MOTORCYCLE MIND: Why We Ride

Some off-the-cuff observations about why we like to ride motorcycles

Some off-the-cuff observations about why we like to ride motorcycles:

SQUEEZE: Riding with your squeeze on your back.

WHIZ: Not the speed per se, as most motorcycles aren’t faster than cars. It’s the optic flow experience; things whiz by closely. Speed isn’t fun. The Earth is moving crazy fast. So what?

WIND: You’re actually moving through a sea of air. You. Yourself. All your skin. All your pores. Your hair. You feel it all.

FLY: Weightlessness. Flying. The physics leads to the ability to lean a very heavy bike with feather-level forces. Really feels weightless above around 30 mph. And actual flying is boring, not to mention filled with astronomical red tape.

REACTIVE: The motorcycle is hypersensitive. Not just wheels turning left or right like in a car. And not even that it feels your weight lean -- that’s actually a slow reaction. No. When you counter-steer, your feather touch is “felt” by the bike, and it reacts as if alive.

ONE: You are a real part of the physics of the experience. You feel all the effects. And you -- and your body itself -- are part of the causes of the behavior.

VIP PARKING: Usually can part in the “front row.” And, more than that, you attend with your motorcycle as part of your persona. “My ride is right there! Come see it!”

EXPRESS: Lane-splitting, and so the usually gridlocked city is, for you, porous and unobstructed.

LANE-SPLITTING: Endless joy to be dynamically navigating an ever-changing maze with walls that occasionally get angry at you.

STAKE: Motorists are very often signaling emotions. Emotional expressions are how we negotiate, and each time we signal, we’re staking something, usually reputation. But in negotiations between vehicles, we’re staking our vehicles and bodies. For motorcycles, the “body” part is radically amplified, and so when I do an aggressive signal toward you, it means more. You know I’m really truly aggressive. “JFC, that guy is crazy! I’m steering clear!”

EMOTIONAL ENGINE: Motorcycles invariably have manual transmission, and one is able to express emotions through the engine itself. I almost never honk. I rev. Because revving IS the signal that corresponds to aggression.

ANTI-SIGNALING: Wealth signaling is all over the world of vehicles. I get it. I don’t poo poo it. But that’s never been my bag. For me, I’m surely probably signaling something. But it ain’t wealth, because motorcycles aren’t generally expensive. One is signaling perhaps that one is ultimately all about the experience, the functionality, the performance. You can get that in an expensive sports car, but the fact that it’s expensive makes one doubt that it’s not really about the status-signaling.

YOU’VE GOT THE LOOK: People want their cars to look good. But, for a bike, the look of the bike inherently depends on you. You’re draped over it. You and the bike become a fashion one. Not so for cars.

TAMING: Take your most formidable car. Almost no one’s afraid to drive it. But for a motorcycle, it might really kill you! You must tame the bike, like the characters tame the dragons in the Avatar world.

GESTURES: You may not realize it, but even in your car you’re carrying out loads of emotional signaling to other vehicles, as I discuss here:

But, with your body visible to all, your gestures and facial expressions are there to aid your negotiation with other drivers. (Also it’s crucial to understand the functional uses of manual transmission, which even manual drivers are often consciously unaware of:

)

COUNTER STEERING: Key to making sense of the ride aspects of a motorcycle is counter steering, where you steer left to go right. And vice versa. While counter-intuitive, it’s actually quite intuitive when explained the right way.

PANTHER: Motorcycles simply look cool. Take your coolest car, no matter the price, and even a relatively cheap motorcycle looks just as cool. Usually cooler.

BEAST VS DEER: Motorcycles are cool in part because they look like a beast, a panther, a predator, something with teeth, something fast and brutal. Scooters, on the other hand, look like deer.

ATTACHED: Unlike scooters which are automatic transmission, and drivers often have both feet dragging the ground and one hand holding a phone, motorcyclists are using all four limbs. Occasionally one’s left hand is freed up, and much more rarely still the right hand. But, most of the time all four limbs are needed. We’re hooked in to the bike. We’re part of the bike, not riding it.

HELMETLESS: Wearing a helmet is overhyped. On highways, yes -- they amount to eyewear so you can see well, as you need to protect your eyes from all angles from wind. But, for around the town, especially for complicated city lane-splitting habitats, I would rather have greater awareness of what’s around me and avoid accidents. Better peripheral vision. Better auditory perception of both other vehicles and even echolocation of obstacles and walls. Better ability to engage in eye contact with other vehicles.

NON-ANONYMOUS: You can of course choose to be an anonymous ninja when out on a ride by fully helmeting up. But, more than any car, and even more than convertibles, when riding without a helmet you’re wearing your real identity on your sleeve. You -- not just your vehicle -- become one of the pieces of furniture in the city.

MUSIC OF MOVEMENT: The sounds of movement itself is a kind of joy. In fact, in earlier work of mine -- my book HARNESSED -- I have made the case that music has culturally evolved to sound like movement, movement of humans in one’s midst. And, in more recent work, I have extended this into chords and chord progressions: https://www.loofwired.com/p/can-music-let-blind-people-see-161. The experience of motorcycling amounts to a symphony of sounds -- of other vehicles, pedestrians, reflections of my own engine off stationary objects -- along with complicated Doppler and other physical regularities my brain totally gets. These “motorcycle symphonies” might not be music, but there is a deep evocativeness and joy coming from them. Said another way, when driving in a car, it’s boring without turning on the radio. But on a motorcycle, no radio needed. One never feels like a radio is missing.

RISKS: When you ride a motorcycle as part of your life, it helps place in proportion the many other supposed risks the media bombards you with. All are exaggerated. And even if they get the risks right, they invariably provide no sense of proportion. What does that risk really mean, in terms of risks we all regularly take? Yes, we take risks. We do it because it’s worth it to us, although maybe not to you. Freedom.

COOL: Although we enjoy that we “look cool” to others when riding a motorcycle, it’s not really that that motivates us. After all, almost all the folks seeing you driving by on your motorcycle never see you again, and have no idea who you are. It’s not about them knowing you. It’s about you feeling as if you’re a powerful creature in your own right. Capable of riding this beast. Able to take the risks. Competent to handle the quite different world of motorcycling. It motivates you to be as strong as you’re perceived to be.

NEGATIVE SPACE: It’s not well appreciated by land lovers how the sailing life is a weird “negative” of the normal life we’re familiar with. The sailors live in the negative space. They live where we cannot even travel. And they tend to be limited in their excursions into our space, more often limited to marina grocery stores and restaurants. Motorcycles, too, have a habitat that occupies in part some of the negative space for cars. We move through networks of “cracks” in the habitat of cars, cracks cars don’t think of as passable at all, whether it be sidewalks, between cars, road shoulders, bike lanes, and so on. And we can “get away” with behaviors pushing far beyond the boundaries of what a car can do. If we dangerously wiggle through traffic, we’re putting ourselves disproportionately at risk. If a car were to do it (supposing it could fit), it’s putting everyone at risk, and is not at all at greater risk. That gives motorcyclists more leeway.

MUSIC ON BIKES: Many motorcyclists do like to blast their music, especially when driving down the main drag in town. Cars do too. For cars, it feels like a party inside the car that’s leaking out and annoying folks not in the party. But for motorcycles, the music isn’t part of any party “inside” the motorcycle. The folks nearby are all parts of the music’s environment. Everyone’s part of the party.

GANGS: Motorcycles promote social groups. You can much more easily than cars stay together in a group, with stragglers streaming past cars as needed to catch up. You can also cluster more closely together, and emotionally express and even talk while riding. More importantly, you look cool together. Not because anyone you know sees you as part of it. But it just feels good to feel part of a group that looks strong.

NO RED TAPE: Flying and boating are not at all replacements for motorcycling, of course. Totally different sorts of experiences. But, even if they somehow were fun in similar ways, getting a motorcycle license is easy, and there’s nothing else to worry about after that, in terms of boring regulations and so on. For flying and boating, on the other hand, you are constantly dealing with massive red tape and rules as to where and when and how fast you can go. Only motorcycling is… freeing.

OUTLAW: Because motorcycles inhabit a lot of “negative space” for cars, they’re often perceived as being “outlaws.” We’re actually just behaving smartly given the new potentialities due to the different size. But we also know you see us as being mild outlaws. And we like it.

RAW: The raw functionality. Visible to the eye, touch, ear and even the smell. No pretense. The beauty is entirely from the utility. Naked.

SPARING: It advertises that I live a sparing life. I subsist on the necessary, on the key things that matter most. Whether rich or poor, I live light.

BESTIE: Because the motorcycle is so dangerous, had to be tamed, and yet you control it with the finest and barest touches, you feel closer to the creature. You love your motorcycle more than you ever loved a car.

These are notes toward what might be a future book titled roughly as this article is titled.