Moto Journal: commuting thoughts

As of today, I have been moto-commuting for three whole months. Here are just a few of the many things I think about that:

1. There is simply no more awesome way to get to work in the morning than on a motorcycle. Hands down. As an added plus, the adrenaline fix that comes with dodging the occasional mildly dangerous situation or simply from twisting your throttle wrist on an open stretch of road is a fantastic day-starter for those of us who suffer from ADHD!

2. It’s not as dangerous as everybody made it out to be. I mean, I got cut off by an 18-wheeler who decided to merge across two lanes of traffic all-at-the-same-time once, but I had plenty of time to activate my still-new braking reflexes and avoid a collision or a skid or anything. I dropped the bike once when I was skirting around a traffic jam on a soft shoulder, as one is tempted to do when one rides an adventure bike and there is a traffic jam up ahead. But other than those two times, I have never come anywhere close to my bike being the “suicide machine” Springsteen called it in his classic “Thunder Road.” In fact, it has been a safe and stable way to get from point A to point B for three months now, and a funner way than any four-wheeler I’ve ever driven at that. 

3. You have to plan extra time. Assuming you take your ATGATT seriously, it takes about an extra fifteen minutes (relative to car commuting) of time in the morning to get the earplugs in, the jacket and helmet on and configured properly, the iPhone properly mounted with Waze properly programmed, and the tunes prepped to play on my Bluetooth com system. The ride itself feels shorter, even if it isn’t by very much, but you have to plan for that extra prep time. 

4. Traffic is a pain in the, well, just about everywhere. It is never fun to sit in stopped traffic in any vehicle, but it is an order of magnitude worse on a motorcycle. Motorbikes, even the modern liquid-cooled ones, are not made to stand still for very long – they are built with the assumption that air is going to be flowing past the engine. Even at an easy idle, my right leg starts getting hotter than I like after about 5 minutes of stop-and-go at a construction site or the like. This is why lane-splitting and shoulder-riding should be legal for motorcyclists: we just aren’t built for standing still. 

5. If you are willing to bend the law just a bit, you can avoid most of the traffic. I once came up an on-ramp to find traffic stopped on the freeway behind a construction site. But there was no traffic on the shoulder! I skimmed along the shoulder to the next off-ramp (which was not very far) and spent the next few miles of my commute on back-roads moving faster than I would have stuck in a car on the freeway. Another time, I came to an off-ramp that was backed up in my lane onto the freeway itself due to getting-out-of-work traffic. That just wouldn’t do (see point 4), so I exited in another lane and waited until there was a motorcycle-sized gap in the turning traffic to make my lane change near my actual turn. Nobody seemed to mind. 

6. People on my commute, at least, seem to notice me and respect the laws of physics that I have to cope with. I have not run into the “cars don’t see motorcycles” problem on Houston roads – maybe because we have a lot of bikes here, maybe because I wear high-viz gear, maybe because I am a pretty sensible rider and tend to do things that are easy for other drivers to anticipate, but nobody has yet to try to occupy the same space on the pavement that I am occupying or planning to occupy. In fact, other drivers have been fairly well courteous: if they see me giving a full four-second following distance on a crowded freeway, they fall back behind me almost the same amount. It’s weird. 

7. That said, there are a lot of people in the current generation who seem to have learned the art of freeway driving from the game Pole Position. ‘Nuff said. 

8. And you should always be aware of white cars, especially when they travel in packs. I’m not kidding: three white cars or vans or trucks in a given space always spells traffic trouble for me. I don’t know why; it’s just an observation. 

9. Adventure bikes win over cars in rainstorms with minor flooding. I’m serious about that: bike tires are built to slice through puddles, car tires are built to sit on top of them and hydroplane. One still needs to have a healthy carefulness about water on the road, but I get home more easily than my wife in the minivan when the roads are “ponding,” as they say in these parts. Also, good rain gear is your friend. And somebody needs to invent “rain-X” for helmet visors. 

10. Riding is a drug. Acceleration, curves, being *in* the scenery instead of in a metal and glass box, it’s all just a thing that wakes me up and makes me feel alive. Which circles back to number 1. 

Here’s to another three months. See ya on the road, y’all!