The Ride
The Ride
State of the sport report
KEVIN CAMERON
THE MOTORCYCLE IS NOW 114 YEARS OLD. GIVEN THAT HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT, IT’S NOT SURPRISING that it has reached a high degree of technical excellence. But the motorcycle has also matured in other ways. It has evolved into many forms to serve everyone’s particular uses. It has notably pierced some social barriers. One of these is gender. Women are choosing to ride motorcycles, not as passengers, but as operators. Welcome to the fun.
Another is age. In times past-that is, when I was 20 years old-motorcycling was regarded much as was Socialism; it was understandable if an idealistic young man dabbled in it, but scandalous if he persisted into later life. Now it has become perfectly okay to be a life-long motorcyclist. Many former riders, sensing that this is so, have resumed the sport.
Also of some assistance have been the Italian designer motorcycle, the Guggenheim Museum’s motorcycle show and the idea of the American custom bike as kinetic art. All these have conspired to make it possible for wealthy and/or educated persons to disguise their fun with motorcycles as high culture. Welcome also.
Despite these gains, there remain both real and perceived threats to motorcycling in this new century. Economics, for one. Although we’re still enjoying a boom and rising sales, we’ve also seen former Asian tigers transformed into mewing kittens. We see our own economy displaying touches of high-speed instability. Does Mr. Greenspan really understand wobble and weave?
History shows that motorcycling survives it all-depressions, wars and cheap automobiles. The motorcycle is a shape-changer. When it is no longer needed as basic transportation, it morphs into travel, leisure and sport, splitting its identity to fill a kaleidoscope of niches.
How about technology itself as a threat to the motorcycle? Might the day come, for example, when only cars are able to carry all the gadgets required by future vehicle legislation? Or will the motorcycle evolve into something too complex to survive, overloaded with radar anti-collision warning, ride-by-wire and yaw control? As a NASA engineer once observed, even if every part of a system is so good that only one in a million fails, if your system has a million parts, you’ll have a failure every time you fly.
Wrong. A human being is unimaginably more complex than any technology, but an average example runs more than 600,000 hours. As complexity increases-and most of it is in control computers-it becomes possible to include self-checking and backup features that mimic living things. Biotech and computer science are converging.
What about environmentalism and land closure? Will the day soon come when the only person legally admitted to public land will be Henry David Thoreau himself, and even he will have to remain silent and motionless? The harder the regulators work to promote restrictive legislation, the more allies they give us-watercraft users, mountain bikers, snowmobilers, even people who just want to mow their lawns with machines they can afford. The more people excluded in law, the louder their collective voice becomes.
Petroleum exhaustion is upon us, as they’ve been telling us for 50 years that I know about. Even if it turns out to be true, it will be a gradual process, a time of rising fuel prices. Which would you rather fill, the 4-gallon tank of a motorcycle or the 25-gallon tank of a big SUV?
Quite aside from the specific politics of the moment, there is one big underlying reason to be optimistic about the motorcycle.
For a thousand millennia, we humans went about our business on foot. Then, some 8000 years ago, everything changed with the domestication of the horse. The horse’s long legs and great power thrillingly multiplied the rider’s own capabilities many times. Imagine the joy of galloping on that early 1-horsepower model-it was like our sleeping dreams of effortless leaping and flying, like the open-mouthed joy of babies as they walk for the first time.
This powerful feeling is the real basis of motorcycling, and because it is built into our natures, nothing can destroy it. Not the carbon tax, not wobbling economics, not even the alleged demise of the internalcombustion engine.
Rely on it. We humans will always find a way to ride. □
