Why do motorcycles get such bad press?

[hegor]

A minority of motorcycle enthusiasts have created the bad rap that many an innocent motorcyclist has had to deal with. I have a saying it goes "The one percent ruin it for the rest of us." This saying can be generalized to pretty much anything fun. Take video games, sunbathing, and even literature. There is always that one percent that is a memeber of your enthusiast group who will take their behaviors to such an extreme level that they could endager your innocent and saftey conscious enjoyment.

Here is what I see the most that annoys me in Lake Forest CA. where on any given day you can see lots of commuter/outlaw bikers/yuppie bikers/crouch rockets riders and so on.

1) Amatuer hour stunt show. You might be good enough to pull off such daring do, but the drivers around you tend to freak out when seeing such things.

2) V-Twin noise rally. I understand certain bikes are noisy but no need to "pee" people off around you if you can help it. My old neighbor used to ride in late (around 3 am on his HD all noisy and such) and wake everyone up. I asked him politely if there was anyway to ride in quietly, his response was "f you". So then I put the speakers from my very powerful stereo system out of my window and pointed to his bedroom one night and as soon as his lights went out, Slayer went on my stereo very loudly. From the next night on he killed his engine and coasted in.

3) Turing residential streets into raceways. Uh yeah. Imagine your a worry wart soccer mom driving your kids to their piano lessons and you hear this noise..........


mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now that wins them over to understand the freedom and enjoyment of a motorcycle!

[shane-o]

not that anyone, including myself, wants to acknowledge this to strongly, but, riding is dangerous

last stats here in my krazy country are roughly, bikes make up 3% of registered transport on the roads and provide 12% of annual road deaths.

and the group most represented in the the bike deaths is not the under 25's as you might think its my group the 26-40 males.


when people see the krazy lane splitter, the traffic stuntman, surburban road racer, they just lable us all as potential organ donars, cause what else can you say when you see stuff like that in your normal day cage driving.

[dieziege]

~50% of multi-vehicle accidents were the fault of the car not the rider.

Hehe, it's funny that emphasis is put on the car and "not the rider" when it's 50% for both of them.

Huh? It's about 30% for riders. In 20% of multi-vehicle accidents neither party was at fault -- as it it might be weather, road condition, or some other factor.

Most of those accidents also involved alcohol just like the Hurt Report I presume.

No, only about 5% of their accidents involved alcohol... they made special note of that fact, but pointed out that people w/ high BACs were overrepresented in the accidents anyway.