May 2022

by Gary Klinker

About the time this hits your in box or mailbox the first class of the year will be done. Up to that time, April is a busy month. The bikes are getting serviced and being hauled back to the range. Paperwork is getting copied for the students. New student handbooks have been ordered. The classroom has been arranged, and the class trailer is coming out of storage. Classes are filling fast. Get signed up now, so you won’t be disappointed.

As I write this, we just returned from Heartland STEAM in Springfield, Illinois. The 350-mile drive was uneventful but interesting, having Shawn, Carolyn Kittredge, and Dave Dwyer along. Besides seeing all the dedicated members and friends from the Midwest states, there were attendees from New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. It was good to see all of them for the first time since last year’s Meeting of the Minds.

All the breakouts I attended were very good. The most informative and relevant was the Future of Transportation. It was also a big theme at Meeting of the Minds last fall. The big question is, “Where do we fit in?” Unfortunately, unless we get busy and get loud, we won’t.

With states banning internal combustion engines and companies saying they won’t build any after certain dates, where does that leave us? Steve Panten and the Legislative Committee have been spearheading this discussion with the Future of Motorcycling Summits. You did attend one, didn’t you?

There is a mad rush to make autonomous vehicles and to develop connected vehicle and road technology. We will all pay the bills for such infrastructure expenses, but it seems we may not be able to use our motorcycles in the transportation system of the near future. The testing of autonomous vehicles seems to be done in states with dry summer weather most of the time. What will they do in snow and ice? Will they recognize a motorcycle even on a nice day? Some of the systems use radar (LIDAR) to allow the car to “see” other vehicles. If your motorcycle is between the car and a big truck, will it even know you exist?

As with most things there are more questions than answers. If we don’t start asking the questions and demanding answers, we may be the last generation of motorcyclists on the planet. Europe is moving on this even faster than us.

Some of you may think that we can always get an electric motorcycle. True, but they will not show up in the traffic mix any more than what we ride now. Having been an avid long-distance rider for a long time, the ten-hour trip to Sturgis taking two or three days with recharging stops would really suck. Can you imagine the Minnesota 1000 in 24 hours being a thousand miles in 90 hours? How about the Iron Butt Rally? Instead of 11,000 miles in 11 days it would end up 3300 miles in 11 days. More like a career than a rally. The point of all of this is that we need to get active and involved now. Any ABATE member should also be an MRF member. Everyone should be on the MRF alert list and be sending the messages to our legislators. Everyone should be involved in this year’s Congressional and Senate elections, along with state legislative elections. If we don’t look out for ourselves, no one else will. As the common saying goes, “If you aren’t at the table, you are on the menu.”

Ride Safe,

Gary