Those who see, those who don't, and those who don't care.

Some friends and I went for a long motorcycle ride last weekend - up in the mountains in the cool air. It was fantastic but it reminded me that when you're on a motorbike, there are essentially three categories of car driver. Those who see you, those who don't, and those who see you but just don't care.
On narrow mountain roads, for the most part, the lanes are separated with a double yellow line. Passing opportunities are few and far between - you can ride for miles before coming across a broken yellow.

When you come up behind a car driver, those who see you are normally very accommodating. Realising you are infinitely faster than they are on a mountain road, they'll pull to the side and slow down, and/or pull in at a lay-by, and/or wave you past. This is nice - you know you've been seen and a friendly wave as you pass them helps seal the deal.

The drivers who don't see you are the same ones who cause all the motorbike accidents. They'll happily run you down as much as look at you, mostly because they're busy corralling the kids, arguing with the co-driver or more likely, texting on their phones. These are simply lost causes - you have no choice other than to sit well back to give them room to drive like total dicks, and then pass them when the markings allow. More often than not, taking them by surprise.

The last category are those drivers who've clearly seen you, and are deliberately doing everything possible to prevent you from passing. Normally this involves driving incredibly slowly when the lines in the middle of the road are double yellow, then speeding up and drifting to the left when you get to a passing area.

Motorcyclists all love driver type 1. We deal with driver type 2 because we have to. Driver type 3? Well, the less said about them, the better. You know who you are and you know where you can go.

From a motorcyclist to all the type 1 drivers who have seen me and acknowledged me: thank you. Especially the guy towing the boat up Mount Nebo loop a few weeks back who pulled the entire rig over on to the soft shoulder and waved me through. I appreciate it.

Please - use your brain.

In my ongoing theme of intolerance of idiot drivers, it seems to me that less and less people are able to use their brains nowadays. This was illustrated again today on the way to lunch. The situation is a little unique - the intersection in question has two left turn lanes. About half way along, there's a street on the left. People want to turn out of that street into the turn lanes so they invariably sit there for ages, waiting to cross traffic and try to force their way in to the lanes that are full of traffic waiting to turn.
The solution is so brilliantly elegant that it illustrates just how stupid some drivers are. If they turned right out of that road and then did a legal U-turn, they could simply join the line of traffic waiting to turn.
But no.
Today, the incredibly short woman in the ridiculously large SUV decided it was in fact better to block the entire road, than it was to use her brain. When she eventually did push in to the traffic, she had to cross a slightly raised kerb and a painted double yellow line to do so, thus not only demonstrating her stupidity, but her complete lack of understanding of road signs and traffic markings.
Why?
Why do people have such a hard time using their brain? I just don't understand it. Are people really evolving to be so idiotically stupid that they can't perform the most simple tasks of reasoning and elemental problem-solving? Or is it just plain selfishness?

Yet another idiot driver causes yet another accident.

A few days ago I was driving home when I came across an odd sight. At one particular set of traffic lights with two lanes each way and a turn lane, all the traffic in the outside lane was standing still at a green light. The inside lane was completely clear. Figuring it was the usual inattentiveness of the driver at the front (who hadn't noticed the green light), both me and the car in front went down the inside lane which was clear. Sadly, it was a trap. The driver at the front of the other lane was in fact attempting to turn right from the left turn lane. He did this just as the driver in front of me got to the front of the queue. The driver in front of me hit the guy who was turning broadside and shoved the entire wreckage into the middle of the intersection. I was able to stop in time for it not to become a three-car pile-up. Once again I found myself filing yet another accident witness statement to the police. I made sure it was crystal clear in my statement that the guy who caused the accident was the idiot who turned right from the left lane. I'd like to think he'd get some sort of punishment for being such a retard, but in my heart I know he'll get a small fine and be left to go on with his life, probably to cause more accidents in future.

Helmet shopping

From time to time (and when the funk in my current helmet is too much to bear) I find myself shopping for motorcycle helmets. It's a strange world though. From the alphabet-soup manufacturers (HJC and the like) to the high-end Japanese jobs (Shoei, Arai), there's a gigantic amount of choice, and a similarly gigantic amount of variation. The key to a helmet of course is that it must protect your noggin in the event of a spill, and to that end, most helmets are DOT, SNELL or BSA approved nowadays. Given that metric, a $70 helmet ought to protect as much as a $700 helmet. And they do. So it then comes down to style - the way it looks - solid colours or graphics, and fit and build quality. Sadly for me, I have a Shoei shaped head. I don't mind - I like Shoei helmets because they fit well and are built well, but I say 'sadly' because that puts me in the $350 range for a new lid. I've never been able to fit into Arai helmets because they always seem to be too oval for me but this time around I was able to try on a lot more manufacturers products than normal. I must have had my head in 40 helmets trying them for fit and it ultimately came down to three. The HJC CL-15 actually fit really nicely once I took the noseguard out. It had some funky graphics options but felt a little 'cheap'. The Scorpion Exo 700 was similar - a nice fit although a little tight across the forehead. The whole feel of the helmet was more polished although it did have a lot of vents on it which makes me wonder how noisy it would be. Ultimately, as always seems to be the case though, I got to Shoei and popped on a TZ-R and it fit like a glove first time out. Typical. Questionable personal taste in graphics aside, this is what I ended up with then:

Redundant (adj). See "Ford".

Long-time readers of my site or this blog will know I'm not one for nanny cars. So it should come as no surprise to find that I'm appalled by what I found when looking through the Acura brochures recently. Specifically, 2010 Acura MDX is able to use its GPS to determine the location of the sun in relation to the car, which it then uses to adapt the climate control to blow cooler on the sunny side of the vehicle. Tell me: how much extra technology (in terms of motors, sensors, processors etc) did it take to make this happen? What's wrong with an analogue heat control and a knob to tell the system where to blow the air?
It's like adaptive cruise control, auto brakes, blind spot sensors, auto windscreen wipers and auto lights - all technologies designed to prevent the driver from having to use a consistently high level of attention to pilot their 2 ton weapon. Instead, people are being coccooned from the outside world and pampered to in the worst way possible. Why do none of the manufacturers understand that this causes more accidents? The more people are isolated from the act of driving, the lazier and more dangerous they become. Or is this the backdoor way of "proving" that we all need autopiloted cars? Make cars so dangerous and people so irresponsible that the only option is to take all control away from us to make us "safe" again? Puh-lease.
But the award for the most retarded and redundant car accessory this year? Well that goes to Ford with their 2010 Mustang GT. Sports car it certainly is not, but to make it sound more like a sports car, they've added sound pipes - an extra pipe from the exhaust that is routed up around the inside of the dash to bring engine sound into the cabin. Umm. Surely if they hadn't added all the extra sound deadening in first place, they wouldn't need the extra pipe so you could hear the engine? Plus the weight loss from throwing away the extra plumbing and sound deadening would lighten the car significantly and make it more sporty to drive, and more sporty to listen to.
Insulating you from the engine noise, then deliberately adding complexity to bring the engine noise into the cabin. Genius.

You've got a big engine - use it!

One of the things that really irritates me about our local drivers is that on the one hand they complain constantly that they need big cars with big engines because small, fuel-economic European cars are either unsafe, too small, or the engine isn't big enough. On the other hand, these are the same people who drive at 19mph in a 40mph zone in a car on their own. Why post a blog entry about this? Obviously because this is what happened to me this morning. I was forced to endure one of the worst commutes of recent months because I got stuck in roadworks behind someone who was driving a Saleen-modified Mustang. Normally you wouldn't think that would be an issue, but this joyless driver was doing 14mph in a 55mph work zone. Every bump in the road, every construction cone that was slightly out of place, and every corner caused the brake lights to come on. He was either nervous, talentless, or too stupid to own a car of any sort.
But here's the point - if you own a 5.4l V8 that is capable of putting out over 500bhp, damn well use it! Most American drivers don't need most of the cars they own. A 32v Northstar engine is a complete waste of time - so is a Hemi - so is anything modified with a supercharger or a turbo unless you're actually going to benefit from it. So instead of bitching about why you need a behemoth of a car riddled with 1950's 'technology', why not buy something modern? A Smart car, or a Fiat 500, or a Ford Focus, or a VW Polo Bluemotion. These are all respectable cars (well - in European form anyway) that are perfectly safe, perfectly roomy, and perfectly fuel economic. And they're all still capable of going faster than 14mph in a work zone.