Spinning Wheels : Auto Drivers Won’t Accept Cycles--or Steer Clear of Them Either

You’re stuck in your car in rush-hour traffic on the freeway. You’re impatient. You’re tense. You’re late for something, and you’re moving at 10 m.p.h. The only saving grace is that even though you are not getting anywhere, neither is that jerk in the car next to you. OK, you’re petty, too.

You tell yourself to relax and accept the fact you are all in this together and there is nothing you . . .

V-r-o-o-om!

What the heck! Where did that come from?

A motorcycle has just whizzed past you at 30 or 40 m.p.h., missing your side view mirror by 2.4 inches and scaring the bejiminy out of you. Look at that guy, weaving in and out of traffic. He’s 10 cars ahead, now 20. What’s with him? Is he nuts? Is he trying to kill himself?

Perhaps it is the motorcyclist’s curse to live with the image of the daredevil who plays by his own rules. There was Marlon Brando in “The Wild One.” There were Hell’s Angels and their roaring Harleys. There was Evel Knievel, trying to leap 20 barrels on his motorcycle and, when that proved too boring, a canyon.

And there is a minority on southern California highways that perpetuates the image, law enforcement officers and industry experts say.

“I don’t know if it’s a death wish or not,” says Ken Daily, a California Highway Patrol traffic officer. “You see the helmet strapped on the side of the bike, they’re driving too fast, they don’t wear gloves or protective clothing, you see them in Bermuda shorts and shower shoes, bareheaded and wearing a T-shirt. It doesn’t take a good cyclist long to know it’s a lot better to wear clothing than to leave his hide on the asphalt.”

In real life, CHP officers say, motorcycle riders don’t cause them any more highway problems than automobiles. And while it isn’t illegal, under some circumstances, for motorcycles to share lanes with cars, many cyclists avoid the practice.

In real life, such as on Orange County freeways and surface streets, the daredevil doesn’t last long. Or he doesn’t read CHP statistics that show that a motorcycle accident claims a life once for every 40 accidents. For cars, the fatality-accident ratio is one for about every 200, according to the CHP’s latest full-year figures.

Or he hasn’t seen the statistics showing that of Orange County’s 84 traffic fatalities for the first nine months of 1987 (the latest figures available), 46 were motorcyclists. That’s 55%, far above the percentage of accidents in which motorcycles were involved, authorities say.

Roger Holt isn’t nuts. And he doesn’t have a death wish. At least, not one he’s aware of, but he does ride his 1100-cc Honda on Orange County freeways and surface streets. An Orange County deputy marshal, Holt, 39, has ridden his motorcycle to work for the last 14 years.

And there are times when he has close calls. “I had one about two weeks ago,” he says. “I was going down LaVeta about 5:45, I saw a guy coming toward me, and he was slowing down as I approached him. Just as I got to him, he turned. He made a left, right out in front of me. I’ve learned to watch the front of the cars instead of looking at the driver. I don’t trust what the guy sees.”

Holt narrowly missed being the victim of the most common of motorcycle accidents--those when a car turns left into a cyclist’s path. Recently in Anaheim, a 56-year-old motorcyclist was killed in just such an accident.

To the driving public, motorcycles have been an increasingly evident traffic neighbor in Southern California since the late 1960s, when an influx of affordable Japanese motorcycles hit the market. But for some reason, automobile drivers have never quite accepted them as equal partners on the highways.

“The American public isn’t attuned to watching for motorcycles,” says motorcycle Officer Harry Gillespie of the CHP, who is based in Santa Ana and has ridden more than 1 million miles. “They (automobile drivers) just don’t see them. They look, but they really don’t see them. They misjudge the speed of the cycles. They’re used to judging speed with a larger mass and they don’t have anything to relate to.”

Don Bell rode his first motorcycle--actually a scooter with a lawn mower engine--more than 40 years ago. Now 50, Bell says: “I ride defensively. I think everybody is out there to get me, and usually I’m proved right. I try not to get too close to cars. I don’t split traffic. I speed up to try to get away from congestion, or slow down, so I don’t have to ride around cars. I don’t think it’s that they (automobile drivers) don’t care. . . . It’s just that motorcycles aren’t a threat, so they don’t worry about you.”

Bell, who supervises the pretrial detention program for Orange County, is president of the county chapter of the Touring Riders Assn., a group of big-bike owners who like to tour the country on their motorcycles. Bell rides a 1300-cc Yamaha, which, he says, is “top of the line, power-wise.”

But whenever possible, Bell says, he stays off the freeways of Southern California. When he rides them, he says: “I’m alert every minute. You have to be.”

The experienced rider, whether through rider-safety courses or experience, learns to foretell trouble on the highways. “You ever play bumper cars?” Bell says. “Most of the time you can stay out of the way. It’s the same way with a motorcycle and cars. These people aren’t deliberately trying to hit you, they just don’t care. So if you go into it with the mentality that it’s bumper cars, and you’re looking around all the time, you can predict which ones are going to get you and you can stay out of the way.”

Staying out of the way can make the difference between life and death. One of the sad facts about motorcycling is that there is little margin for error.

“When we investigate a motorcycle accident, there’s almost no such thing as a non-injury accident,” says Daily, with the CHP in San Juan Capistrano. “With cars, that’s the most common kind. It is not a forgiving thing to get in an accident on a motorcycle.”

It is precisely that specter--the safety threat--that the motorcycle industry is trying to overcome. It has become such a critical issue, among others that have hampered the industry in recent years, that officials of the four leading Japanese motorcycle manufacturers (Honda, Kawasaki, Yamaha and Suzuki) met in Palm Springs about 18 months ago with others to discuss the problems.

What resulted is a 1988 national advertising campaign called “Discover Today’s Motorcycling,” conducted by the Los Angeles advertising firm of Doremus Porter Novelli and designed to rekindle the kind of interest in motorcycling that exploded in America in the 1960s and early ‘70s. The campaign plans to target women, believing that they exert strong influences on husbands, boyfriends and sons, and also because, advertising officials say, more women are riding motorcycles than ever.

“We’re looking to make motorcycling more attractive to the general public in the same way the milk people are trying to encourage people to drink milk,” says Steve Nissen, Doremus Porter Novelli vice president. “It’s almost to reintroduce motorcycling to the general public. The bottom line is that there has to be a reason why all those people in the ‘60s and ‘70s got on motorcycles and had a good time. We think it still exists. . . . I can tell you it’s a damn exciting sport, especially in California.”

Motorcycle industry statistics chart the decline. Nationwide, the number of motorcycle registrations has dropped from 5.5 million in 1979 to 5 million in 1986. The decline can’t be blamed on a handful of trouble spots: 21 states have fewer registrations in 1986 than in 1976, statistics show.

Industry experts cite a number of factors, including rising costs, increased consumer concern over motorcycle safety and the increasing number of choices for the buyers’ dollar, particularly the proliferating video-electronics industry. And always lurking in the motorcycle industry is the image.

In 1985, the Costa Mesa-based Motorcycle Industry Council conducted a national survey of people who didn’t own motorcycles to determine their attitudes toward motorcycles. The survey indicated that 39% had either a “very negative” or “somewhat negative” attitude; 30% were neutral and 26% had either a “positive” or “somewhat positive” attitude. The other 5% didn’t offer an opinion.

Industry experts believe that correcting an image about motorcycle safety will help spur sales. The Motorcycle Safety Foundation, also based in Costa Mesa, sponsors some 700 rider courses nationally, including one at Orange Coast College. As of Jan. 1 of this year, anyone under 18 in California must pass the course before getting a license.

The thrust of the program is to teach riders how to spot potential trouble spots and avoid them. Riders also are taught how to take the bike down with them without injuring themselves, much like state patrolmen do.

For the motorcycle industry, the stakes are high: to restore its now-flagging business. Part of the challenge is to change the opinions of people like CHP officer Daily, a 22-year veteran who sold his motorcycle after investigating too many traffic accidents.

“We have a saying that there are two kinds of motorcycle riders,” Daily says. “The ones who have been down and the ones who are going down.” Don Bell disagrees. “I’m aware of it (the danger), and I’m not flaunting my luck. I’m just saying that’s not true. We all have our laughing fall-overs, where we forget to put the side stand down. . . . I haven’t been down yet, but I think they’re coming to get me all the time. The last time I rode, someone came into my lane and turned in front of me. It’s a daily experience.”

It is little consolation, other than for those trying to change the motorcyclist’s image, to cite a 1980 USC study that showed that in multi-vehicle accidents involving motorcycles, two-thirds were the fault of the non-motorcyclist.

As Bell says, it doesn’t matter if the motorcyclist is in the right in a territorial dispute with an automobile. “You can be right,” he says. “Dead right.”