We Need to Stay Engaged

by Steve Panten

Our efforts on getting the State Department of Transportation to recognize that motorcycles are an important part of Wisconsin’s economy, and transportation system are starting to pay off. A newly released draft of the DOT’s “Connect 2050 Plan” now includes motorcycles as one of the icons on the slide and it spells out that motorcycles will be considered. We have been meeting with the DOT to draw attention to the fact that we are not listed in the original draft as a priority, and we should be. The conversations have been good, and we have been assured that motorcycles are being considered in their plan, yet we are not included in any language about their goals, nor are we included on their official Connect 2050 slides. Our future was the focus of ABATE’s Lobby Day this past February and our elected Representatives were surprised to learn that motorcyclists were not included in the original plan. After the meetings, Assembly Member Jessie Rodriguez from Oak Creek, took our information to the DOT for clarification. At that meeting they admitted that they mistakenly did not include motorcycles in their plan, and they are correcting that.

This has been going on for over 10 years and we finally got them to admit we were not being considered when developing their new plan. By no means does this mean that our work is done though. Just because they are saying this, does not mean they will really consider us as equal to other means of transportation on the road. Remember, they don’t know what to do with us! Combustion engine vehicles without the software to communicate with other vehicles on the road is going to be a problem. We need to keep the pressure on them. We asked them to do real life testing with autonomous vehicles operating in driverless mode and motorcycles traveling at real world speeds. Do they “see” the motorcycle and know how to react? That is what we want to know but nobody is reporting on it.

Engaging motorcyclists is helping our cause. The more engaged people that we have, the more they will have to include us in their testing. Our last Future of Motorcycling in Wisconsin Summit was successful in going into detail on where discussions are at on the State and Federal Level. Attendees got to hear from the people engaged in these discussions and why we think our future is in jeopardy. There was a lot of great information shared and we had good, interactive discussions about what is going on. How to move forward is a larger question. Attendees were very receptive to the information being presented and I think it opened some eyes a bit. This was the most in-depth information that we have ever presented, and it showed why we feel that, unless all 500,000 people in the state with an “M” endorsement on their driver’s license stand up to help protect motorcycling, it won’t exist as we know it, if at all. I want that thank everyone that attended, presented, asked questions, and helped organize this. It was a large undertaking to get all this information organized and presented in under 4 hours with questions, but we did it without people realizing how fast time was passing.

The big questions are where to go from here and how people can help. The question of what we can do to help comes up every time we do one of these presentations and the answer is still the same, stay engaged. We are not sure where to go from here, but we will continue to hold meetings with all the players making the decisions and eventually we will all need to act. We are going to continue to fight things that seem trivial, like protecting lower ethanol fuel, right to repair laws, and even fight to ensure that every vehicle will still be required to have an operator in it. Currently, Wisconsin State Statute says that every vehicle must have an operator in it. We need to make sure that stays law. Now, the term “operator” can be construed to mean many things. Can an operator be a person in the first semi-truck driving down the road, so the other trucks do not have one? This is the case for truck platooning, which is legal and is being tested in the state. Currently, all trucks have an operator behind the wheel of every truck and can disconnect from the platoon if they need to, but how long is that going to be before they push their testing methods?

In May, ABATE sent a group to join other motorcyclists from across the country to the Motorcycle Riders Foundation’s “Bikers Inside the Beltway” event. This is our chance to visit every Wisconsin Senators and Congress members offices to bring the concerns of all motorcyclists in the state to Washington DC. Wow, what an opportunity! Always a great opportunity to visit them in their office to show how important these issues are to all of us at home. We will be asking the same question to them as we did our state elected officials, what are they doing to protect motorcycling as we know it in Wisconsin? We are going to talk to them about our conversations with the DOT and ask them what are they going to do about the Head of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration’s comments that when it comes to autonomous vehicle policy, “we have the wild west out there right now.” Technology is moving faster than policy and we are getting to the point now where they must draft policy to accommodate what is going on rather than drafting well thought out policy. We need to find a way to start tracking crashes involving vehicles with driverless technology to know who was in control of the vehicles when it crashed. Right now, nobody knows!

Next month I will write more about our meeting in Washington DC (my article is due to the editor before our trip). Until then, be seen. Keep driving your motorcycle and wear your ABATE clothes. We need the DOT and legislators to notice how many of us there are. We need to ride safely. If we can lower our fatalities, they have less of an argument to not include us in their plan.

I will see you at the Summer Hummer! If you see me and want to talk about these things, please do. It is going to take all of us to protect motorcycling as we know it.

That’s it.

Steve