An earlier Mr. Subjective blog post led to a long-ish email exchange between two old friends: Tom, a continuing blogger in ‘Geezer with a Grudge’, and Mr. Subjective. The ‘Sorta Sensible Trade Off’ essay was about the trade-offs between today’s safety-enhancing technologies like anti-lock brake systems, and the other important aspects of the motorcycling experience. Among other things, Tom is a retired MSF instructor. Below is our email exchange, time-sequenced for clarity.

On Mar 5, 2020, at 4:35 PM, Tom wrote:

Andy,

Interesting article. Back in 2012, when I reviewed the R1200GS for MMM (Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly), I noted that BMW’s ABS was a pretty coarse device, especially compared to the Super Tenere that I’d reviewed earlier. I concluded that section of the review with “In fact, I'd be inclined to turn off ABS on a long off-road trip.” As usual, Victor and the editor took a verbal/email beating for allowing that criticism into the review. I’m not surprised that rattling caused downstream stress on the driveline and I wish I’d have suspected that for the review. ? It would make me seem almost smart now.

When I was teaching the “Experienced Rider Courses” I was always entertained by the Harley and Polaris riders during the emergency braking exercise. The ABS on those hippobikes was so brutal and the jerking scared the crap out of most of the riders (who had probably never used their brakes before the class).

Hope you’re doing well.
Tom
http://geezerwithagrudge.com

From: Andy (Mr Subjective)
Sent: Thursday, March 5, 2020 4:58 PM
To: Tom Subject: Re: Modern Technology & Trade-Offs

Thanks for writing. Long time. All is well here.

On the business side, Aerostich still mostly solvent and staggering along. Not much growth but holding steady now. Still a fun business and still enjoying both the customers and my co-workers most of the time.

On the motorcycle side, have two running ridable bikes: 07 R1200R and 94 XR650L. Also a low-end electric bicycle and a regular pedal bike. None of these are fancy. They’re just rideable. Rode to NYC and back last summer. To Nebraska for the eclipse the summer prior. To the BMW RA national rally three summers ago. Not sure where I’ll go this year.
Glad you wrote. Hope we’ll see each other in person somewhere this summer.

On Mar 6, 2020, at 7:50 PM, Tom wrote:

Hey Andy,

At least in the US, motorcycling seems to be “staggering along,” too. The number of MSF courses offered by the state seems to be dropping 10-20% every year since 2007, when it peaked. I quit last year. The previous year every class I signed up for cancelled due to low student turnout. Century College went from 3 ranges doing two classes (morning and afternoon) each every weekend from April to September to one range intermittently doing classes; morning only. I don’t think Red Wing is doing any classes this year. Some kind of sea change is going on here that, oddly, doesn’t seem to be happening anywhere else in the world.

I keep hearing the tameness of Millennials blamed for motorcycling’s problems, but my experience with that crowd doesn’t back that up much. My grandson, for example, commutes 12 months a year on a mountain bike or eBike (RadMini), he is into rock climbing, wall jumping, marathons, kick boxing, and all kinds of stuff I’ve never heard of and has lots of friends doing the same kinds of things. I’d put riding a bike 7 miles one way in a Minneapolis January over anything I’ve ever seen a hippobike rider do, adventure-wise. He sucks at maintenance, though. His eBike is in my garage waiting for a motor replacement. He beat it to death in 8 months. We did a full service on his mountain bike last weekend and it was pretty hammered, too. ?

After last summer’s medical bullshit, I don’t know where I am as a motorcyclist. I didn’t ride a mile last year and missed a lot of the spring the year before. We’ll see this spring. It’s possible that I’m just a bicyclist now. My wife really got into her eBike last year so we do that together often now. A first for that.

A good friend of mine from California was in Nebraska, somewhere west on US20 on my recommendation, for the eclipse. I thought about joining him, but copped out. I guess it was really crowded and nutty where he was, Valentine, I think. He crossed the country, west to east, on Highway 20 driving a Citroën 2CV that he’s owned for at least 35 years. Almost a motorcycle.

Hope to see you soon,
Tom

From: Andy (Mr. Subjective)
Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2020 8:11 PM
To: Tom Subject: Re: Modern Technology & Trade-Offs

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the MC biz and the current MC situation in American culture. It’s’ partly the “tameness of millenials” but there’s a lot more going on. A real confluence of factors. Sort of a ‘perfect storm’. We could have a long conversation or several conversations about this but the main thing is that it just ‘is’, and if one wants to ride badly enough one just figures out how.

In a way it’s kinda neat that so few people are riding nowadays. I’ve always liked the oddball-ness of riding, without the traditional 1% outlaw part.

Riding is going to come back, but it won’t be for a while and when it does it’s not going to look much like the riding we experienced. ADV bikes and HD’s and crotch rockets and luxe touring bikes might eventually look pretty stupid, but each of these branches of motorcycling will continue more in the idiom of nostalgia than mainstream riding. Like the old geezers today with their ‘collectable’ cars. Whatever is in fashion in collectable cars changes across time. All collectable things from artworks to old cars go in and out of fashion.

Right now the hottest fashion in motorcycles are the very elemental, minimalistic customs. Bikes stripped to their essence. The younger consumers are looking for purity and not doing miles, not exploring, not going fast, not going far or any of the kinds of riding we did. Take an old airhead, remove everything: Body, saddle, lights, fenders, side panels, center stand, instruments, mirrors and air filters. Add back very small lights, very thin flat saddle, knobby tires and small mufflers and little else and you have the kind of bike that looks like the purified essence of a motorcycle. Unfortunately these bikes are better at looking cool in a garage or entry way of a McMansion than going on any kind of actual ride, be it a day, a commute, or across country. In a sentence, these bikes are reverent homages to the idea of what a motorcycle means. The core meaning. The symbolism.

That's what’s cool right now, and to consume motorcycling that way you don’t need to know much about how to ride or much in the way of gear. All the gear we rejected as crap or in some way a pain-in-the-ass is now the height of fashion. Jet style helmets, bubble shields or goggles, jeans and windbreakers and flannel shirts and lace up Red Wing hunting boots.

The young are always very self-conscious compared to old people like us. It’s very important to be recognized by ones peers as getting it. This was so for me when I was young, and it’s no different today. The manifestations are different but youth is eternal.

This era of the purification of motorcycling will pass. When your brave grandson reaches 45 he’s not going to have the energy to commute on a bicycle or the time to use an e bike for this purpose. He’s going to look for a single track vehicle that is easy to use, safe and practical. Light and affordable and all-weather capable. And the gear to go with it.

He will know that motorcycles are simply a bicycle with a motor, and that they are the easiest way to get from A to B with the infrastructure sprawl we’ve spent the last 150 years building. The power system will either be electric or ICE.

That’s how motorcycling will look when it comes back.With one small addition. Most bikes made since the 1990’s are going to still be pretty good to ride twenty years from now if they were kept indoors. Crotch rockets, HD’s and everything in between. Lots of people like your grandson will get those running without stripping them down as art projects. They will lightly modify them for increased utility and use them for general purpose riding.

It will all come together in 15-20 years. Climate warming will be a full-blown deal beyond what is going on today, and that will be a factor. Maybe the yet-to-happen ‘Great Depression 2’ will be over by then and some kind of ’New Deal 2’ will be developing. Motorcycles will become fashionable again for a bunch of reasons not associated with rebelliousness or luxury recreation or speed.

I’m hoping.

We won’t be around to see it, probably.

PS - I’ve been commuting all winter for the last two years with a more-or-less crappy e-bike. Learning (and re-learning) all kinds of things at 16-22 mph. Last winter I commuted one day at minus 15. This year I think the coolest day was around minus 10.

PPS - Still have the studded tire wheels on mine. Very anxious to go to the summer wheels. Probably next Wednesday or Thursday. Studded tires are SO NOISY!.

PPPS - Yesterday on my way home from work I jumped a curb a little too hard and had an immediate rim-pinch flat. Two holes in the tube, one on each side. I run the tires pretty soft in the winter. It’s not a fat bike. The tires are 27.5 x 2.8. All patched up this morning. Now the tube has two new patches to go with the one I put on it last year.

PPPPS - Tomorrow I’m going to try and bleed the rear brake and disassemble and clean and re-lube the twistgrip on my twenty four year old (16” wheel) lowered XR650L. I’d parked it about five years ago. These are the last two items it needs to be rideable for commuting again. Which is my plan. A bunch of stuff got done last fall. And my R1200R is ready to go. Somewhere. New tires, oil and full service at Moon Motors late October last year at $1000 cost. Only rode it back here and parked it after, hoping I’d survive the winter and be able to do something with it this summer.

On March 9, 2020, at 12:04PM Tom wrote:

I wish I could see more of the “oddball-ness of riding, without the traditional 1% outlaw part” in Red Wing. We’re the destination for all of the tame Boomers and 1% gangbanger pretenders from the Twin Cities and Wisconsin on their unmuffled Hardlys and trikes. It is enough make a lifetime motorcyclist hate motorcycles. On the odd occasion an actual motorcyclist rides through our neighborhood, I get reminded of how unrepresentative they are of the general population and remember why I like those folks so much. There are few things (most peds and bicycles) that are less obtrusive and attention-demanding than a quiet motorcycle cruising through town or a neighborhood.

If motorcycling does become a rare thing, as eBikes and bicycling become more common, that could be a saving grace. If there are fewer riders there will be fewer fatalities that that will be, I think, the thing that catches the public and highway safety bureaucracy’s attention as cars continue to become safer. Motorcycles shouldn’t be anywhere near 2% of highway fatalities, based on miles driven, but we’re always hovering around and above 14%. I think if that number approaches 20% it will be the end of motorcycles on public roads. But even if the crash-per-mile/per-capita numbers stay the same, if the number of riders on the road drops that might even lower the overall statistic enough to keep motorcycles out of public attention.

Collectable items are a fashion, but it seems to me that collections in general are fading. We might be the last generation of hoarders. I don’t see that as a bad thing, either. After purging stuff to move from 2600 square feet to 1100, we still have too much crap. I have tried to enforce a ‘1 in/2 out’ rule, but enforcing anything with my life is an exercise in self-delusion. My pile, however, is definitely shrinking. I just gave a load of test equipment (some was homemade gear that I’ve used in electronics since the 70’s) to a friend who runs a music store locally. I unloaded a recording studio and a lifetime’s collection of microphones, tools, truck loads of books, and a lot of audio test equipment when we left Little Canada and I have yet to miss anything from that huge pile. I’m probably too quick to hope for the end of collections/hoarding since one of my life’s goals has always been to be owned by a small enough pile of stuff that I could move in a small van and a few hours work.

About 15 years ago, the hipsters I knew through the music college jumped on to that thing that inspired the Ducati Scrambler; with café racer’d 70’s and 80’s Japanese bikes. About a dozen of them regularly bugged me for maintenance and repair tips and some of them really got into stuff like tweaking carbs and pipes and suspension bits along with the cosmetic thing they were going for. Within 5 years, many were through that phase, several were also finished with music, and moving on with the rest of their adult lives. Most of them had some minor scary event on their motorcycles that convinced them it was more dangerous than it was worth, but some just realized motorcycles weren’t even as practical as bicycles for their purposes. At least a half-dozen of them moved on to become part of the Minneapolis bicycle 4-season scene. Several others had kids, started businesses, and became family guys. Some just sort of withered away into the Millennial characters you often hear about either working fast food, coffee shop, convenience store, or other menial labor jobs. “Some are mathematicians, some are carpenter’s wives. Don't know how it all got started, I don't know what they're doin' with their lives.” However, none are doing anything with motorcycles.

I doubt that IC motorcycles are going to make much of a comeback in the future. I do a blog I’ve called “The Rat’s Eye View” for a little longer than I’ve done the Geezer-with-a-Grudge thing. One of my Rat’s Rules is “My theory is that as a technology approaches terminal, it gets really good.” Electric vehicles are, I think and hope, on the cusp of becoming a solid replacement for IC and that’s part of why we’re seeing all sorts of amazing innovation in a technology that is on its last gasp. I really don’t see my grandson ever getting interested in old motorcycles, could be wrong but if I am I really suck at knowing people. I absolutely can imagine him on a $5,000 Zero that can do 200 miles on a charge. We have done a lot of things together in his 22 years, but working on cars and motorcycles is not one of them.

Weirdly, we’re seeing that shift in music, too. Guitars are definitely an old guy’s instrument. Guitar sales are down and have been going down for 20-some years. Music featuring guitars is less popular. Music stores are struggling, too. It’s not just that the music business is dead (which it is) but that music has become a commodity that people don’t expect to have to pay for. There is a wonderful book about this, Rockonomics: What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics (and Our Future) by Alan Krueger. I learned more about the industry I was involved in for 50-some years from Rockonomics than I had in my career.

I’m pretty sure I won’t be around to see any sort of revival, though. It just feels too far into the future.

Tom
Red Wing, MN