Editorial

EDITORIAL

David 1, Goliath 0

WELL MY FRIENDS, YOU DID IT. CONgratulations.

A lot of people believed that you couldn’t do it, or wouldn’t do it, but you proved them wrong. You proved that democracy is alive and well in America, that elected officals do not own our government but merely rent it, and that we, the people, are its landlords. Be proud of what you have accomplished; we certainly are.

What you’ve done, just in case you haven’t already heard, is to knock the stuffing out of Senate Bill 1536. That was Senator John Danforth’s “Motorcycle Safety Act of 1987,” the proposed anti-superbike legislation which ultimately would have placed severe performance restrictions on practically all streetbikes.

Most of you learned about S.B. 1536 through articles that appeared either in our October issue, or in recent issues of other major motorcycling publications. One way or another, these stories implored all motorcyclists to stand up and be counted, to take pen in hand and let the appropriate elected officials know that we are large in number and, as voters, will not tolerate such oppressive action.

And that’s exactly what you did. You literally bombarded Danforth, the members of the Senate sub-committee in charge of the bill, and your respective home-state senators with mail that made your utter outrage heard with crystal clarity from coast to coast. Your response to S.B. 1536 was so overwhelming that even Danforth, a hardened veteran of countless political controversies, was totally unprepared, likening it to walking into a buzz saw.

As a result, on October 14, Danforth met with representatives of the American Motorcyclist Association and publicly announced that he had withdrawn his support of the bill. He stated that due to the avalanche of public opposition, “No hearings (on the bill) are scheduled. It’s a deadend street . . . it’s got about as much life to it as last year’s snow.” He said that he could not withdraw S.B. 1536, but that the bill “doesn’t have a prayer.”

That’s a victory of unprecedented proportions for motorcycling. But before you fill your head with too many I-guess-we-showed-them notions, know this: The battle is not over. We’ve not heard the last verbal barrage, not seen the final volley fired in this matter of high-performance motorcycles. To the contrary, the fight has just begun. As CYCLE WORLD Publisher Jim Hansen put it, “We didn’t kill the Death Star; we just moved it off-course. And right now, it’s backing up into the next galaxy so it can get a really good run at us the next time.”

Rest assured, there will be a next time. The force behind this current onslaught of anti-superbike sentiment is still out there, still trying desperately to sweep the streets clean of high-performance vehicles. In many ways, all that our victory accomplished was to teach the proponents of that force that motorcyclists are not such easy prey as originally thought, and that they will need a much more organized, iron-clad program for the next assault.

That force—the Death Star, if you will—is the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the self-serving insurance-industry organization that put Danforth on the scent of superbikes in the first place. Earlier in 1987, the IIHS made a sensationalistic film about canyon-racing accidents in Southern California, while at the same time putting together a so-called “safety study” on the accident frequencies of sportbikes. But before making the film available to anyone else, the IIHS took it to Danforth, along with some carefully selected facts culled from its then-incomplete safety study. Hook, line and sinker, Danforth accepted the IIHS data as accurate and representative of a growing national crisis, and immediately whipped together S.B. 1536.

That same film was also previewed for CBS television executives who, like Danforth, took the bait and subsequently aired a West 57th Street segment, called “Bullet Bikes,” that took dead-aim at—you guessed it— sportbike canyon-racing in Southern California.

We’ve not viewed the entire IIHS film, but we have seen the parts of it that were in “Bullet Bikes”; and we’ve just recently read the IIHS safety study, which was kept secret until after S.B. 1536 was introduced and “Bullet Bikes” was aired. Both are so full of errors, half-truths, illogical conclusions and outright lies that it’s no wonder Danforth and CBS were suckered into producing such anti-motorcycling nonsense. If you knew nothing about motorcycles— which definitely applies to the above two parties-you couldn’t help but conclude that high-performance bikes are the greatest threat to young Americans since the Vietnam war.

So make no mistake: Where motorcycles are concerned, the IIHS is The Enemy. Its objective is either to get motorcycles legislated out of existence, or to have them made acceptably safe—“safe” being a word that, in the lexicon of the insurance industry, means turning motorcycles into things that are not motorcycles as we presently know them.

Once again, preventing such injustices will be left up to you. It might involve something as traditional as another letter-writing campaign or as radical as a boycott of all insurance companies that support the IIHS. But whatever it involves, one thing is clear: We can’t afford to drop our guard and return to thinking about motorcycles in the same way we did before S.B. 1536. Because there now is no question that the insurance industry is out to get us.

You have the power to prevent that from happening. You’ve just proven it. If the IIHS has its way, you might be called upon to prove it once again.

Paul Dean