www.roadracerx.com/article.php?article_id=358
Click here for printer friendly version (All links open in a new window) For a while, I worked in Los Angeles, on the sixteenth floor of building that would have been downtown, if El Lay had a downtown. I noted the conversations that strangers struck up on the elevator rides. In Canada, we talked about the weather in such situations. Weather--often extreme weather--was the inescapable context of our lives. The answer would come, "Simi Valley," "Tustin," or whatever. Then, inevitably, "How long does it take you to get in?" " I always wondered what that could possibly have meant, since in Los Angeles, there's never no traffic. Over the course of my life, I've been a cab driver (earning my Bachelor's degree in traffic) and a courier (Master of Traffic Arts and Sciences). But the 120-mile one-way trip from my home in San Diego up to my office on Wilshire Boulevard was where I earned my PhD in commuting. I suppose I got used to SoCal ways, because last week I returned to Canada for a visit. Spring had sprung up there and despite the rash of gravel left on the roads, there were loads of motorcycles out when I left the Calgary airport at the height of rush hour. As I inched along in stop-and-go traffic on McKnight Boulevard, I looked in my rear-view mirror and wondered what that guy on the GSX-R, directly behind me, could possibly be waiting for. Then I remembered: lane splitting is illegal there (as it is pretty much everywhere in North America except in California). There was a great article by Nick Paumgarten in a recent (April 16) issue of the New Yorker about the state of commuting in America. Reading it, I learned that about 90 percent of Americans commute to work by car, and about 90 percent of those commuters do so alone. One commuter in six travels more than 45 minutes each way. There are several million drones who spend three or more hours a day in their cars. Indeed, those "extreme commuters" make up the fastest-growing category, according to the US Census Bureau. Leave aside the collective insanity of what those commuters typically drive, and the fact that (at least in my direct experience) most commuters under-report the length of their commutes. The New Yorker article served to quantify something that I've always implicitly known, which is that long commutes are emotionally corrosive. Despite the fact that people consciously, objectively set out to optimize some kind of life equation when they choose where they'll live and work, there is a very strong inverse correlation between the length of the commute and the worker's happiness and satisfaction in day-to-day life. Reading it made me wonder what effect commuting by motorcycle would have on the psyche of suburbanites. At least in California, where lane-splitting is legal, motorcycle riders are never really subjected to the teeth-grinding infuriation of coming to a full stop on the freeway. In heavy SoCal traffic, two wheels obviously move more freely than four, and often pick up time at the destination when they're easier to park. Against this, of course, one must balance time spent girding one's loins for battle, and more frequent (but shorter) fuel stops. Purely on a time spent (read: wasted) basis, motorcycles win, but not always by that much. Some times in that elevator, people would see me in my Roadcrafter suit and full-on enduro boots, carrying my helmet and backpack, and they'd ask, "Where'd you come in from?" The thing is, it wasn't boring, because riding in heavy traffic is its own extreme sport. Or at least it is a slow motion dance/duel that threatens to become an extreme sport if you let your concentration waver. So I arrived, sometimes after lane-splitting for sixty of the hundred and twenty miles, feeling pretty pumped. Anyway, the rare times that I drove up instead of riding up, I arrived in a state of rage, so I give motorcycles the credit. I was always amazed how rarely I saw other motorcycles on that ride, considering that I passed thousands of cars each trip. You'd think more of those guys would get the idea, especially considering that hundreds of them must've had bikes in their garages at home. Collectively, the motorcycle industry has done a poor job of explaining to car drivers that each motorcycle rider means less fuel burned, less foreign oil imported, and less greenhouse gas emitted than almost any four-wheeler is accountable for. Motorcycles free up parking spaces and, where lane splitting is permitted, they effectively occupy interstitial space in traffic, contributing virtually nothing to congestion. So not only do motorcyclists get where they're going faster, so do all the car drivers. If you think I'm exaggerating the impact of 1 or 2 percent of drivers switching to bikes, you need to study traffic flow patterns. The difference between completely free-flowing traffic that moves at the speed limit and stop-and-go traffic averaging speeds in the single digits is often measured in a few percent of the total volume. And the best thing about riding is that you arrive feeling good about yourself, since even a pretty shitty ride is actually fun. In the past, when I've written about this stuff, it's largely been in the context of preserving lane-splitting where it exists, but now I think we should make it a project to get lane-splitting approved everywhere. Over there, they call lane-splitting "filtering," and those couriers are masters of the art. The thing that fascinated them the most was that it was largely forbidden in America. ") Being able to filter through traffic, both on the freeway and moving up to the front of the queue at traffic lights on surface streets, is the killer app for motorbikes. The industry should promote it because it will sell bikes. Of course, a first step toward loosening lane restrictions for motorcycles will be establishing that this killer app is not literally deadly. I guess that will depend on the new comprehensive safety study being conducted by the Oklahoma Transportation Center. We'd better find (as did Hurt Report found, back in the '70s) that proper lane-splitting is no more dangerous than stop and go traffic. I suppose, considering how angry some California motorists get when you lane-split past them, that we'd have to conduct quite a public education program in states that suddenly allowed it. I think Texas almost did allow it last year, and two Illinois legislators--John Cullerton and Donne Trotter--recently proposed adding a mandatory helmet provision for the state, while simultaneously amending the state's highway code to allow lane splitting "in a safe and prudent manner" when traffic was congested. Their bill was left in limbo when the state senate session ended, but this is a great idea. I'd like to see every state that currently allows people to ride without helmets strike the same bargain. Commuting by motorcycle would get safer and faster with the stroke of a pen. On a related subject, a couple of weeks back I noticing a few disturbing stories coming out of the UK. It seems that large private-sector companies over there have started "banning" the use of motorcycles by their employees. The first I heard about was Johnson Controls, but several others followed suit. I was angered by the very notion of it, but then I learned that no one was saying employees couldn't commute to and from work on their bikes, the companies were "just" saying that motorcycles couldn't be used by employees while they were working. I presume they mean, say, you need to run some document or widget across town, or get across town to attend a meeting. I thought, #& 'em then, if those companies want to waste time and money, let 'em. But it turns out that most of the companies that have just passed these rules are responding to pressure from the giant AXA insurance company, which has added a "no motorcycles" provision to commercial liability policies in the UK. Of course, the strongest supporter of commuting by motorcycle is Andy Goldfine, who owns Aerostich/RiderWearhouse.
a whole website devoted to helping us riders be our own best PR. The more of us there are on the roads that day and every other day, the better it will be for all ...
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