My local paper led off with this good news today, “Minnesota drivers expected to hit more than 42,000 deer.” “Minnesota drivers have a 1-in-80 chance of hitting a deer this year, with Wisconsin drivers at 1-in-77, South Dakota drivers at 1-in-70 and North Dakota at 1-in-91.”
So, be careful out there.
I've said this before, but there is still not a lot about owning and restoring old bikes that I get. I took a lot of pictures, talked to a bunch of people, and got asked "Do you know Victor?" in response to my MMM riding jacket. In all, I had fun, but wasn't much tempted . . . until I spotted a cheap, fairly sun-thrashed, 1984 Yamaha IT200 for "make offer." 
So, here was one I could afford. Not the bike I rode and loved, but pretty damn close and very accessible. The bits were mostly all there (the motor was busted, but fixable). The rod had snapped and punched a hole in one case. I could see from the parts box that most of the motor bits were reusable. The old bike had probably last been ridden in 2002 and had spent a good bit of the next 11 years leaning against the side of a Texas garage. The plastic was oxidized nearly gray, from the original Yamaha competition blue. The price was ridiculously right. It estimated at least $500 to get it running about another $1,000 to make it primo. A few hundred loving hours and I'd have a motorcycle that I lusted over when I was still mobile and reasonable athletic. I was tempted, but the temptation didn't last. 
My daughter used to wear a t-shirt decorated with the words, "I only wish I could ride as fast as my dad remembers he did." I was in my 40's then. I have no doubt that another twenty years has made my younger self even faster. Hey! There is hardly anyone left alive to provide evidence to the contrary. I can say what I want and you're not going to find a counter-argument from a live person or YouTube, unless you can find some old silent movies that have been transferred to digital video. I was never good enough to warrant more being part of the background for someone who was doing something terrific. 
I abandoned real DP motorcycles when I moved to Colorado (No, that doesn't make a lick of sense.), but after a few years without a serious dual purpose motorcycle, I bought a 2000 Kawasaki Super Sherpa KL250 with the intention of commuting and touring on the bike. The touring part never happened, but I regularly commuted on the little bike, putting 8,000 miles on the bike in two seasons. It replaced my V-Strom as my regular ride; solely because of the fun factor and 70+mpg in-town efficiency. A couple of years ago, I replaced the Sherpa with my current favorite motorcycle, a Yamaha WR250X. It gets slightly worse mileage (about 60mpg), but it starts easily year-around; thanks to fuel injection. I have a little more than 10,000 miles on the WR and it has done double-duty as a regular commuter and an mid-range adventure touring bike. My old V-Strom is even more lonely than before. In fact, I have ridden it once this year, as of mid-August.
My 2016 MSF/MMSC training season appears to be pretty much indicative of the motorcycle training business in general. Due to a physical problem, last year’s fairly normal season got cut short around late July. Since 2001, I’ve been doing 15-25 Basic and (recently renamed) Intermediate classes a year along with the occasional Skills Retest and Maintenance class. Last year, I’d signed up for 16 classes and managed to teach a dozen before my right foot turned into a pain generator and I had to bail out of the last portion of my season. I hadn’t missed a class in 14 years before that season.
This year, I decided to downsize my participation to the minimum 4 classes.Honestly, I didn’t have much fun last season and have been wondering if I’m near the point where teaching anything to anyone has lost its appeal. I have been doing some sort of education function for almost 40 years; either as a corporate trainer or a college instructor. My father was a high school math and accounting teacher and I never imagined myself following in his career footsteps, but I did; sort of. My tolerance for fools has never been well developed, but it appears to be vanishing altogether in my cranky old age. I can put up with miles of inexperience, but I can’t move and inch to fix deliberate stupidity. When I first started training technicians, in the mid-70’s, I was ruthless when it came to putting up with a tech who wanted the planet to revolve in his direction. Several of my employers moved asshole employees into my departments because they didn’t have the balls or personal organization and disipline to fire them. I have always believed in saying (and documenting) what I am going to do and doing what I say I will do. If I say, “Screw up three times and you’re fired,” you should assume that when you’re at two strikes you better not swing at a bad pitch.
Part of what convinced me to quit my college teaching gig was that my ability to make the classroom rules and enforce them had vanished. Probably the worst thing about activities like for-profit education, healthcare, resource management, and like things is that management can rarely remember the purpose of the organization, beyond providing large salaries to management, for any length of time. When the rules for an activity are changed to keep the income steady for mismanagement, the rules no long exist and neither does the purpose of the activity. And so it went for my college teaching career.
The rules for motorcycle safety instruction have never been designed toward improving motorcycle safety. The MSF is OWNED by the MIC, which is all about putting butts with credit or cash on motorcycle seats. “Safety” is just the smokescreen used to justify avoiding the sort of government regulations that motorcycling’s awful safety record would warrant. Any other activity that would cost the nation’s taxpayers a good bit over $16B per year while providing little-to-no valuable utility (except guns and “financial services”) would see the regulation hammer drop like a brick on an ant. Like most for-profit organizations, the MIC has no strong reason to care if its customers die shortly after handing over their cash or the dealers sell the loans to some TBTF bank. It’s not like motorcycling has a long future in sight for these folks or that their execs have a financial motivation to provide for the future of the companies they mismanage.
In fact, the MSF program carefully orders instructors and program managers not to make claims about the MSF’s training having any effect on motorcycle safety. And that’s because it doesn’t. Not only does the MSF know that training doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, it doesn’t appear to work anywhere. One of the attractions to teaching is the feedback an instructor gets when people learn a skill and begin on a path toward mastering it. Trust me, it’s not about the money. Take away the hope there was a reason for spending a hot summer weekend on a parking lot walking 11-miles-per-day putting down and picking up cones, avoiding and preventing injury from a runaway motorcycle and motorcyclist or ten, and listening to people whine when they manage to fail the grossly-easy “skills test” at the end and you kill a lot of instructor motivation.
Teaching the “Intermediate Safety Course” (IRC) is often way less fun or advanced than the “Basic” course. Overcoming the myths and objections of so-called experienced riders is wearing. I’ve dealth with two-year-olds who were more informed than the majority of over-50 Harley riders; especially the “club” characters who are just making the motions toward motorcycle safety to justify their gang patches and pirate parades.
One of the main consumers of the IRC has been Polaris, with a requirement that employees must obtain a motorcycle license and take both the BRC and IRC before they can “check out” bikes from the company’s reverse-engineering inventory and Indian/Victory loaners. To accomodate those wannabe “motorcyclists” who want to ride but don’t want to have to actually buy a motorcycle, we ran an experiment a couple of years ago with allowing IRC customers to use the BRC bikes along with taking the MSF’s IRC test at the end. The results were pretty good, but the outcome was that we’re now allowing IRC students to use the small bikes but we’re blowing off the test. If there was ever evidence that we are not serious about providing actual results from motorcycle training, it was this for me.
So, at the end of this season I’m going to be spending the winter contemplating my motorcycle safety training “career.” Like most teaching gigs in the US, I think the average length of a motorcycle trainer’s career is less than 3 years. You’d think getting to play with motorcycles for fun and profit would be a better gig, but it isn’t in most states. Again, it’s the feedback reinforcement that overcomes the downsides to teaching and they aren’t there.
My wife and I made a run for Northfield on Friday in the pickup because we were planning on blowing a boatload of money on trees at Knecht’s Nursery. About five miles east of Northfield on Highway 19, a westbound pickup was turning right into a farm house driveway. A nutjob on a big cruiser pulling a trailer was tailgating the pickup and, apparently, didn’t see the turn signal or notice the pickup was slowing for the turn. We were about 100 yards behind a delivery truck in the eastbound lane.
The biker nutjob decided to split the space between the pickup in front of him and the delivery truck, with a foot of space on either side. I shit you not, the idiot was dragging his fucking FEET to slow down while he slithered between the two vehicles! He had to have been going at least 60 mph and didn’t make the slightest effort to even roll off the throttle. I know because we could hear his POS exhaust going full bore when he past us.
Sometimes I like to generate my own statistics, just to see of the published data bears any resemblence to actual highway experience. This afternoon, I rode from Red Wing to Rosemount and back, mostly because I screwed up and didn’t see the email yesterday rescheduling the MMSC coaches’ night at DCTC to next week. Oh well. While I’m riding my overly nimble WR250X on relatively boring county and state roads, I like to count the number of cars between motorcycles. Today, the sequence went like this:
When I’m doing my numbers, I don’t count groups of motorcycles as anything more than one rider. If it’s a pack of slow-moving pirates, I don’t count them at all. That kind of riding is just conspicuous consumption and has nothing to do with transportation. However, on this trip I didn’t even see a pirate parade around Treasure Island. I suspect most of the biker crowd have put up their chrome toys for the season.
Let’s add ‘em up, four motorcycles over 2086 cages or about 0.2% of highway traffic on a perfect motorcycle day in September at and around rush hour. That is one seriously dismal statistic. It absolutely justifies my estimate (from Craig’s List motorcycle want ads) that the average motorcycle is ridden barely 1,000 miles per year.
Now, let’s look at last year’s crash stats. There were 61 motorcyclists killed in Minnesota last year and, oddly, 67 people were also killed in pickup crashes. Combining two types of cages, SUVs and vans, a total of 41 people died in those vehicles’ crashes. So, if you believe there is any legitimate comparison to be made between the miles travelled by pickups or SUVs and vans and motorcycles, I’m all ears. Make me laugh.
On my mid-summer’s trip to Colorado, I went into overload on a couple of long stretches where the count was in the several thousand vehicles per motorcycle. Around Ft. Collins, the stats were more encouraging, but a couple dozen miles west into the mountains and, once the racer boyz were on their way back to the dorm, motorcycles vanished and I didn’t see another bike until Steamboat.
We’re a vanishing breed folks.
For about 40 years, I had at least some of my fingers into some area of mid-to-high-tech every day. When I moved from engineering into academia, I was pretty much down to one finger on the edge of what was going on in technology. Retirement put an end to that connection in any practical sense. One of the few ways I have left to stay in touch with what is going on in the tech world is my subscription to “Design News.” This month, Design News had a few articles that should be interesting to a motorcyclist.
In this month’s review of the magazine’s past home gadget builder projects, “Gadget Freak Case #235: Ignition Control Unit for Harley Davidson Panhead Engine” described how one gearhead tried to resolve the problem of getting an old Harley to start reliably. There isn’t much follow-up in the article, so I don’t know (or care) how it all worked out. Reading the story of his analysis and design solution was interesting, though.
In case you are still suffering the delusion that autonomous cars are in the distant future, "Hope or Hype? Big Automakers Look to Autonomous Vehicles" should relieve you of that false hope. You might know how I think autonomous vehicles are going to affect street legal motorcycling, so read it and weep. "Ford president and CEO Mark Fields made it clear that the giant automaker is not settling for half-measures in its effort and is going straight to self-driving cars by 2021. ‘That means there’s going to be no steering wheel. There’s not going to be a gas pedal. There’s not going to be a brake pedal and, of course, a driver is not going to be required,’ he said."
As for the noise, pollution, energy inefficiency of internal combustion engines, "6 Automakers Will Lead the Way to EV Battery Growth" describes how “Six big automakers will carry the electric vehicle (EV) battery market to a five-fold sales increase by 2020, a new study says . . .Tesla, General Motors (GM), Renault-Nissan, Volkswagen, BMW, and BYD will account for 90% of the electric car battery sales during those five years, mostly on the strength of bigger battery packs.” By “bigger” the article is not talking about physicial size, later this year Chevy will be hyping a “60-kWh battery in the all-electric Chevy Bolt.” The number of electric cars on the road is going to change, too. Tesla is planning for “annual sales of 500,000 of the affordable Model 3 vehicles by 2018.” There is some debate over how much of the cage market electric vehicles will be in the next few years, but I think the end of the Age of Oil is in sight and if I were a younger motorcyclist I’d be really interested in how that will play out on two wheels.
