I’m a motorcyclist, have been for over forty years. I don’t drive a car, my licence is for motorcycles only (something just about every cop that sees it comments on), and I have never been interested in getting a car licence. I also ride old bikes between 49 and 65 years old (this year) with drum brakes and none of the mandated ugly crap (like blinkers) that festoon more modern bikes. The only exception is the disc brake I fitted to my 1955 Harley-Davidson, as the original front drum brake, 7” X 1”, is no bigger than the front drum on my 1951 Triumph for a bike close to twice the weight. My basic safety rule is to ride like I’m invisible, and to treat every other road user as a negligent, incompetent, murdering psychopath.

So yeah, I’m biased.

In that forty years I have come to the conclusion that the difference between me on the road and the vast majority of road users is I ride because I enjoy it, they drive because they have to. I care about how I ride, and take personal pleasure and satisfaction from doing it well. Most drivers look on it as an unavoidable chore and would really prefer to be doing something else, something confirmed IMHO, by the number of amusements and distractions built into cars these days. The proliferation of mobile phones and GPS navigation devices has only made this worse, and I reckon cars are just far too comfortable these days, encouraging these non-drivers in charge of vehicles to even higher levels of negligence as they sloth about like they’re playing a computer game in their lounge rooms.

As for so-called “professional” drivers, taxi drivers are notorious for being only interested in looking out for fares, and will U-turn across double lines without hesitation. Many occasions where motorcycles are involved in “single vehicle accidents” I believe is because of evasive action taken to avoid collisions - that’s certainly been my experience. There is also a more sinister side, where some motorists will deliberately set about running bikes off the road, a form of murderous behaviour also practised by police (it has been done to me, by cops, when I was 17 years old, followed by a vicious violent assault when they found they hadn’t killed me).

Truck drivers do have enormous pressure on them, basically because they’re economically screwed. The reason the road transport industry has overtaken rail freight in this country is because owner-operator truck drivers are exploited (and the industry attracts idiots who can’t do the maths to work it out for themselves) compared to organised, unionised rail workers. For the same reason the federal government is screwing over Australian seafarers and allowing them to be replaced with grossly mistreated foreign coolie labour. This is confirmed by Matthew’s description of his uncle’s circumstances. The relative size of trucks compared to other road users means the basic laws of physics makes these vehicles a hazard to everyone else on the road as a matter of course. There is a place for road freight, it’s in small vehicles from the rail head to the final destination - nowhere else.

I also maintain that the way motoring offences are dealt with in the courts are an absolute joke, something that personally affected me with the travesty of justice when my mother was killed by a hung-over drunk protected, I still suspect, by a corrupt relationship between the incompetent cops (no breathalyser test, worthless evidence in court) and the ex-cop barrister the defendant used.

This is an issue that affects us all, and while it’s maybe “off topic”, the parlous state of so much public transport is due to the ideological skewing of so much of the transport system generally in favour of race-to-the-bottom policies that have, since the end of WW1, favoured inferior technologies that have shifted the obvious costs of providing service, to more invisible costs, with pollution, urban sprawl and blight, and the road toll as the manifestations of this cost shifting.

Two wheels good, four wheels bad - ride to live, live to ride.

Tony G

PS - got the blue slip to register my Harley last week, should be on the road with a couple of weeks. Six and a half years after it got burnt, it’s risen from the flames at last.