Surly you’ve heard the popular phrase “driving is not a right, it’s a priveledge.”
Please consider the depth of that statement. Think about how drunk/drugged drivers, traffic scofflaws and even car cell phone users have felt the legal repercussions of a pissed-off electorate. I don’t think you appreciate how easy it would be to literally outlaw motorcycles. There are a lot of voters in the three-block radius of that roaring, loud bike, my friend.
I think you have visions of a popular pro-motorcycle uprising akin to the ones envisioned by gun right advocates. Forget it. Bikers have no constitutional leg to stand on. They are entirely at the mercy of local, state and federal legislatures.
I totally agree with the AMA’s stance. A few loud bikers (some who just want to be cool, and others, like yourself, who are looking out for their own personal safety – everyone else’s comfort be damned) are going to screw it up for the rest of us.
those are people who endanger other peoples lives, and last I checked, they dont have a bazillion political lobbiest working to make it legal to drive drunk while talking on a cell phone. Its a bad comparison
But there are a lot of voting motorcycleist who have well organized rights groups that would keep them from being outlawed. Thats why the helmet laws keep getting repealed. And no, that would not be the AMA, but groups like the Texas Motorcycle Rights Association, ABATE, and a host of others. At one of the Texas democratic conventions they had enough voting representatives to force them to put helmet repeal on the platformm before anything else.
In several states, legislators who voted for the helmet law where voted out office next term partly because the motorcycle lobby worked for thier opponent(I remember one in california where the newly elected credited the motorcycleist in her acceptance speech)
nope, they have an organized lobby that is better than an uprising, are at the mercy of no one. We vote.
Lets see…My life…Someone elses comfort…Sorry bud, gotta go with saving my life…Thanks for your insight.
My neighbor Joe owns a Harley. That bastard is LOUD. We can hear it, in our house, with the doors closed and windows sealed. And we have amazingly sound-proof condos. In four years of living there, I’ve been awed at how seldom we hear anything from outside or the neighboring homes. Until Joe bought the Harley. Outside, it’s deafening.
But so fricking what? It’s his hobby, it makes noise for, what, 7 minutes tops as he gets it started and rides out of the neighborhood? How much does that cut into my quality of life? Not worth measuring.
It’s a beautiful bike too, I must say. He loves it, takes great care of it, gets a lot of pleasure out of it.
I suppose if he had a biker gang that met at his house and rode around on our street for a coupla hours each night, I’d be cantakerous about it. But as it is, it doesn’t seem worth being a bitch about it.
bdgr, so “they have an organized lobby that is better than an uprising, are at the mercy of no one.”
Realllllly? At the mercy of no one, eh?
So then I can assume there are no noise ordinances for bikes? Silly me, I thought there were.
And I can assume there are no helmet laws? Silly me, I thought there were.
And I can assume there are no inspection requirements? Silly me, I thought there were.
And I can assume there are no speed limits? Silly me, I thought there were.
Tell you what, bdgr. Next time you see a biker get pulled over for doing 60 in a 30 MPH zone set the cop straight. Tell him that bikers are “at the mercy of no one.”
If you have such a hard time envisioning a world without motorcycles, just think what it would be like if every single motorcyclist had a loud, roaring bike – a situation which I presume you endorse. If the electorate is forced to choose between tens of thousands of roaring bikes and no bikes at all, I suspect that motorcycles will go the way of the steam locomotive.
First of all, I meant in the sense of bikes getting banned and such. And the mercy of no-one in the sense that no citizen is "at the mercy"of thier government.
If enough citizens bitched about loud bikes, they would just start enforcing the ordinanaces that exist, maybe making siffer penalties. The assumption a situation would ever occur that it would be a choice “between tens of thousands of roaring bikes and no bikes at all” is pretty absurd. There are many steps inbetween here and there. A elected official who tried to take such a drastic approach would find himself unemployed, so no one would even propose it. And there already are “Tens of thousands of roaring bikes” actually, a whole lot more than that. Check out sturgis or daytona during bike week. Sturgis had 630,000 people for the 2000 rally, and probably 2/3s of the bikes there would be considered loud.
open pipes are not something new. We have been running them this way for 70 years or more. THe world has not come to an end yet. 3
in my opinion, ABATE and the folks in texas are wasting thier efforts on lost causes and counterproductive issues. i don’t think BDGR and i will ever agree on some issues, but that is fine. i respect his right to whatever opinion he wants. that is the beauty of this country. i consider riding my bikes a “right”. i have seen how easy it is for other people to take “rights” away, by passing laws or other illeagle means. i try to protect my rights by being considerate of other’s rights, and not pissing them off too much. i recognize there are alot more of “them” then “us”, and they can (attempt to)vote us out of existance. they might not succeed, but we will surely lose ground somewhere.
my views on helmets are the same as on (other hot issues): what i may do has nothing to do with anyone else. every one should have the right to choose for themselves.
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So far, they have been pretty successfull. The helmet law here in Texas is all but repealed. You just have to have health insurance, or pass a saftey course to ride helmet free. And they are chipping away at that now.
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I think that it was Hienlin who said “If two people agree on everything, one of them isn’t neccesary”
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There may be a few more of them, but history has shown us that doesnt matter so much as having an organized group to protect your rights. Look at how many people voted in the last presidential race. If you have huge group of people, who dont care enough to voice an opinion or vote, or a small group who activly protests and lets you know they will do thier best to vote you out of office, which group do you think the policitcians will be more afraid of? This is why the helmet laws keep getting repealed, why motorcycles are now able to drive in the HOV lanes, why ordinanaces banning motorcycles from public parks have been struck down etc. A vocal minority beats a sedentary majority any day.
That said, I try not disturb anybody unneccesarily with my bike. I dont rev my bike uneccesarily at lights, or really get on it in residential areas. I don’t work on my bike in my bake yard at 2 in the morning for the same reason I dont run my table saw at two in the morning. Common courtesy. Most people I meet from day to day dont have a real problem with loud bikes. At worst, its a few seconds of loud noise pulling out from a light, or when someone first starts thier bike to ride off. Especially with an older bike like mine, people will come up and ask questions about it, or wave to me on the road.
I’ll start this out by saying that I’ve rarely had a problem with a motorcyclist while on the road. With a few exceptions most of them seemed aware of what was going on around them and I do my best to give them a wide comfort zone when I know I’m around them.
This Labor Day weekend we went to Mountainview, Arkansas for my wife’s yearly family get together. The highlight of the trip is going into town to listen to the mountain music festival. I should mention that only no electric amplification of voice or instrument is permitted at the festival. It isn’t hard to walk 20 yards from a group playing and not being able to hear them. There are many such groups playing during the evenings.
Well apparantly there was some sort of biker rally in the area. Some of the local businesses had signs up for ABATE riders and there were many more motorcyclist then usual. I only ran into two problems with them.
Their loud engines drowned out the music every time they cruised around the courtyard. They should have been a bit more considerate and parked a bit farther away.
They came to the resort well after midnight and their bikes were loud enough to wake me. This didn’t just happen once during the night either.
I don’t think these bikers were going out of their way to be inconsiderate on purpose. None of them caused any trouble and they were just enjoying the music like everyone else. I suppose in the long term it really isn’t the end of the world. But it can be pretty annoying when a loud bike inturrupts sleep or the enjoyment of some music at a festival you only get to attend once a year. Of course in this case it was mostly Harley Davidson bikes that were making all the noise. But I’ve also heard some pretty loud crotch rockets in the past.
How many bikers with those loud engines experience some form of hearing damage?