motorcyclists, More Proficient Motorcycling: Mastering the Ride, and The Good Rider) and his many magazine articles with the AMA's American Motorcyclist, Cycle World, Sound Rider, and Motorcycle Consumer News. He has also stepped out as a vocal critic of US motorcycle safety training in a series of articles almost a decade ago in Motorcycle Consumer News aggressively titled "The Fuss About Rider Training" and "Trouble in Rider Training." Oddly, he and I have been concerned about many of the same things: motorcycling's out-of-control fatality and injury rate, the lack of practical application for motorcycles, and the state of motorcycle safety training and licensing that contributes to our mortality and morbidity statistics. 
 
I've harped on the counter productivity of the AMA more than a few times, but David has an insider's view of that disorganization that is even more gloomy. Unlike me, David has a profound respect for Rod Dingman, the AMA chairman, and repeatedly called him "a brilliant man." From my distant outsider's view, I would have never guessed other than during that brief instance when Mr. Dingman was asked what issues most threaten motorcycling and he replied, "Noise, noise, and noise." Typically, the AMA promptly backed off of that moment of sanity and returned to the safer territory of representing the interests of motorcycle aftermarket vendors rather than motorcycle riders. Before that quick retreat, I almost joined the AMA for the first time since my racing years (30 years ago) when membership was required to be on the track. The Motorcycle Safety Foundation has a similar problem because the heart of the organization is barely more than a lobbying tool of the motorcycle manufacturers disguised as a motorcycle training business. With that as a core purpose, motorcycle safety takes a back seat in the long, long bus full of constituents that both organizations try to serve. 
 
One of the places Mr. Hough and I totally agree is that motorcycling is dangerous business. So dangerous that in the late 1970's, Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, and Kawasaki began to diversify their business models so that, when liability problems from motorcycling's terrible mortality records overran the profits derived, they could simply quit the business and go elsewhere. Honda and Suzuki build cars. Kawasaki and Yamaha build everything else. Motorcycles are just one division of a huge manufacturing business that will not be allowed to drag down the whole. Only the lame (economically and flexibility-wise) but politically-connected Harley-Davidson constituency has protected the rest of the industry from obsolescence . . .  for a while. Our time appears to be coming, though.

David's perspective on our share of highway mortality is considerably different than the already-awful numbers with which we're familiar. His take comes from the independent Motorcycle Safety Training Institute where the data is more directly related to what we care about; driver mortality, since motorcycles are primarily a single-passenger vehicle. That data says we are 20% of the driver vehicle deaths, nation-wide. The other place David and I agreed was that "registered vehicles" is useless information. While it may be a source of pride to industry promoters that motorcycles are 3% of registered vehicles, anyone who sets up a video camera on most any freeway, highway, or residential street will discover we are rarely 0.01% of total traffic. (Optimistic motorcycle promoters might claim we're as much as 1% of total traffic, but no reasonable observation over time would substantiate that.) With those numbers in mind, it becomes obvious that motorcycles are substantially more dangerous than any other vehicle on the road; several hundred, or thousand, times more dangerous. 
 
That last bit is at the core of what's wrong with motorcycle safety training. The first thing that needs to be admitted and recognized is that your mother was right, motorcycles can kill you. That old motorcyclist saying that "there are motorcyclists who have crashed and those who haven't crashed yet" is absolutely true and if you aren't bright enough to recognize that, you aren't aware enough to ride a motorcycle. This should be the thing we talk about most in the early stages of motorcycle training classes. The 1960's "Mechanized Death" videos ought to be revived and revitalized with even gorier crash pictures and up-to-date statistics. Students should be forced to look at the carnage and mayhem from motorcycle crashes and be made well aware that they are entering into an activity that can be lethal, crippling, or mindlessly saddening when we are responsible for the injury or death of a loved one who trusted us with their life on a motorcycle.

Contrary to the industry's advertisements, riding a motorcycle is not a gleefully liberating activity: motorcycling is a life-threatening, dangerous, high-risk activity that requires all of our concentration, ability, and constant practice just to minimize the risk to "really, really dangerous." Beyond  and because of all that, the casual motorcycle "bike-curious" should be discouraged. Anyone not actively and irreconcilably drawn to motorcycling because of the many great things about taking your life in your own hands and tempting fate on a balanced pair of wheels is pretending that motorcycles are a "lifestyle" and has no business on a bike of any sort; powered or otherwise.

In fact, anyone who hasn't already put a few thousand miles on a bicycle isn't interested enough in this kind of machinery to be a motorcyclist. If you are going to take your life in your own hands, you ought to at least care a little bit about staying alive. If you don't, buy a gun and take yourself out in America's Favorite Method. Don't make our dismal statistics even worse because your daddy didn't appreciate you or your mother liked your sister better. I am dead serious about this. Riding a motorcycle is a commitment in time and money that requires concentration, study, practice, and the kind of attitude you might expect from skydivers or rock climbers. We can lightly remind beginning riders that motorcycling is a "skill of your mind and eyes," but that's just a fraction of the reality.

It is also a physical skill of the sort that you need to practice until muscle memory overcomes natural reactions. You won't get that kind of result from an occasional weekend ride. Muscle memory requires practice. Martial arts experts say it requires 3,000-5,000 repetitions to ingrain a exercise.¹ For example, just practicing the single skill of emergency stopping could take you twenty or thirty hours of continuous practice. If you want to get to 25-30mph for your practice run, you'll need at least a 100 foot range for that attempt. Add 50 feet for the return loop and you have a 250 foot total practice loop. Five-thousand attempts later and you have traveled about 240 miles. If we assume you are stopping and returning to your start point quickly, you're still going to have a hard time managing a 10mph average. That would be 24 hours of continuous practice for a single skill.  Do you have that kind of dedication to becoming a good rider? If not, you are probably the wrong person to take on motorcycling.

¹ Motor Learning and Performance,  by Dr. Richard Schmidt and Dr. Craig A. Wrisberg and Performance and Motor Control And Learning by Dr. Richard Schmidt and Dr. Timothy D. Lee

Drinking the MSF Kool-Aid

Every two years, the Minnesota MSF program requires instructors to attend a “Professional Development Workshop.” Yes, it is as painful as it sounds. Like a lot of the corporate educational fools in the US, the MSF is a big proponent of “scientific teaching” and that is demonstrated sadly and badly in their instructor “training.” So, in August of 2013, I slogged my way through another of these silly exercises in turning energy into random motion. Every time I go through this experience, I think “Maybe I’m too old for this shit.”

After a momentary period of educational creativity in the early BRC years, the MSF has settled back into its over-bearing, drill sergeant tactics. Instead of talking to students like an instructor, the MSF now tells us just to read the corporate material to our “students”: I suppose that is because we’re too dumb to be teachers and the students are too illiterate to read this crap by themselves? The justification for the “read the cards” harping pretends that the MSF has “scientifically audience tested” the pigeon English in their illiterate 1970’s-era technical writing and that those poorly-written phrases magically turn rookies into Valentino Rossi just by their pure scientific magical-ness. “Keep knees against tank,” “keep feet on ground, not on footrests,” and “at double cones, downshift to 2nd gear, easing out clutch while in straight path” are examples of that genius literature. If I could manage a half-decent Pakistani taxi driver accent, I could deliver their script more authentically. The best I can do is a lousy 1950’s-era Charlie Chan hack-job and that is more offensive than funny. Reading this drivel with a straight face is just embarrassing, so I’m working on the taxi driver bit. So far, I’m more inclined toward the “You talkin’ to me?” sort of taxi driver, though. Reading the cards, without editing on the fly, is awkward and embarrassing. Once you’re involved in trying to fill in the missing pronouns and articles, you might as well paraphrase the whole performance.

Even though we often have a dozen riders with a dozen different skills, temperaments, listening abilities, and mental impairments, the MSF pretends that it’s possible to keep all riders in sight at all times while providing individual instruction to anyone who needs it. “”Never have running motorcycles behind you,” is one of the MSF mantras spoken by those who have never taught a class, paid a lick of attention to struggling students, and possesses an infinite supply of energy. A collection of insane and useless coaching positions are pitched to us as having magical powers in that regard. The fact that most of us see with the eyes in front of our heads rather than our backs appears to be new information to the academic geeks who run the MSF. It is possible that those pencil necks can’t swivel far enough to increase their visual horizon more than a couple of degrees, but most of us can cover a lot of ground from one location just by turning our heads and staying mobile. Go figure.

The chief instructor/trainer-trainer’s catch-all rebuttal is “It’s safer.” Like the conservative’s “think of the children” chickenshit come-back, this is a tough-to-beat argument in a typical classroom situation. It’s not like you can effectively argue against safety. However, like several other sorts of irrational debate tactics, no evidence of that safety improvement is offered or proven. In fact, claiming a tactic is safer without proving that point with statistics is just noise intended to stop discussion. The safety of an instructor’s style, range position, and technique is directly related to how that instructor conducts the class. A “universally perfect position” is an impossibility imagined by someone trying to create a defensible position liability-wise.

Likewise, the argument “If the chief instructor does/says it, it must be right” is about as worthless. The basis for “selecting” chief instructors has turned into accepting anyone who is silly enough to pay to haul his ass to one of the MSF’s training locations and obtain that certification. With that as a basis for selection, it’s a credential no more credible than an inheritance. At one time, our chief instructor was one of the best riders and instructors in our system. Now, the three chief instructors are just three guys who paid more money than the rest of us to do this thing. This is just one more example of failing leadership in all things American. Contrary to popular belief, there is some value in having excellence at the top of an organization

Pulling back from the early days of allowing instructors to find their own style and methods is a mistake, but it’s a popular mistake in the US. Everything known about teachers and teaching has found that instructor autonomy is crucial. All positive education outcomes are derived from creative, inspired, empowered instructors who give a shit about their students. The “read the cards” mantra is a No Child’s Behind Left Untouched holdover that came from the Reagan years’ public education sabotage and it drives good instructors from the system while reinforcing mediocrity. If the reason for recitation instead of teaching is because the MSF is requiring conformity, I’d say that would be a powerful reason for abandoning the MSF program for a state-managed system like Oregon’s. If the reason is liability, I’d say the state needs better lawyers. Reading the cards is something the best instructors do when they are being monitored by our “newspeak chief instructors,” but hardly anyone who knows what they are doing has that habit in an actual course. The upside is that reading the damn things is easy enough to do when we’re pretending to believe in the MSF magic. The downside is that doing that reminds us that we’re supposed to be marionettes, not instructors.

The predictable end result of the MSF’s style of instruction was summed up by this report from someone who took the ERC on a military base, “I also passed the ERC this summer.  The card was good for an insurance discount, and some of the slow speed instruction was valuable.  Other than that, the way this course was taught by the instructors I had was very thin...they did what was in the MSF Rider Card booklets, and that's it.  Mediocre instructors teaching minimal curriculum.  Most of the attendees at my course were military active duty, military retirees, or contractors on military bases all needing the card for two-wheel base access.  It is too bad the military is drinking the MSF Kool-Aid.”

All of this is just another example of the same mismanagement that has driven real work underground in the US. The only talent American management has consistently shown is an ability to make any kind of work as miserable as possible. The average teaching career in the US is eleven years, but even more important is the 25% of beginning teachers who leave the field after four years and the 50% of urban teachers who abandon their careers after five years. The kids aren’t the problem. Management is. About ten years ago (2003), Pat Hahn produced a list of Minnesota MSF instructors with their “length of service” information. I did some Excel sorting on that data and found that the average (mean) instructor career was about three years. There were some significant outliers (15-24 years) in the group, but the overwhelming majority were short-timers. I know more than a few ex-Minnesota MSF instructors and none of them regret quitting. At the time, I wondered how it was possible to make riding the state’s motorcycles for money unpleasant. Now I know.

I know in a couple of ways. For a dozen years, I taught recording engineering and applied acoustics at a private music college. For about eight years, that job was so much fun I would have done it for free. (In fact, I did do a lot of work for nothing other than the pleasure of working with the kids and the school’s great musicians and instructors.) Eventually, the school was overrun by academics and “professional school administrators” and the fun, creativity, and energy was thoroughly sucked from the program. At one time, I thought I would teach at that school until they tossed me out or I died. Now, I’d rather take a bullet than teach another semester. Flipping that kind of commitment takes talent and the one thing American mismanagement has is an incredible ability to make any job as miserable as possible.

I’m writing this in early August 2013 under the assumption that by the time it hits the blog, I’ll either be dead or long out of motorcycle safety training. If not, I’m sure the MSF and the MMSC will make sure that decision is made for me once they read this criticism. It’s hard to imagine that being a big loss. The real problem in motorcycle “safety training” and licensing is that it isn’t serious enough. It’s one thing that 25% of motorcycle fatalities were unlicensed, it’s another that licensing is so easy that people with no ability can fumble through it fairly easily. A real approach to reducing the completely-out-of-line motorcycle fatality and injury numbers would require much tougher motorcycle licensing and a hard-assed approach to unlicensed motorcyclists (confiscate the motorcycle and put the asshole on foot where he/she was stopped along with a big fine). Until that happens, all of this “safety training” malarkey is just part of the sales pitch that is the real MSF objective (after all, the MSF is owned by the Motorcycle Industry Council, a “national trade association representing manufacturers and distributors of motorcycles, scooters, motorcycle/ATV parts and accessories and members of allied trades.” When was the last time you remember a trade organization being restrained in its desire to sell stuff over the safety of its customers? Yeah, that’s what I thought. If it were up to the MIC, motorcycle fatalities would be 90% of total traffic deaths and they’d just suppress the news so that a whole new batch of victims/customers would dive into traffic unaware of the hazards. The MSF is just an attempt to pretend to civic-mindedness while cranking out as many licensed customers as possible. The fact that this organization has forced the states to accept its monopoly on motorcycle safety training is all the evidence anyone should need to know this is a fact.

Licensed Non-Riders

One of the many ridiculous facts pertaining to our idiotic motorcycle licensing system in the “freedumb” USA is that once you obtain a motorcycle endorsement you can keep the damn thing forever without even riding a motorcycle once you receive the endorsement. Apparently, 8 million non-riders in the USA are in that category. 8 million bozos are ready and barely-able to swing a leg over a 110 cubic-inch Hardly simply because they once passed (even if they barely managed that on a 125cc training bike). Holy crap.

Even worse, Hardly wants to capitalize on that by convincing that marginally-abled crowd of “sleeping license-holders” to jump in front of a moving train after getting a second mortgage on their homes to buy a chrome-laden suicide machine. According to an article titled, "Millions of people have a motorcycle license but don't own a bike," ”Harley has a goal of attracting 2 million new U.S. riders over the next 10 years, a tall order considering it would represent a 25% increase in the total number of motorcycles registered in the nation.” You know me, I’m all for population reduction any way it can happen (as long as no innocent cats, dogs, hawks, eagles, crocodiles, or elephants are harmed in the filming of this catastrophe), but this is downright hilarious.

Stuff like this is why I believe motorcycle training is totally back-asswards. It’s pretty obvious that training beginning riders is a pointless, stupid idea from the perspective of a society trying to reduce the $22.6B in medical costs due to motorcycle crashes. Society has absolutely no reason to want to train beginning motorcyclists, with the obvious idea that the more butts put on motorcycle seats the more money it will cost society. However, once someone has decided to get licensed and buy a donor-cycle, society has every motivation to be sure that person is as unlikely as possible to contribute to that $22.6B. Which means that every time a motorcycle license comes due it should NOT be renewed without some evidence of recent (3-6 months, for example) advanced rider training. Not that silly MSF Intermediate Rider bullshit, either. I mean some kind of skill-demanding, road-speed advanced training like the MMSC/MSF “advanced” or “expert” rider courses.

Couple that training with a serious helmet law (no DOT head-pot bullshit, but full face, Snell-approved or nothing) and we’re beginning to talk about an actual attempt to drag US motorcycling into the 20th Century. Once we’ve made it that far, we might even head toward an actual 21st Century system of tiered licensing and a real inital rider’s test.

Training’s Value?

For the last 16 years, I’ve concluded every motorcycle safety class with a bit about the insurance companies that offer discounts for taking the classes. A couple of weekends ago, I took the MMSC’s MN Expert Rider Course and the lead instructor told us that GEICO, Progressive, and a few other companies offer a discount for every training course a rider takes. This morning, I called GEICO to update their records on me and ask for the additional discount.

What I learned was something completely different from what I’ve been saying for the last 16 years. Not only did I not recieve an additional discount for the Expert Rider Course, but I haven’t even been receiving a discount for being an instructor because I haven’t notified GEICO that my instructor certification had been re-upped in the last couple of years. It turns out that the ONLY people who get a discount credit for “training” are instructors. At least, that’s true with GEICO.

Now, I’m wondering if any insurance companies still give discounts for taking the class? As instructors, we don’t get much feedback on some of the things we’ve been taught to say during the classes. I’ve heard hints from students, especially Intermediate Rider Course students (used to be the “Experienced Rider Course”) that their insurance company didn’t give any sort of discount for the BRC. I’ve checked up on this over the years on the Web, but that information has been inconclusive and contradictory. So, now I’m even more confused than usual.

I did learn that a couple of companies have discontinued motorcycle insurance in various states that do not have helmet laws.

#149 It's a Dirt Bike Habit

All Rights Reserved © 2015 Thomas W. Day

One of my least favorite excuses for poor street bike motorcycle skills is "it's a dirt bike habit," as if I'm too stupid or inexperienced to know what works off-road. Ok, I grant that I'm not that bright and there are a world of things I don't know about riding a dirt bike, but I'm pretty sure I know more and ride better on or off-road than an over-18 newbie who needs to take the MSF Basic Riding Course to get a motorcycle license. (A subject for a whole different GwAG rant.) Face it, if you were good you'd just ride down to the DMV, take their easy little test, and get your license. But that doesn't stop a certain portion of the folks who take the Basic Rider Course from explaining away all of their awful habits with "it's a dirt bike habit"; habits that have been formed from experiences as diverse as riding on the back of Dad's ATV to mountain biking.

The things that get blamed on dirt bike experience are 1) clinging to the front brake lever with one or more fingers as if it were a lifeline, 2) sticking a foot out any time the bike leans more than two degrees away from vertical, 3) superstition, ignorance, and terror of either the front or rear brake use, 4) staring at the front wheel as if it were about to fall off at any moment at the expense of having the remotest idea where the motorcycle is traveling, and 5) any number of weird and uncontrollable throttle hand positions. There are lots more dumb things that, supposedly, dirt bike riders "all do," but I'll leave the list at five for the purposes of keeping this short and minimally pissed-off. 

It is true that riding off-road and, especially, racing off-road is a different animal from street riding. There is no life-threatening situation in a motocross or enduro where you have to worry about maximum braking horsepower. That is one of many reasons why dirt bikes have wimpy little brakes that barely seem functional in street riding situations. Mostly due to my riding style, skill limitations, and attitude, when I raced off-road I was more inclined to lift the front wheel and ride over obstacles and downed riders and bikes than I was to hit the brakes or try to avoid those obstructions. That is simply not a survivable option on the street. On the road, in any given week of commuting, I would be surprised if I didn't seriously exercise my motorcycle's brakes at least twice out of necessity and I have a long-established habit of working on my stopping and avoidance skills every day. You have to be able to stop quickly or be ready to offer up the girlyman excuse, "I had to lay 'er down" when you explain why you are on crutches for a whole riding season. I hope it's obvious that four fingers are stronger than one or two. It might be less obvious that regularly practicing braking with all four fingers does not limit a rider to exclusively using four fingers every time the brakes are used. You can always consciously choose to only use one finger or two in appropriate braking situations or when hanging on to the bars in precarious (as it is in off-road situations). I always argue that it's better to have to think about using a less effective braking technique than it is to automatically select the low-power option in an emergency. I could be wrong about that, but it's still the argument I'd present to any new rider hoping to ride safely for a lot of years.

Clinging to the grips while you are also trying to use the throttle, clutch, or brake precisely is another "dirt bike habit" that is ineffective, unnecessary, and dangerous on the road. I am referring to those riders who are unable to use more than a couple of fingers for braking because they are afraid of losing their grip on the bars. Braking in particular puts a lot of force on the palm of your hand and you are not likely to be bumped loose when you're applying maximum braking forces. However, if you are really that insecure about loosening your grip on the bars, the chances are pretty good that you're going to crash sooner or later. When you do, those fingers you've allocated under the levers are likely to get crushed when the weight of the bike smashes the lever ends into the ground. 

A few moments on YouTube will demonstrate the difference between the riding techniques of great off-road racers and street racers (search for Valentino Rossi and James Stewart on-board camera views, for example). The road racer hand movements and throttle application looks almost in slow motion compared to the off-road racers. Steward, Dungey, and Carmichael drop the hammer on the throttle like they have no use for anything between full off and full on. Likewise, off-road one finger clutch and brake use is common because you are hanging on for dear life and taking a pounding, physically, for every inch of travel. The street is a different environment. Speeds are higher, traction is more predictable, acceleration and deceleration forces are dramatically higher as a result. Road racing is physical, but it is a substantially different sport. Rossi, Stoner, and Marquez are much more tentative in their use of all of their controls. It's not accurate to say the road racers are altogether smoother than the off-road pros, but their on-bike movements are considerably less sudden.

The foot thing is just silly in pavement situations, especially on a dry parking lot at speeds that barely require shifting to second gear. At 150mph, Valentino Rossi might stick a leg out from behind his fairing's air-pocket to add a little drag before entering a high speed corner and James Stewart might plant a speedway-style boot in the apex of a tight corner, but you do not need to pretend you are in either of those situations in typical street conditions. Stick that basketball shoe into a warm chunk of asphalt and you may find your shin trying to occupy the same space as your thigh bone when you discover how much traction those Nikes can grab. More importantly, if you are sticking a foot out to help steer your street bike around a tight curve you are most likely putting your weight on the highside of the bike, which forces the motorcycle to lean further than necessary and a greater lean angle can mean you are working with a smaller tire contact patch and unnecessarily high side forces. And, of course, you look like a total douche to any experienced motorcyclists who may be watching.

Maneuverability is a motorcyclist's only weapon against the forces of four-wheel evil, four-hooved devils, and two-legged idiots. Stopping or slowing quickly is just one aspect of maneuverability, but if you can't do it you're pretty much a set of streamers dangling from your bike's handlebars. Regardless of what your father, boyfriend, goofy neighbor, or Rush Limbaugh told you, using either brake aggressively and with skill is not a dangerous activity. In fact, if you can't use your brakes, riding is dangerous.

MMM October 2016

Backseat Driving

I just took what will probably be my last MSF instructor training session and got a little more insight into where motorcycle safety training is going, in the process. The “new” (2014) classroom design is a giant step back from the MSF’s earlier attempt at “learner centered” or adult training. While I might suck at the delivery, I’ve always been a big fan of that concept because the alternative leaves me out in the cold as a student. The “education system” I grew up with is often called “the sage on the stage,” which would be one thing if the person on the stage was actually a sage (“a profoundly wise person; a person famed for wisdom. someone venerated for the possession of wisdom, judgment, and experience”), but it will always be difficult to attract that kind of person to western Kansas (where I grew up and experienced my K-12 “education”). Most small-to-mid-sized towns have the same problems, from the intolerant majority segments of the Midwest and Southeast, and most of the country’s underfunded public education system. 

For many years I was too often stuck listening to someone who had put about as much effort into their lecture topic as me, although that person was 20-30 years older and a whole lot lazier. If it hadn’t been for the years I spent in southern California’s university system, I’d have lived my whole life believing that teachers were nothing special. Lucky for me, that didn’t happen. Otherwise, I’d have been so bored with “education” that I’d have given it up after my first junior college semester in 1966.

Becoming one of those “lazier than me” lecturers has never been a goal of mine. In fact, for the first 40 years of my life I had absolutely no interest in being any kind of teacher, although I’d been roped into dealer, technician, and customer training with a couple of my employers for about ten years. I didn’t consider myself to be a teacher and if someone had called me one I’d have laughed at them. My father was a career high school teacher and I spent my first 15 years surrounded by adults who made their living “teaching.” Nothing about that experience provided any inspiration toward that career path.

Some motorcycle instructors claim they teach the MSF program to “give something back to motorcycling.” I don’t get that. 

Motorcycles are a transportation vehicle or a luxury toy. If their primary purpose is to be a “lifestyle” prop and noise-generating irritant, that’s nothing worth the “giving back” effort. After paying my vehicle license and fuel taxes, I don’t feel any compulsion to give back any of my time and energy to Wisconsin, Iowa, Detroit, Japan, or China. Honestly, for at least half of the years I’ve taught the MSF program my primary motivation has been self-preservation. While I do not believe the remedial training we provide or the license testing the state requires does anything significant toward making new or even experienced riders safer or more competent beyond a few weeks post-training, I know that thinking, talking, and demonstrating decent riding techniques make me a safer, smarter, and more competent rider. And I get paid to do it, which brings up my decision to wind down my motorcycle instructor career. This is something I haven’t done for the money for the last 16 years, but wouldn’t do without getting paid for it about 90% of the time.

Over the last five years, I’ve discarded all of the other things I’ve done to make a living that fall into that category. I used to repair professional audio equipment for $175/hour. I wound down that work and business starting in 2012 and by July 2013 all of my customers had been redirected to someone else. I did commercial acoustic consulting and audio forensics, which sometimes paid fantastically and always paid well. I did my last 911 call analysis in late 2011 and completed my last acoustic consulting contracts in early 2012. A decade ago, when someone asked me what I did for a living, I used to say, “I teach rock and roll.” (Nobody wants to hear about the repair or consulting stuff and most people don’t take self-employment seriously; including me.) For more than a decade, teaching music production and technology at MSCM felt exactly like that. After the last couple of uninspiring semesters, there was finally more money than fun in that job. After a minor heart attack in late 2012 I decided I had been there long enough. My last months of teaching came at the end of the spring 2013 semester. I pretty much knew I wasn’t going back, but decided for sure on my 65th birthday that summer. The only thing I do for pay, now, is teach “motorcycle safety” classes a few times a summer. (2015 was the last summer I taught something resembling a full load. Plus, I am still selling off stuff in hopes that we can downsize “bigly” one more time and hit the road full time. Come on by. See anything you like, make an offer!

The “fun” part of teaching motorcycle safety classes was working with and getting to know the students. Even during the Harley/Polaris/Star/hippobike boom days I still had occasional students who made the job worth doing. [For example, two near-retirement medical doctors from Stillwater who took the class, listened to my advice on their first motorcycles, bought a pair of Honda Nighthawk 250’s, and rode them to Alaska and back.] I assisted with my first range portion of the MSF course in 2001 and wrote about freezing my ass off in 2” of slush back then. I went through the training program in 2002 and became an official MSF instructor and taught a boat load of classes that first year of the MSF’s Basic Rider Course. I wrote about that experience in MMM, too. For the next dozen years, I filled most of my summers with basic and experienced rider classes and enjoyed a good bit of that. I got to work with some dedicated, talented, and entertaining instructors (and a few who weren’t any of that) and I met a lot of hopeful prospective motorcyclists.

Over the years, I’ve had lots of conversations about teaching techniques, read a few dozen books about adult education, and have thought and written about teaching everything from computer applications to motorcycle safety and expertise to music, audio recording, and electrical/electronic engineering. One of the many things I’ve learned about teaching is that, like everything, it only works if there is a corrective (negative) feedback loop to provide input that keeps the system on course to achieve the intended outcome(s). There is only one meaningful outcome in motorcycle safety training: reduced mortality/morbidity occurances among “trained motorcyclists.” That is not only something the MSF warns instructors and programs not to expect, it’s not being measured by anyone. Without that critical piece of the puzzle, it seems to me that the effort, time, and money spent on training is wasted. I don’t have a lot of time left, so I’d like to waste as little of it as possible.

Keeping up with the Japanese

I’m wrestling with an essay for MMM on motorcycle safety training. Mostly, writing about this subject is kicking my ass because there is so little actual information about the only thing that matters in motorcycle training: the outcome/effectiveness of training. It’s no secret that I believe motorcycles are a doomed mode of transportation and it shouldn’t be surprising that I believe the problem is that our favorite vehicle is primarily a hyper-dangerous toy and that licensing for the use of this vehicle on public roads is a joke. The fact that so many “riders” believe the DMV “test” is “impossible to pass on a real motorcycle” ought to be absolute proof that most of the characters on motorcycles are incompetent as riders and not all that bright as human beings.

As part of looking for inspiration for this article, I got involved in a discussion about why motorcycle sales have tanked (post-2008) and the recovery has been so weak. An old MNSportbike acquaintance who has been in the retail end of the business for the last decade thinks it’s because “the last two generations are pussies.” I can find no evidence to support his claim, but his argument is mostly that we’re following the Japanese model and that Japanese youth are “pussies.”

A long while back, Japan’s NHTSA equivalent decided to attack the constant over-representation of motorcycles in that nation’s mortality and morbidity statistics. The end result has been the only effective change in motorcycle safety in the world. Another result has been a dramatic drop in Japan’s motorcycle/scooter sales. Other than the industry itself, which generates almost as much expense as revenue, collapsing motorcycle sales isn’t much of a downside. The Japan Biker F.A.Q. created a page to explain the Japanese licensing system, “Motorcycle Classes and Vehicle Licensing.” The whole story is pretty much there in English and Japanese, explaining the tiered licensing system, insurance requirements, motorcyclists’ liability, laws and enforcement, and the rider costs of all of that. Honestly, I was surprised that the actual expense of compliance is so low. Insurance for the various classes isn’t out-of-line with US costs. Testing and licensing expense is reasonable. The real difference is what happens when you violate the laws: enforcement is expensive and harsh.

It’s obvious and true that if you had to be competent to obtain a motorcycle license and that getting caught riding without a license would result in serious costs and even jail time a large portion of the idiots on hippobikes would quit riding. Harley and Indian sales would disappear in a puff of logic, since obtaining that “Large Class” (400cc and over) license would require competence and riders would have to demonstrate that competence on the actual bike the plan to be riding.

Yesterday, on the way back from Alma, WI with my wife (she was driving), I got to see how far from being an actual motorcyclist the typical hippobike rider reality is. Two nitwits heading south on WI35 decided to make a U-turn on that relatively wide two-lane road with decent shoulders on both sides. The two stopped in the middle of their lane, stacked up a couple of cars behind them while they gathered their nerve to make the turn, paddled through the turn one-at-a-time, and the second of the two made his entrance into our lane about 100 yards in front of our vehicle. Being the obvious least competent of the two, he panicked when he finally noticed our vehicle (and the four behind us) bearing down on him, and he sped-up his paddling routine to get out of our way. Of course, he didn’t make the turn and paddled right into the ditch, which fortunately for him was only a few inches deep at that spot. On their best day, these two would barely deserve to posses Japan’s “Small Class: 50cc to 125cc” license. Here in Freedomville, USA, these idiots are on motorcycles 10X their capabilities.

Safety Training and Us

About a year ago, David Hough wrote a LinkedIn article about the California motorcycle training experiment and the MSF’s repsonse: “Changes in CA training.” It’s a pretty good read and some of the comments were as thought stimulating. A lot of MSF instructors are beginning to reconsider the purpose of training, especially in light of the newest MSF new rider program that appears to be taking an even more simplistic approach to putting butts on motorcycle seats.

#134 Changing the Rules, Mixing My Emotions

All Rights Reserved © 2015 Thomas W. Day

On the last October weekend of the 2014 MMSC training season, I taught a “Seasoned Rider” class (aka Experienced Rider Course, ERC, BRC II, etc.) for a few Polaris company employees. Because the course had some experimental qualities (“There will be a test.”), the course was prepaid to the college regardless of the number of students. Saturday morning was right at freezing and no one was compelled (either by work or because they’d laid down $60) to be there, so only four students showed up. On top of that, due to the lateness in the season and the “test,” the Polaris employees were allowed to ride the course on the state’s 250-and-under motorcycles, instead of bringing their own rides. Due to those points, I was the only guy on the range who rode to the range. The first 3 1/2 hours were identical to the usual course, but it was pretty obvious that we all had a different kind of edge on due to the impending “evaluation” (PC for “test”). The students, because they were in a pass/fail situation and instructors because we’d never conducted a BRC II with a test at the end.

The big exception to this course was the students were offered the choice of riding their own bikes or the state’s. Because it was specially offered to Polaris employees by Polaris and some of them are beginning motorcycle owners and may or may not actually own a motorcycle, it made for an interesting experiment. By design and purpose, the BRC II is intended, I think, to be ridden on the students’ bikes. At least, that’s the way we’ve always done the course as long as I’ve known about it. And, of course, there has not been an evaluation at the end to determine what has been learned in the course during the time I’ve been an instructor. That has not always been the case, though.

I took my first prototype-ERC at Willow Springs Raceway, back in the late 1980’s. It wasn’t called the ERC, as I remember, but I don’t remember what it was called. There was a fair amount of lecture along with the usual emergency stop, obstacle avoidance, turning, and riding technique instruction. There was a short performance test at the end of the course and, as I remember, we were presented with a certificate that could be used for a drivers’ training discount with our insurance companies. The next time I took the course was in Denver, at Bandimere Speedway, the drag racing track. The “range” was a marked-up and coned section of the speedway where the cart racing is today. The course used the same kind of exercises, along with an opportunity to play panic-braking on their big training-wheeled 500 Nighthawk. You could wind up the bike to about 40-50mph and hammer the brakes and the skids kept the Nighthawk from falling over. I don’t think there was a test with that course. The last time I took the course as a student was in Minnesota on the Guidant parking lot in Arden Hills. The parking lot had been oiled earlier that week and employee cars had been sliding into each other at low speeds, morning and evening. I know because I worked there. I usually bicycled to work, so I missed out on the parking lot fun until Saturday at the ERC. The course continued the sliding and crashing the cars had demonstrated earlier in the week. Almost everyone in the class crashed at least once and a lot of chrome and plastic looked worse for the wear. I “anticipated” the emergency swerve exercise because I didn’t think my Yamaha TDM would look better coated in greasy black oil. The next week, another asphalt contractor cleaned and recoated the parking lot, this time with materials that didn’t come from the county oil recycling sludge pit. That’s the history of my student experience with the ERC and it’s ancestors and all of that was on my own motorcycles.

That behind me, I had a little built-in resistance to teaching the course to “experienced riders” on what most of those riders would consider to be “beginner bikes.” The fact is, a lot of experienced riding course students do not ride well enough to be called “experienced.” Maybe that’s the motivation for the recent renaming of those classes as “Basic Rider Course II” or “Seasoned Rider Course.” Another fact I have often expressed is that I think about 90% of Minnesota motorcyclists choose motorcycles that require skill levels far beyond the riders’ capabilities. Unlike ABATE, the AMA (the motorcycle group, not the doctors’ AMA), and the Industry, I believe tiered licensing is just common sense and that our current license testing is a joke. Not a funny joke, but a cruel, sarcastic, vicious joke that costs lives and billions of dollars in death and injury. From observing street riders over half-a-century and training them for a dozen years, I’d estimate about 50% of Minnesota riders should be limited to 250cc-and-under motorcycles, 90% should be limited to 650cc-and-under, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the 10% who are smart, competent, and safe enough to be on 650cc-and-above would probably choose to ride their big bikes on closed courses 90% of the time.

All that baggage under my belt, we started this course with a little apprehension. A lot of my doubts dissolved quickly, though. After the first couple of exercises it became clear that our students were riding a lot more aggressively and testing their skills more confidently than the typical BRC II class. Some of this was because this was a younger-than-typical class, but I have to give a substantial credit to the fact that we all ride small bikes more competently and confidently than large ones. We decided that I’d administer the test, since I’d studied the BRC II test procedure and had a couple of on-line conversations with California MSF instructors who’d done the test in the BRC II’s early years. The BRC II test is more like the DOT’s test. Which means all four sections of the test are performed by each student, more or less non-stop. More concentration is required, along with competence, memory, and attention, all qualities directly related to being safe on the road. Again, this was a small class filled with better-than-typical students, but at the end they all scored well enough to be qualified as MSF instructors.

I thought about this class for several days afterwards. There are some subversive reasons I am inclined to like the whole concept. The test is more important than I’d imagined. We often have old, unskilled, and/or arrogant riders who simply ride through the harder exercises on their abysmal hippobikes, imagining that there is no relationship between low speed closed course exercises and their delusional “real world.” The apehanger crowd that is overrepresented in mortality/morbidity statistics is typical of this character. Handing them a card that indicates successful completion of the course is particularly galling. Mostly what that group achieves is four hours of an out-of-control riding demonstration on an overweight, unmanageable motorcycle that has put the other riders and the instructors at risk. Most of that alcohol-demented bunch would totally blow the BRC II test because they’d forget half of it before they left the gate. If they were allowed to perform the test on a small bike or their own, the result would probably be the same; massive failure. Nearest and dearest to my heart, allowing these intermediate-level riders to do the course on our small motorcycles might encourage some of them to consider, or reconsider, their choice of motorcycle. A tiny percentage of riders might discover that “small is fun” and take that lesson to the street. If that, alone, happened, I’d be all for letting BRC II riders take the class on whatever motorcycle they chose.

This May be the Last Time

Last year's MMSC training season was pretty much a bust. The first 3-4 months were a clusterfuck of mostly Century College classes that I signed up for because I assumed I'd be shuffling between our new home in Red Wing and the house we were selling in Little Canada. Instead, the Little Canada house sold in March and I ended up trying to make the 60-mile-one-way commute less miserable by checking into hotels for a day so my wife and I could pretend we were getting something out of the trips. The season ended with a foot injury that almost turned me into an invalid for the last months of that summer. Century has been my home school for almost ten years and when I tried a couple of classes closer to my new home I was reminded of my original reason for keeping it close. Unfortunately, there are some really awful instructors out there and I'd just as soon not even know them let alone work with 'em.

The sign-up process for MMSC classes has been a giant hassle since the first year the state took over the program. Each college has it's own meeting (I hate all meetings) and instructors are asked to select class dates 5-10 months into the future for the next year's season; usually sometime between November and early January. It you want to teach at four locations, four meetings at various inconvenient times. Way back in 2002, the state tried an on-line sign-up but too many of the seven or eight 90-year-old long-term instructors couldn't figure out the pipes and wires of "the new-fangled intrasnet-thing" and instructors with senility pulled rank and bawled until the system was drug back to the 1800's.

This year, I decided to give myself a break for the first time since 2001. I only went to the Red Wing sign-up. Later, I ended up volunteering for an IRC (Intermediate Rider Course) that turned into this television PSA: "Experienced motorcyclists most at risk for crashing." So far, one of my four classes has cancelled (due to low turnout). This weekend will be my only BRC of the season. Sometime in July, I'm supposed to do another IRC in Red Wing. After that, I'm free for the first summer in 15 years. The purpose of this break is to see if I miss it. If I don't, this will be my last MSF/MMSC season.

Right Concept, Wrong Mission

An April BRC class included a seriously handicapped rider. For testing purposes, she, of course, chose to ride a scooter, although her already-purchased motorcycle was (big surprise) a large Harley with some kind of automatic transmission modification. There are two places in the BRC license test where students can lose 5 points (each) for not using both brakes. This student would lose a total of 10 points (out of a maximum 21) if she were evaluated like the other students. Physically being unable to control a motorcycle due to a variety of mental (like ADHD) and physical (like obesity) handicaps appears to be a root cause for large portion of motorcycle crashes. You might mistake both the MSF’s “safety training” or the DMV’s licensing testing as an attempt to minimize crashes and fatalities, but you’d be unobservant and politically-clueless if that were your conclusion.

When I asked MMSC management for advice on how to score this student’s evaluation, one comment was “in the spirit of trying to help someone overcome a disability I would say no deduct for not using one hand brake.” The advice from other management and coaching sources was similar. In the end, it didn’t matter. While this student was barely more than handgrip fringe for most of the class, she managed to only collect a few points during the evaluation. Scored either way, she’d have passed the state’s test. There were two other students in that particular course who were less in control of their motorcycles than our handicapped student and they passed, too. I was the license examiner, so if anyone gets blamed for not scoring hard enough it would be me.

The fact that 90% of our licensing system is designed to put butts on motorcycle seats will, sooner or later, be the reason I quit teaching motorcycle safety classes. I do not believe my mission is to “help someone overcome a disability,” regardless of that disability. I do not believe that ADHD, obese, or otherwise physically handicapped people belong on motorcycles on public streets. If that is insensitive, remember that I often repeat the mantra, “Life is hard, then you die. Get over yourself.”

A motorcycle is a fairly effective way to commit suicide, but I don’t feel compelled to be a suicide-pilot-trainer. My motorcycle safety mission, as I see it, is to help potential motorcyclists save some time in learning critical lessons about riding; tactically and physically. The more critical part of my mission is to help people who have no business being on a motorcycle realize that fact before they are killed or injured. I have never encouraged a friend, family member, or anyone I care about to become a motorcyclist. If you are not driven to ride, you should avoid both riding and being a passenger. You are thousands of times more likely to be injured on a motorcycles than on any other means of transportation, including bicycles, so don’t do it unless you don’t have a choice.

In other words, If you can think of a better way to get from point A to B than by riding your motorcycle, you should do it. I write because I don't have a choice, as Menken said "For the same reasons cows give milk." I ride a motorcycle because there are times when I can't see myself going anywhere unless I get to ride my motorcycle there. I play guitar, sing, and listen to music because it is part of who I am. None of those things are necessary to 90% of the population and that's fine with me. It is not my job to help you find your passions, but as a motorcycle instructor it is (in my opinion) my job to help you discover how passionate you are about risking your life on a motorcycle.

Real World Training

When I invited him to hang out at last year's ZARS customer appreciation event, a friend replied, “I think I need a class on how to go slower and stay out of the way more effectively. That's my thing; ride on empty roads. You won't find me in any ‘single vehicle accidents’.” That’s not an uncommon theory on safe riding. However, statistics in Minnesota don’t support that theory of accident prevention. 


The chart that is most applicable to this discussion  is this one (at left).  The overwhelming majority of fatalities happened where the population of a city or township was “under 1,000.” The big cities accounted for damn few fatalities, crashes, or injuries, in fact. So much for being terrified of the big, bad freeway. The state used to track and report the sort of roadway that crashes occurred on, but the 2013 report didn’t seem to contain that information. Like city populations, the relationship between getting killed and being on a low traffic road was direct. For a variety of reasons (see the chart below), most of what gets motorcyclists killed is counter-intuitive. The hope that being on a lonely road out in the country or cruising through small towns is a crash preventative is wrong-headed. It just doesn’t work that way.

Sunday, I did not one time receive any encouragement to “go faster” from any of my ZARS coaches. When I did something well, I was complemented, but not once did Joe, Brent, Debby, Karen, or Jessica say anything about how I might increase my speed. In fact, Brent consistently gave me exercises I could use at lower speeds to work on control, precision, and getting smoother in my cornering transitions. All of my coaches were way faster than me, but making me fast was never a goal of mine and, therefore, it wasn’t one of theirs.

If you look at the “contributing factors” in the chart at right, I hope you’ll see a whole lot of situations where better general handling skills would have saved a few dozen lives at any speed and on any kind of road.

Going Faster on Purpose

How do you know you’ve had a good day riding with folks at Zalusky Advanced Riding School (ZARS)? According to Jessica Zalusky and her professional instructors, your legs are worn out. So, what does it mean when all of you is worn out after an eight hour day riding and learning how to ride smoother, faster, and smarter? In my case, it means “You’re old, out-of-shape, and . . . old.”

One of the perks of being an instructor for the Minnesota Motorcycle Safety Center’s MSF program is connecting to the state’s other motorcycle training programs. This past Sunday, I was invited to participate in one of the ZARS cornering courses. So, from 8AM till 5PM, with breaks for recovery, “classroom” discussions, and lots of water (and coffee) I abused my WR250X and myself on the Dakota County Technical College Decision Driving Range. If you’ve ever watched me ride, you know I have more bad habits than good and the ZARS coach, Joe Mastain, assigned to me and one other rider had his work cut out for the day. Fortunately, the other guy was young and competent, so Joe only had to cope with one thick head.

There is a lot about going faster on pavement that is uncomfortable to me. For almost 30 years, my basic riding  philosophy has been “if you’re not slidin’ you’re not ridin’.” That’s an easy, fairly non-threatening concept on dirt, but pretty much impossible (for me) to apply to pavement. For starters, sliding on pavement involves going a lot faster than I am willing to go. So, I have been in a never-ending battle with my off-road habits and what little understanding I have of traction, lean angle, steering mechanics, and body position. The more hours I get in the saddle, commuting and riding in ordinary situations, the more I revert to my old habits. After spending the winter bombing around New Mexico dirt roads and that state’s decrepit paved roads and playing on Elephant Butte Park’s massive beaches, returning to the predictable traction of the MSF class ranges and Minnesota’s almost-Scandinavian fixation for maintaining pavement was almost a shock. For most of my 2013 ntraining season, I had to pretend that I knew what I was doing with the MSF curriculum because I really wanted to stick a foot out and try to steer with my back tire, like I’d been doing for most of 7,000 miles the past winter. I’ve pretended to know what I’m doing for most of my life, so getting through basic motorcycle classes wasn’t a huge functional shift. The “Seasoned Rider” classes, on the other hand, sometimes felt disingenuous. While I was encouraging my students to keep their feet on the pegs and knees against the tank, I could empathize with their inclinations. I had ‘em, too.

The ZARS program breaks rider skill into six categories: 1 through 6, in fact. I’ve spent a fair amount of time playing around at the DCTC course, but between the facts that I would be riding a 250 in a liter-plus-world and the more important facts that I’m old and slow and haven’t taken a ZARS course before, I signed up as a Level 1 student. If Level 1 turned out to be too remedial or slow for me, I could always ask to be upgraded to Level 2 or an instructor might suggest that I move up a grade.  At this late point in life, I don’t have a lot of ego invested in many things and being fast or looking cool are just not likely scenarios. The added advantage of starting as a beginner is that I took some pressure off of myself. “Keeping up” wouldn’t be nearly as difficult, I hoped, if I stuck with the beginners. Of course, there are no real “beginners” in a course like this. Riders who have enough confidence to put themselves in a situation where they have no chance of being the quickest people on the road are, by definition, experienced, competent motorcyclists.  Beginners are the clowns to show off on public roads without a clue how slow, out-of-control, and incompetent they really are until they are sliding down the asphalt and preparing to provide much needed organs to people who have been patiently waiting for a donor cycle to make a donation.

The course material was no problem, but it was fun listening to someone else say many of the same things I say in an elevated training situation. The DCTC range has a fairly long back straight and a moderately long front straight and my unwillingness to flog my 250 to keep from getting passed on the straights pretty much confirmed the decision to stick with the intro class. I could hang with most of the folks in the corners and for the first couple of sessions the people who passed me on the straights were boring the crap out of me once we hit the turns. Once I had a pack in front of me, I resorted to practicing countersteering with one hand while I waited for them to rocked off on the straight sections. By the end of the morning sessions, that problem resolved itself. Everyone got a lot faster. The first afternoon session, I threw away my machine-friendly attitude and hammered my poor little bike on the long straights so that I could maintain some room to play in the corners. A WR250X being beaten into submission is not a pretty sound and, realizing that I’d be riding my “race bike” back home forced me to rethink that whole philosophy for the rest of the day. ZARS coaches, Brent and Debby Jass (the owners and trainers of the Ride Safe, Ride Smart MSF program) and old Minnesota Sportbike friends, gave me a few things to work on, instead of the one-handed tactic, and that helped a lot. By my fourth time out, I was using all of the track, sometimes exploring the fast line and sometimes pushing my bike into what could be passing lines if we were allowed to pass in the corners. Using their tactical suggestions and working on Joe’s many excellent criticisms of my “dirt bike” riding technique, I was able to put my bike pretty much anywhere I aimed it at cornering speeds that would have made me really uncomfortable earlier in the day.

Our group’s head coach Karen Eberhardt (also an MMSC MSF coach) and the ever-present and incredibly upbeat Jessica Zalusky provided a solid structure for “classroom” discussions between riding sessions and breaks. All of the coaches were available for discussions, criticism, and instruction any time a student was interested in extending a conversation beyond the course materials. I’m pretty sure Joe got about 15 minutes of break time for all of Sunday. (Sorry about that, Joe. Retired people are lousy time managers.) The whole organization is incredibly customer oriented. I don’t think I’ve been asked “Are you having fun?” so often any time in my life. I was, by the way. ZARS is a terrific organization and we are incredibly lucky to have a motorcycle training group like this in Minnesota. One more reason why we put up with Minnesota winters.

Next weekend, Sept 27-28, is ARS Appreciation Weekend Riding at DCTC. A day of closed-course riding costs only $50! It will be your last DCTC chance to experience this great group of dedicated motorcycle fanatics in 2013. Saturday’s event includes a free barbeque at the end of the day. Level 3-6 places were filled as of Sunday night, yesterday. There is no Level 1 for that event, but there were still Level 2 spaces available when ZARS closed up the company RV last night. The last ZARS event of the year will be at Brainerd International Raceway on October 3, 2013. If you want to find out how fast (or slow) you really are, this is the track to make that discovery.

Herding Chickens

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

[I wrote this for the national MSF (Motorcycle Safety Foundation) Newsletter, it appeared in the August, 2002 issue.]

Years ago, a friend who owned and managed a small manufacturing company described his management tasks as being something like "herding a flock of chickens." Since, at the time, I was pulling similar duty as a manufacturing engineering manager, the analogy has stuck in my memory. It all came back, painfully, during my 2002 Minnesota IPC student teaching extravaganza.

The morning class had a group of students who could make spaghetti out of pool cues. As an example, let's imagine that I led each of them by the arm to a point on the ground marked with a big X and said, "You, stay here until I tell you to move to the next spot." Then, I would walk to another large X and pointed to that marker. When I turned around to tell the group to move to that marker, you could bet your month’s paycheck that most of those folks would be wandering around in circles somewhere near the freeway. They were mystical in the manner that they interpreted simple instructions. They could turn any maneuver into a practical demonstration of modern Chaos Theory. But I learned more lessons in crowd control from that class than I’d learned in 25 years of industrial training experience.

I learned a lot about how to pick a group leader, for instance. From what I learned in that class, any faith I once had in the future of democracy dissolved. There are two polar-opposite leaders who will create equally disastrous results in completely different ways. First, I selected the most timid, slowest rider in the group, partially because she was so far behind her group that I had time to completely describe the maneuver I wanted her to perform before the rest of the group formed a line behind her. Little did I realize that "angle across the oval to the opposite side and ride around the course in the opposite direction" could be interpreted as "start making irrational maneuvers all over the range until you run over one of your instructors." By the time I remembered I had a whistle and blew it to stop the motorcycling spasms, I had students scattered all over White Bear Lake. Not the range, but the city.

So, learning something from my mistake, I figured I’d try a completely different tactic the next time around. There was a good reason why I’d decided not to do this the first time, but I discarded that logic since my first plan was so obviously flawed. I picked a guy who was taking the class to provide comfort and support to his wife. He was obviously a cruiser-kind-of-guy, who was growing increasingly bored with our exercises and was practically chewing up his helmet strap waiting for a chance to show us what he could do with a motorcycle. I knew that, way earlier. Accordingly, I had decided to keep him in the middle of the pack to put a leash on his enthusiasm, but I didn’t stick with those guns. No, I handed them over to him, with the instruction to "ride as slowly as you can, across the oval to the opposite side and ride around the course in the opposite direction." Twenty-one milliseconds later, he gunned his bike, dashed across the oval, smack into the middle of the slower half of riders still going the original direction. Then, he got confused and began to make random figure-eight’s all over the range until I blew the whistle, signaled all-stop, and started pounding my head into the asphalt as a subtle indication of mild frustration.

Herding chickens, that’s what we’re doing in the Basic ("beginning") Rider Course. Not always, but enough of the time that it’s important to remember how chickens think. I think the only well known chicken quote is "the sky is falling, the sky is falling . . .." and so on. Our job is to keep the chickens busy enough that they don’t have time to look up or worry about the condition of the sky. If you identify a student who takes direction, pays attention, and can lead the group through reversals and into the staging area, don’t press your luck. Keep using that student until someone complains. If someone complains, listen politely, nod your head, respect their opinion, and stick with your lead student until the Skills Tests are finished, the RXs are signed and distributed, and all of the bikes are back in the trailer. Then, assign the guy who complained to lead the group back to their cars.

That’s my opinion, but I could be wrong.