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That's just because you live where you live... Come to Colorado! We've got three straight roads that go straight for more than two miles in a city of over 500,000 people. Squared off tires are rare here, usually they wear pretty evenly...

Unadulterated parking rant coming up.

I’ve spent the evening trying to find a spare-looking bolt on the Daytona so that I can stick a parking permit holder onto it, but all the Daytona’s bolts are presently occupied in holding the Daytona together. This means that I can’t fit the permit and I will therefore have to take my chances with the traffic warden whenever I leave the bike on the road outside my house during the restricted hours. That’s a pain. OK, I’ve registered the Daytona's details with the local council, so that if I do get a ticket I can trek over to their Letchworth offices, present my papers and they will automatically cancel it. But it’s a hell of a hassle.

It wasn’t always like this. The parking permit scheme only came to my road a couple of weeks ago. The neighbourhood has been debating this one with the council for over three years.

Here’s the situation. My road is very close to a railway station which is on the main line from London to York and on the branch line to Cambridge. Hitchin is a commuter town, so all the commuters drive to the station every morning to catch the train into the city and elsewhere. The station car-park is ridiculously expensive. (Getting the picture?) So, every morning my road fills up with parked cars owned by commuters looking for a free space. They get back from London fairly late, so that means that residents never have any parking space for themselves when they get home from work.

Well, that’s the story. But it isn’t like that. Sure, there are loads of commuters who park down my road every day. But in the five years that I’ve been parking the bike outside the house after I get home from work, I’ve only ever failed to find a parking place three times. So, there’s a moral here: never be convinced by an argument just because it sounds logical. Check out the facts first.

Parking permit schemes only usually get introduced in wealthy middle-class areas where the residents can afford to pay to keep the riff-raff out, not in working-class streets like mine where the houses are small and lots of people live on low incomes (or incomes made from professions like burglary and drug dealing.)

So now we have to pay £60 per year, per vehicle to park. The money goes, so the council tells us, on the adminstration of the scheme and on the wages of the traffic warden who now comes down the road twice a day (so he says) and sticks tickets on cars (and bikes) which are not displaying a permit.

What does all this mean in the real world? It means that during the day when everyone is at work, all the parking spaces down my road are now empty (i.e. they are going to waste). Despite the occasional small inconvenience, local people used to park outside their homes for free, and commuters used to park for free too. Now, local people have to pay for the right to park, so that they can force commuters to pay for the right to park as well. Who wins here? Explain the logic of this to me. Toby, my biking neighbour and I tried to argue against the scheme, but to no avail. The greater wit and wisdom of the local authority finally triumphed. What a pain!

Well, I suppose it keeps somebody in a job.

It’s the idiocy of the situation that does my head in. In practical terms I’m griping for nothing here, as bikes don’t have to pay the £60 permit fee at the moment. Bikes get a permit for free. But those free permits won’t go on for ever. Bikes do not normally have to pay to park anywhere in the UK. That’s been the case for many years. But this current anti-bike government is trying to change all that. And once free parking for bikes goes generally, the free permits will go with it.

The £60 fee is a joke as well. This 'low-cost' permit was introduced to woo the local residents and win them over. We are told that it actually costs the council the equivalent of £120 per person to run the scheme. The permits are therefore subsidised out of council tax. Now I work for a local council (though not this one) and I know how councils work. Once everything has settled down, they will discover that they have to make budget cuts somewhere and, with a change of priorities, they can no longer afford to subsidise the scheme. Very soon I expect we will be paying through the nose.

An Italian friend of a friend was recently telling me how mercifully free from bureaucracy the UK is in comparison with her own home country. Lord help the Italians, is all I can say.

How big and thick is the permit holder, and where on the bike do you want to put it?

I'm thinking you might be able to get a longer version of one of the screws on the fairing, and put it under that.

There are now holders and mounts on the market for putting electronic toll transponders on motorcycles - I wonder if one of these could be adapted for your need?

Hi JS

Thanks for the suggestions.

Yes, I guess when I have a moment I will nip on down to a local dealer and get a longer bolt. I'll probably stick the new holder on the same bolt as my tax disc holder. There's room there for it, and it will prevent the damn bike beginning to look like a Christmas tree.

As for the other item you mentioned - the transponder thingy, I have no idea what this might be or even what it might look like. (Sounds like some sort of Southampton to New York Cunard liner to me.) I don't think North Hertfordshire District Council would know what one was either!

I spoke to the traffic warden on the day the scheme started. It seems that very few people in the street had bothered to buy a permit at that time (bolshy lot that we are) and nobody at the council had bothered to tell him what the rules of this particular scheme were, either. He didn't know, for instance, that bikes were supposed to have a permit as well as cars (albeit a free one). As I was passing, I was able to exercise my duty as a 'citizen' and inform him of this fact. Nor could he make up his mind whether to stick tickets on the few cars that were parking there, or assume that something had gone horribly wrong and give them the benefit of the doubt.

We will never become a southern-European type of bureacracy in this country simply because we are totally incapable of organising a p1ss up in a brewery.

sv-wolf wrote:As for the other item you mentioned - the transponder thingy,

That would be a "Thingy" designed to let the government collect highway tolls, or at least bill you for your usage of the toll highways. I believe they're just an RF tag...

dr_bar wrote:

sv-wolf wrote:As for the other item you mentioned - the transponder thingy,

That would be a "Thingy" designed to let the government collect highway tolls, or at least bill you for your usage of the toll highways. I believe they're just an RF tag...

In NJ the transponder is contained in a plastic case about 2" x 3" x 3/8". Locally it's called an "EZ Pass". If you google EZ Pass+motorcycle+holder you'll find some of the products I was thinking of - perhaps it could be adapted to hold a permit.

It sounds all very sinister. Big brother is bugging you! I'll take a look at the site, JS.

Your island is infested with speed cameras, and you talk to us about big brother??????

jstark47 wrote:Your island is infested with speed cameras, and you talk to us about big brother??????

Tch. What are you on about, Mr Stark? I was speaking quite generally. You Yanks are such a touchy lot.

And please don't hold me responsible for the actions of HM government. (How long have you been reading my posts?) I've never voted for a politician from any political party in my adult life, and I'm never likely to. I bear no responsibility whatsoever for their actions, claim no borrowed glory from their deeds, and owe no allegience to their state. I'm only British 'cos they stamped it on my forehead at birth.

Put simply: it is not my island. I don't own any of it.

Got it????

Maybe you would like to redeem yourself from this shameful outburst of patriotism and give me the benefit of your mechanical expertise. I've discovered something odd about the Daytona's cutting-out problem.

She gave me a clue today (though 'clue' might not be the right word. Clues have to mean something - and this means nothing to me at all.)

I've begun to realise that she only starts to cut out on the clutch, if I had previously revved her while she was warming up. How bizarre is that? I can only think that it must therefore be something to do with the ECU. It happened again this afternoon. I was on the forecourt outside my office. I was rolling her backwards while she was warming up and I accidentally blipped the throttle. From that moment the engine note changed and started to sound very irregular. As soon as I set off and clutched her for the first time she cut out as before and continuted doing it until I got home.

It was then I remembered - exactly the same sequence of events happened the last time.

How come I ended up with a bike as eccentric as this?

[Edit:] Don't answer that, Mr Stark. You've already disgraced yourself enough for one day.

Wow... Now that's a unique problem Mr. Wolf...
IIRC your 'Tona's an FI model right?
If so then yeah, I'd assume it's an ECU mapping issue. Weird though because you'd think it was happening with everyone that has the same ECU map. I'd guess it's running too lean when it figures it has no load on the engine. No idea why it would do that though. Were you in Neutral or 1st when you blipped the throttle backing it out?