More Evidence

Humans are clearly not smart enough to play with 200mph motorcycles off of the race track. Here is one more example of a dumbass in a world of dumbasses. This one appears to be proud of the fact that he almost killed a friend and himself. More evidence that dogs should not breed with monkeys. This kind of stuff is why I can't get too worked up about 400ppm CO2. Humans are clearly not intended to become a sentient animal.

Motorcycle Miles Traveled

One of my least favorite aspects of motorcycle safety statistics is the wildly optimistic "miles traveled" numbers that seem to be spouted by everyone from the dreaded AMA to the MSF to NTSA. I do not believe the average mileage traveled by motorcyclists is anywhere near 10,000 miles per year. But how do we get real numbers?

It struck me this morning that we have a ready source of data, CraigsList and eBay. So, I started paging through CraigsList ads this afternoon, copying down the bike year and miles advertised, tossed them into a spreadsheet, and did some calculations.

Observation and experiences are powerful tools. I realize that what appears to be isn't always what is, but I also realize that people making political claims are often motivated to tell less than the truth about . . . anything. One of my least favorite statistics is the "miles traveled" numbers that are used for motorcycle safety data. I simply do not believe that there are nearly as many motorcycles on the road as the industry, safety organizations, and, even, the government claims.

The Kelly Blue Book, for example, posts the following statement, "Obviously mileage will vary from year to year and model to model. A simple guide could be to consider the type of bike you are looking at: If the bike is a sportbike 600 c.c. to 999 c.c., and since these bikes are traditionally weekend only bikes, you can expect to see lower miles, about 3,000 miles per year. Tourers or Sport Tourers usually see a lot of miles, but these are generally freeway miles, between 5,000 to 6,000 miles per year." Those are silly numbers, based on fantasy. NHTA is considerably more conservative with an estimate of 1,943 miles per year for the average motorcycle. I'm not sure I buy that, either.

When people sell their motorcycles, they are pretty much forced to provide credible mileage numbers, so places like CraigsList, eBay, and local newspapers are pretty useful resources. In about a half-hour on two different days, I collected data on 60 motorcycles. So far, my data indicates the average mileage is about 1,425/year with a standard deviation of 863 miles. So far, there are some radically low-mileage outliers. The most annual mileage I've seen is 4,700/year over a 12 year lifetime. My own mileage tops that, but I'm trying to ignore anecdotal data and only collect "for sale" data to keep the information consistent and believable.

I created my own data gathering tool, a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, that allowed me to enter data that I found in various locations and make some statistical assumptions from that information. Because I'm lazy, old, half-blind, and don't feel some kind of compulsion to do all of this on my own, I' originally posted the spreadsheet on my website for others to play with. A much smarter guy, William Wahby, transferred my Excel sheet to a Google Docs format:(Geezer with a Grudge: Average Mileage) where any of us can add data. If you want to add some bikes from your region, you'll see we've included the following data entry fields for you to work with:

State

Date Sampled

Make/Model or Description

Year

Miles

These are all data entry fields. The rest of the data fields -- Miles/Year, Miles Driven, and the statistical analysis fields -- calculate mileage automatically when you enter data into the Year and Miles fields. Please just enter the traditional two-letter State designation into that field. The date format is automatic: DD/MM/YYYY. I'll take pretty much anything for Make/Model. 

This is the kind of data collection that you'd think/hope NHTSA and the states would be collecting and using for analysis proposes. From what I've been told, they don't bother.  To the right is a charty of what our data looks like, so far. Pretty disgusting, don't you think? One thing this absolutely points out is that the overwhelming majority of riders don't need a bike bigger than 150-250cc. Any damn bike will hold up for less than 2,000 miles a year and how fast do you need to go if you're only going to be on the bike for less than twenty hours a year?

The Cell Phone Rule

All Rights Reserved © 2012 Thomas W. Day

New road trip rule: Never travel with anyone who carries a multi-function touchscreen phones.

Case One: For a decade or two my brother, Larry, and I have talked about taking a motorcycle trip together. Larry suffers from the classic Kansas "I don't care, what do you want to do?" indecision syndrome and the trip has been on-again, off-again for at least three years; as has been his motorcycle ownership decision. Our 2007-2010 trips were cancelled due to family disasters. In 2011, after a summer of missed schedules and minor miscues we began to "organize" a trip around Lake Superior in July. 

Organize is a misused word when it comes to the two of us; or just me. When I bought my WR250X, I told Larry about my plan to circle Lake Superior this summer and he asked if he could go along on my V-Strom. So, instead of prepping one bike for a trip I laid out the riding and camping gear and did the work and paid the tab for tires, chain and sprockets, and general maintenance for two motorcycles and two riders. I gave him a range of departure dates and waited to hear something for a month. I tried for the 1st week in July, no answer. I could feel the trip slipping away. I tried, again, for the 3rd week. Still quiet. I picked a day and got ready for the trip, solo. Four days before my planned departure day, Larry says it's a go. I had a motorcycle class the weekend before we would leave, so I crammed finishing up the V-Strom chores into 2 days. Larry arrived on Saturday night. We did a brief ERC to refresh his skills on Monday. We were on the road Tuesday at 6AM.

After a good start, we stopped for breakfast and the cell phone routine begins. He checked his text messages and sent a few. Then, he called his girlfriend and that's how we spent breakfast. So it went for each meal and every night's stop for a few days. We quit before dusk every day and he was on the phone until 2AM the first night. I didn't ask about his 2nd night, but I knew it went past midnight. The third day out, he was tired, slow to get moving, took long disorganized and unannounced stops, and finally got lost on the only highway going our direction. I backtracked 50 miles, looking in all the ditches, and couldn't find him. Cell phones are useless in Ontario, outside of two cities, so both of our phones were a waste of radio waves for 150 miles.

About 7PM, three hours after he disappeared, Larry called my wife and they talked about where he was, where I was, and where we could meet. What I got out of that was that he was alive and still in Canada. My wife isn't good with message translation. Luckily, Larry and I tripped over each other in Thunder Bay and got back on the path again.

Case Two: I took a couple of short road trips with a friend a few years ago. He's a proud man who believes he is in charge of all of his habits. But every time his iPhone phone rang he had to stop whatever he was doing and answer the damn thing. If we were riding, he'd pull over, take off his gear, and yak on the phone for a few minutes. All while I was stuck waiting for the phone jones to subside so we could get back on the road. The best I've seen him do is to stop to look at his phone and decide the caller wasn't as important as the task at hand and put the call off for an hour or two. He deludes himself into thinking that is a major improvement. It pains me to see a man enslaved to a crappy piece of technology and the expectations of everyone who knows his phone number.

The last couple of times my friend wanted to go somewhere, I suggested we take my car because we might be able to get there and back in my lifetime by cage. I figured if he just talked on the phone all the way to and from our destination while I drove we could save some time and hassle. Since I'd rather walk than travel by cage when the weather is even half-decent, we quit travelling together during riding season.

As I get older and grumpier, I'm generating lists of "never do that again" items. I've always hated telephones, but cell phones and the constant connection addiction took that to a new level. After the incident with my brother, I tossed my cell phone into the street and I haven't decided if I want to replace it. I might give my residual pay-as-you-go minutes to my daughter and be rid of that infernal technology for the rest of my life. Six months later, I haven't been inspired to replace the thing. This could be significant.

Part of what I love about motorcycling is the solitude, the remoteness of being on a one-person vehicle out of touch with work, responsibility, and my usual life. A mobile phone can defeat all of that, if you're not willing to turn the damn thing off. It appears to me that the fancier the phone, but more addicting the thing becomes. Once you can do more than have an unpleasant conversation on your phone, I suspect smartphoners begin to think the phone is actually more entertaining than the places and people nearby. If I'm who you're with and where we are is some place that took some effort to get to, I admit to being insulted by that slight.

The telephone is one of my least favorite modern "conveniences." I have a simple pay-as-you-go cell phone, but it's only turned on when I want to call someone. I rarely want to fool with my phone. In fact, in 2011 I bought 500 annual minutes and carried over 400 into 2012. The clanging, squawking, beeping, or tinny musical reproduction announcing a telephone call is a rude interruption to the flow of the moment. I'm a huge fan of the "no news is good news" philosophy and I can't remember the last time a telephone call brought good news. Phones are like spoiled children, shrieking "Look at me! Now!" I can decide when to receive and respond to snail mail or email. A telephone call is insistent that I respond when someone else decides to interrupt my day. Carrying a portable telephone is like spending a day with an enemy, nothing good will come from it. If you add more distracting functions to the telephone, I will only dislike it more. There is nothing "smart" that ever comes from a telephone.

So, I'm adding smartphone owning motorcyclists to my list of things to avoid; along with motorcycles previously owned by kids, Falstaff-ian motorcycles and bikers, going into debt for toys, being guilted into taking a trip with someone I don't know well, budget motorcycle riding gear,  vintage motorcycles, scooters, and all motorcycles with "personality," distracted cagers, riding cold or dehydrated, marketing people, panic reactions, and motorcycle hoarders. That list might have missed one or two other irritants I've written about or am about to write about. Call it an unwarranted prejudice, if you like. However, since I would just as soon avoid hearing one end of a two-way conversation that is as entertaining as Dick Cheney's sense of humor, I don't have a dog in this fight. It's not a hard problem to solve, either. I'll keep moving while you settle those trivial problems that come to you by cell phone and we'll talk about the trip when we get home.

Extravagant Methods and Extreme Results

According to the JR Central Japan Railway Company statistics, the high speed Tōkaidō Shinkansen holds the record as the world's most used high-speed rail line. The train averages 151 million passengers per year (March 2008) and since the inception of the rail line the Tōkaidō Shinkansen has carried over 6 billion passengers.

I thought about this fact as I rode across parts of the Rockies in July. In a discussion about alternative transportation systems, Kevin Cameron wrote, "The Japanese high-speed trains tear up their roadbeds so rapidly that track alignment machines have to make frequent passes. Such machines put down big hydraulic elephant feet, grip the rails, and then using vibration jerk them into better alignment. Those trains are more of a hood ornament than a practicality - like the Moscow subway."

As I rode down well-maintained highways in rural South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah and passed through hundreds of miles of "men at work" sign-dotted roads under repair, I wondered who's system is really a hood ornament? In the United States, we dive off of the deep end of rationality to protect individuality. We use massive taxpayer investment to protect the "rights" of the few individuals who can afford to live and work in places that have little-to-no socioeconomic justification. These highways require constant maintenance and every couple of years they are ripped up and rebuilt, mostly because the earth itself tears them up.

One Wyoming path we traveled constantly brought me back to the conversation with Kevin. It started with US18 at Redbird, turned into WY 270 toward Lance Creek, and ended back on US18 through Lost Springs and eventually reconnected us to I25 at McKinley. 91 miles of nothing: no population, no industry, no traffic, and damn little justification for a well-maintained road. On top of that economic insult, most of the 270 section had been gouged by someone dragging a piece of equipment down the middle of the west-side lane, cutting a 1-2" deep, 8" wide gash into the asphalt. This section, in fact, is where I began to suspect I had a suspension problem. Each time I crossed that gouge, the bike "skipped" its front tire across the damaged section and chattered for several feet until settling down.

The technology required to build and maintain a road in this abandoned place is unjustifiable. If a system that has transported 6 billion people is a "hood ornament," what is an investment in rural highways that probably wouldn't serve 6 billion people in 6 million years? At best, this area might deserve a gravel road maintained by the taxpayers of the county and state. It might be inconvenient for the local farmer(s?) to have to drive something less manicured than a personal interstate highway, but since it wouldn't matter at all to the rest of the country if this inconvenience turned into a disaster I have no interest in that justification.

Roads like this are nothing more than the result of pork-barrel politics and they exist all over the country. As a taxpayer, I resent them. As a motorcyclist, I really resent them.

The only traffic I saw in nearly 100 miles of this route were three motorcyclists; one traditional Harley couple and a pair of adventure touring BMWs. We passed the first Beemer about 10 miles into US18 and the second in the middle of 270. I was southbound, the BMWs were northbound, so I didn't have much opportunity to watch their interaction with the road. The Harley couple were, like us, heading toward Colorado. Wolf took some pictures of them, while they were in front of us, but they turned out poorly so they've hit the digital trashcan. Honestly, they seemed to be struggling with the wind and the occasional corner, but that's probably just my biased view. They were, however, traveling about 15mph below the speed limit, so we didn't spend a lot of time behind them.

I can't speak for the Harley pair, but I suspect the BMW riders were like me; picking an out-of-the-way route hoping for a little challenge. Instead, what we got was a manicured (if recently damaged) two-lane personal freeway that was hardly challenging and rarely interesting. Wolf and I had a few disappointments like that on our trip. Several of my favorites, including Pike's Peak, that used to be interesting, challenging gravel or dirt roads are turning into expensive, well-maintained, paved highways. If there is any road that rivals the Tōkaidō Shinkansen as an overpriced hood ornament, it has to be the highway to the top of Pike's Peak (or Mt. Evans, which has been paved to the top for decades). The girlymen of the world are ruining all the good rides and I am sick of it. It's time to put a little cost-justification into highway construction (Republicans would call that "rationing") and ask a few reasonable questions before setting the asphalt fascists loose on every backroad in the country.