A friend recently moved next door and her work is literally a stone throw away from her apartment. She get a lunch break which she uses to get out of the office and walk her dog. She willingly agreed to walk Laya for me if I chose to ride my bicycle to work. Since I am not in the best of shape, I am only riding to work twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday. I want to get to 3 days and eventually all 5 days.

My work is a 28 mile round trip and it involves climbing the Acosta bridge. The morning rides are very refreshing. The afternoon rides are a little tiring. Between the sun and 5 PM rush hour traffic, I am fighting several battles on my bicycle.

I am riding my xtracycle to work. It is the only long distance bicycle with multiple gears and a rock solid construction. Moreover, the heavy bike gives me a good workout. This is my second week and I can already feel the difference. Moreover, this is an appropriate activity for Bike Month rather than group ride with police escorts like this one: link

Riding a bicycle does not save me a whole lot of money since I am only offsetting minor wear and tear on the motorcycle and negligible fuel usage. Yup, I have been getting over 75 miles per gallon on the little Kawasaki. All I did was reduce my speed on Phillips Highway from 50 to 45. Enjoy the graphs and charts. Happy motoring!

No position is absolute. Times change and with time changes the angle with which we look at a problem. I often evaluate my position against the car tax. It is a position of protest against the City of Jacksonville making people spend a large sum of money every month in the name of basic necessities.

Days like today make me evaluate my stand. It was starting to rain by the time I was leaving work. I left early to beat the rain. The rain caught up with me by the time I reached I95, the last 4 miles of my 13 mile commute. It is here that grooves are cut along the road to help cars. Motorcycles be damned.

Climbing the Acosta bridge was very challenging. It is already super windy on the bridge. Even more grooves give the motorcycle a mind of its own. By the time the motorcycle climbed near the top of the bridge, the cross wind started to push it into the next lane. The grooves cut on the road aid the wind making the motorcycle even more unstable. There was nothing I could do to compensate the shift. A heavier motorcycle will compensate for the wind and the grooves but it costs more money. If I money was not an object, I would never protest against the car tax.

I reduced my speed, stepped down a gear while making a mental note to not use the front brake. The red Camaro behind me was surprisingly understanding and kept a safe distance while I negotiated a freshly wet curving exit lane. I later saw the sticker “Harley Davidson” on the rear window. They probably knew the limitations of a motorcycle on a windy rainy day on top of a bridge.

This somewhat righteous protest of mine is based on an absolute truth. The truth that even a minimum wage employee is required to either buy a car and pay running costs or waste time and effort waiting for busses.

I feel compelled to carry out this protest even if nobody is listening. This protest was never supposed to be easy.

Having spent the last week bouncing around on my motorcycle in a 20 mph cross wind, I was super sensitive to every feature on the road that is not motorcycle friendly. The most important ones are cracks on the road between lanes and at a curve and the grooves cut on an interstate to facilitate rain water flow. I encounter these grooves on bridges across the St. Johns where the winds are especially choppy. My protest against Car Tax is more challenging than I thought.

Most roadway design engineers are not motorcyclists or bicyclists for that matter. These two groups usually get left out during planning. When a co-worker asked me how my commute has been lately, I decided to bring forth the issue of grooves cut on the road surface. I made a case that it is designed for four wheeled traffic and is potentially unsafe for motorcyclists. Tires get caught in the grooves which make the motorcycle follow the grooves till they get traction back. This happens back and forth and the motorcyclist is helpless in controlling the machine efficiently. Lighter motorcycles like mine feel it more than some heavier ones. An accident at interstate speeds with moving traffic can be fatal.

Motorcyclists are about 2% of registered vehicles. My coworkers made a point that roads are designed for the majority. They argued that it is my choice of lifestyle to ride a motorcycle and the engineers should not have to bend over backwards to accommodate my personal life choices. I am sure some of his comments were friendly banter but it made me think about concept of designing for majority. It effectively puts a price-tag on the value of a motorcyclist’s life. What is an acceptable price of anyone’s life?

What determines majority?

Is it just number of registered cars v/s motorcycles? The cars win hands down. I have designed a different method of scoring majority that is fairer and somewhat biased.

It has two factors:

Factor One > Occupants per 100 lbs

Factor Two > Gallons per 100 mile per occupant

Assumptions:

• Average motorcycle = Suzuki SV 650
• Average Car = Honda Civic
• One occupant per car
• One occupant per motorcycle
• Fuel efficiencies from company websites

Factor One – Occupants in a vehicle per 100 lbs. Single rider on a 650 cc street bike that weighs 500 lbs will have a score of 1/5. A single motorist, which is usually the case, in a Honda Civic weighing 3000 lbs will have a score of 1/30. Every Honda Civic on the road is equivalent to six motorcycles. Factor One result = 6.

Factor Two – Gallons per 100 mile per occupant. A 650 cc motorcycle gets around 55 mpg (city + hwy). Therefore, the single rider uses 1.81 gallons per 100 miles travelled. A 2010 Honda Civic gets 29 mpg (city + hwy). A single occupant uses 3.44 gallons every 100 miles driven. Therefore, a Civic user is 1.9 times the fuel footprint of a motorcycle. Factor Two result = 1.9

Factor One multiplied to Factor Two gives 11.37. Therefore, each motorcycle on the road gets multiplied by 11.37 to become a car equivalent. With motorcycles being 2% of registered vehicles, for every 98 cars on the road, there were 2 motorcycles. Now, for every 98 cars on the road, there are 2 X 11.37 = 22.75 motorcycles on the road. That is a share of 18% of traffic. Even though a minority, it is not negligible any more.

There are factors such as less wear on the road by motorcycles due to low weight thereby requiring less road maintenance that I have not considered. I have also not considered how motorcycles are unfavorable in adverse weather conditions since I ride all year and it has nothing to do with considering roadway design. Noise pollution on some larger cruisers and choppers is also not considered since plenty of cars have loud exhausts and a lot of them also blare loud music. Most motorcycles don’t come with sound systems.

I am a little biased on my two factor calculation but every road designer and transportation engineer is biased towards cars. I don’t feel guilty.

All of the above rant and pseudo-mathematics mostly try to convey that cars take a front seat in any planning. Cars are convenient, safe, protected from elements and quick. Motorcycles are not that convenient, safe with proper training, not protected from elements at all but are quick. Bicycles are neither of the three but probably the safest. Bicycles are convenient if one lives in a bicycle-centric city. Cars do cost the most amount of money to purchase and operate. They suck people deeper into dependence than a commuter motorcycle does. Yet, we promote it.

We are supposed to be the smarter of the mammals!

In order to pay for these basic necessities, we have devised a system of compensation for work or service that creates a product that other people want to buy. We go to work everyday, get paid, pay our taxes and so on. Sometimes, we have money left over that we try to save for a rainy day or retirement, take a vacation, sponsor our hobbies or just plain consumerism. These are indulgences.

A car is something we buy to commute in a safe and protected way, though the safety of commuting in a car is questionable. When you are made to buy a car due to the design of the city’s infrastructure, the car becomes a necessity. It is not a cheap necessity either. A brand new car kept for 10 years with insurance and gas will cost over $200 a month, usually more than utilities to power your home. That is $2,400 a year. Most people do not keep their car for 10 years. For the first five years, that car costs over $500 a month or $6,000 a year. This car puts us in a random environment of traffic, made random by the presence of other drivers. Random = increased risk of an accident.

Mass transit, though costs extra tax revenue, and in turn the payment of extra taxes take the human element out of the commuting equation resulting in a safer method of commuting. The absence of mass transit or an effective mass transit will compel people to have to spend on a car. Such is the case with the City of Jacksonville. They provide an infrequent bus service with insufficient routes to conquer the vase expanse of the city. They also insult us with a skyway system that starts at a parking lot in the middle of nowhere and takes you to a convention center with ample on site parking, a college and a few other businesses. It does not even take you to the sports arenas.

Therefore, the citizens of Jacksonville FL, mostly republican, pay the car tax because it is a necessity, a need, not a want any more. No one protests at a tea party.

The struggling citizen who work hard to make a living are left behind to fend for themselves. They have to chose between a budget for either gas, car payments and insurance or quality food to feed their children. They choose the high-fructose corn syrup laden preservative infused cheap foods. They would like to pay premium for food not car but they don’t have a choice. They are not given a choice. Who cares about them anyway?

Some people understand the severity of this issue and protest on a very popular website namely metrojacksonville.com. I wish to protest by not owning a car. I moved recently to a walkable part of the city that put me out of bicycling range to work but I did not buy a car. If I was to pay a tax and had the choice to decide how much to pay I will try to pay the least. I wanted my mode of transportation to be reliable and requiring low maintenance. I bought the cheapest motorcycle in the market for $3,000. The insurance on that cycle is $20 a month. It gives me about 70 miles per gallon. The monthly cost on the motorcycle is $100, including depreciation. This is my protest to the city. This is my protest against the car tax.

Mom and Dad, fearing traffic conditions of Bombay, never bought me one. After laboriously evaluating every production motorcycle in India through magazines and internet, I had zeroed in on the Enfield Bullet 350 as the object of my affection. I got to ride a 1971 Royal Enfield Bullet 350 on the closed streets of Godrej & Boyce manufacturing campus. Even though I ended up pushing the heavy kick-start bike back to its owner for a quarter mile, consumerism was taking over. I wanted to acquire motorcycles from everything like the Enfield 350 to the over powered liquid cooled V4 engined Yamaha V-Max. Frugal options like 100 cc to 150 cc commuter motorcycles legendary for their reliability, affordability and fuel efficiency were not on my radar.

Others: Get what you really want. You will grow tired of this in three months.

Me: But I don’t have $9000 for the Triumph America. I want to keep my operating costs low.

Others: Put it on your credit card. Ask for an extension on your limit. Get financing. (in other words, get deeper into debt like the rest of us)

Me: I get 90+ miles per gallon. Insurance costs only $181 annually for Liability and Comprehensive.

Others: You will grow out of it soon. Get what you really want.

Me: I just want to commute. Not really worried about speed.

Others: You’ll think your bike is too slow in 3 months.

I am in a position where only time can tell if I grow tired of this bike quickly. Till now, my top speed has been a modest 30 mph on slippery rainy conditions with slippery new tires. I plan to own this bike for two to three years till I can afford to own and maintain a bigger motorcycle without going into debt. I am not, however, excited about being pulled into the rat race of traffic and commute. Owning a motor vehicle is one step closer to being another brick in the wall.

Calling a much slower instrument a vehicle and placing it on the road with much larger vehicles only with a thin shear blanket of a law is lazy. I am of the opinion that the definition of bicycles as vehicles is flawed. If the law and motorist’s courtesy is all that sufficiently protects a cyclist on a road, then let’s remove sidewalks and place the pedestrians on the road as well. They can use the shoulder and save bucket loads of money on concrete sidewalks.

Projecting a vehicular cyclist logic forward, cars, motorcycles, buses, trucks, tractor-trailers, bicycles, wheel chair bound disabled people, pedestrians etc. will all be called ‘widgets’ and all widgets will share the road with each other. Why should pedestrians be separated from the road to make it easier for vehicles to travel safely? Why support vehicular superiority? Vehicular Cyclists do not aggressively support Shared Space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space), making their arguments hypocritic and selfish.

Living in any sprawled area with no infrastructure but the blind principles of John Forrester makes life friction-full. Yells and honks start becoming an itch that wouldn’t cease so much that you would wish to cut off your limb to ease the pain. Initially, optimism and gumption help overcome the constant reminder that you as a bicyclist are unwanted and unwelcome on the road. The hammering does not stop, not till a large organization (Eg. a government) recognizes it and makes plans to stop it. Such efforts are usually graced with positive and constructive outcomes as seen in the cities of Portland OR, Davis CA and New York City NY.

I have decided to stop getting hammered. I am buying a motorcycle and moving to a bicycle-friendly neighborhood further away from work. I am moving from the top of a pile of bicycle commuters to the bottom of the pile of motor-vehicle commuters. In my efforts to latch on to a higher dynamic quality, namely car-free bicycle commuting, I am degenerating to an activity of lower quality, namely motorcycle ownership for commuting. I have kept gas bills, insurance and depreciation on the motorcycle to a frugal low of $100 a month, which used to be my taxi fare budget.

Lastly, the people who continue to bicycle commute here, Jonathan, Jose, Rebekah and the couple others who I haven’t met, are bigger people than I am. They are true heroes.

I have chosen to move to another part of town 13 miles away. A bicycle friendly and socially active part of town. I therefore need a motorcycle to commute to and from work. I would have done it on a bicycle but I have a dog to take care of and it is not fair to leave her in a room for 12+ hours while I am away.

My goals are to keep my expense at a minimum, gasoline usage low and not much insurance to pay. I have been looking at commuter motorcycles for a while. These are the options I am considering:

My route includes 12 miles of Interstate 95 and State Road 202 where the average speed of travel is 65 mph.

Only I95 has a minimum limit of 40 mph. It is recommended that to ride a motorcycle on a roadway, one should at least ride at the speed of traffic with some reserve power left to accelerate away from danger. I have heard stories from friends about how they were able to wring the throttle to escape an accident. It is not a common occurrence but it only takes one accident. This renders the Eliminator and the Suzuki not worthy of the interstate.

The motorcycle culture in USA, much like the bicycle culture is very much biased towards recreation. I have been battling this consumerist materialistic more-power-is-never-enough attitude for a few weeks. It is time to define my goals strongly and move towards a decision objectively.

Kawasaki Eliminator 125: I have been a secret fan of this bike in India where it is sold with a 180cc engine. It maintains its styling nicely even with a smaller engine.

Pros:

• Low styling (low center of gravity)
• High gas mileage (low carbon footprint)
• Least cost of the three (more money saved to replace my dying laptop)
• Low desirability (for theft)
• Low insurance ($181 per year includes comprehensive and liability)

Cons:

• Not worthy of interstate riding (Elongates my 15 min one way trip time to 30 min)

Suzuki TU250X: This reminds me of 70s style motorcycles I grew up watching. I like the sit-up styling unlike the foot-forward cruiser styling of the Eliminator.

Pros:

• High gas mileage (low carbon footprint)
• Low cost (more money saved to replace my dying laptop)
• Low desirability (for theft)
• Low insurance ($171 per year includes comprehensive and liability)
• Electronic Fuel injected

Cons:

• Not worthy of interstate riding. It will struggle to keep up. (Elongates my 15 min one way trip time to 30 min)

Buell Blast: This single cylinder has a reputation for hit-and-miss reliability. Some people seem to not have any problems with it while some complain. It was designed to be a maintenance free beginner bike.

Pros:

• Interstate ready. I wont have to take alternate routes on slower roads.
• Low center of gravity (muffler is tucked under the engine)
• Belt drive

Cons:

• Lowest gas mileage of the three (though very respectable)
• Hit and miss reliability in reviews
• High cost (low value for money)
• Highest insurance by far ($497 per year includes comprehensive and liability)

Conclusion:

The utility of these bikes goes up only with the Buell which allows me to keep pace with interstate traffic and have plenty of juice left to pull away from danger. Other than that, I don’t really see any extra utility. I will spend an extra 30 minutes (15 each way) by commuting on Phillips Highway but I am usually in no hurry and always have time. It fails to justify the cost over the Eliminator and the Suzuki.

I will get to ride the likes of the Eliminator and the Suzuki during my Motorcycle Safety Training Basic Rider Course. The final decision will have to wait till then. I am leaning towards the Eliminator though. It can provide the joy of cruising along at my own pace at a very affordable price. It is also a good step towards upgrading to a classic styled bike in a few years…like this one.