I don’t expect anyone but fellow bikers (Kande above all) to agree with me on this one, but, if you look at it from our viewpoint, motorcycles are the best form of transport.

Forget, you four wheel bound box-dwellers, the feel of the wind in your face, etc, etc, the road whizzing by ten centimetres below your boot, and all the other things I’m sure you’re sick and tired of hearing from bikers. Forget all talk of freedom and the feel of the road. Just remember that a bike uses less fuel than your car and can get your ass through the endless rush hour traffic jams (caused, let me remind you, by your cars) much faster – and that most of the time you don’t carry either enough people or material in your vehicle to make the extra storage space of your car worth while.

OK, so even seen from the point of view of the daily commute bikes win. I won’t even bother to torment you with talk of bike rides out in the country, doing things on two wheels you won’t ever be able to imagine doing on four. Forget that as well.

So why am I writing a post against bikes?

Because I am not.   

I’m writing a post against bikers. Not the sort of drug-crazed, insecure, violent moron who can’t seem to live outside the world of outlaw motorcycle clubs like the Hells Angels or Pagans’. Nor am I talking of the type of idiot who recently drove around Delhi beating up people at random. No.

I’m talking about the twerp on the street, the brainless dolt in the saddle driving past you, the sort of dweeb who seems to specialise in killing others, getting himself killed, or ruining the reputation of bikes in general.

Think about it. You hear of a plane crash that killed 250. How many of you immediately shout out that aeroplanes are deadly monstrosities that ought to be banned? How many of you even think twice about your own upcoming flight? Are there any?

Now, you hear of some git on a bike who wrapped his vehicle round a lamp-post; and how many of you immediately decide that motorcycles are lethally dangerous contraptions that should be got off the streets?

Answers?

Here in the town where I live, this is generally what the average biker does:

He buys a new motorcycle, and then immediately removes the rear view mirrors. Why, I’m sure I couldn’t tell you, unless it’s because he thinks mirrors are “sissy”. Most bikes therefore end up mirrorless.

Then, he adjusts the fuel flow so that the carburettor receives much more than its normal flow of fuel. This wastes one hell of a lot of petrol, but it makes for a deep engine note, a positive growl making his 150cc engine sound as if it’s got the capacity of a RoadKing or Fat Boy, and that’s all that matters. If he can get away with it he will remove the silencer entirely, though only for short periods since this tends to get the law down on him like a ton of bricks. Even cops value their hearing.

Then, because the laws of this state make helmet use compulsory, he makes a point of not wearing a helmet. Again, if he encounters a traffic cop without a helmet, he’s liable to get a ticket or at least a chewing out, so what he does is either wear a plastic cap (resembling a hard hat but slightly less than a hundredth as protective) or carry a helmet slung by the chinstrap over an arm. If he does this he’ll clap it on as soon as he sights a cop and remove it as soon as he’s safely past. And he’ll congratulate himself with the thought that he’s putting one over on the cops (remember, of course, that I live in a town where the maximum summer temperature never exceeds 28 or 29 degrees, even on the hottest days. So heat isn’t an excuse for not wearing a helmet) – as though wearing a helmet isn’t for his own safety.

Next, this moron begins wheelies and other flash techniques. No real biker has anything but contempt for these, but we’re talking about people who are basically punks. I’ve seen one actually fall under his own bike while trying a wheelie. I was amused and disappointed that he wasn’t hurt enough to teach him a lesson.

After this, our zero will set his girl on his bike, and she - always unhelmeted - will wrap her arms round him, and he – in the belief that this makes him sexy – will zip through traffic, between trucks, whatever bizarre and dangerous stunt he can think of. Rules of the road are not for him – and, of course, most people on the road don’t even have driving licences at all, let alone valid ones. So he can’t even depend on car drivers obeying rules either – they don’t know them any better than he does. (I mean this literally; during the abortive attempt to introduce traffic lights in town earlier this year, almost no driver knew what red, green, or amber meant.)

So, on a dark, rain slick road, helmetless, perhaps with alcohol sloshing around inside, his engine noise set so high he can’t hear any other traffic, with no rear view mirrors, Mr Zero tries one over take too many and wrecks his bike, killing self and lady love in the process. What are the families and others going to say?

You guessed it.

“Those contraptions shouldn’t be allowed. They’re death traps on wheels.”            

Feel.

Feel the thrum of an engine under you, the hard curves of the fuel tank between your knees. Feel the wind in your face through the helmet’s faceplate.

Listen.

Listen to the rumble of engines, yours and others, of the beep of indicator lamps, the rustle of wind. Listen to the road under your wheels. It has its own voice, and you get to be able to listen to it.

Let your hands and feet dance.

Your right hand is on the throttle, it twists it smoothly to increase your speed. Your left hand’s fingers press down on the clutch as your right hand decreases the pressure on the accelerator, your left foot presses on the gear lever to shift up to the higher gear. As you release the clutch, you increase velocity again.

A turn’s coming up. You ease off throttle, flick the indicator with your thumb, lean into the turn, automatically, the motorcycle banking under you. You shut the indicator and  straighten in time to see some stupid old biddy wandering into your path, thinking of who knows what. The fingers of your left hand press down on the clutch, those of your right hand on the handbrake, and your right foot on the rear brake, all together, simultaneously twisting the throttle down to zero. You screech to a halt, glare at the oblivious old dodderer as she wanders off to be run over by someone else, and move off again.

Traffic, and you have to stop, go, stop again, your eyes constantly searching for the oncoming vehicles, and in your rear view mirror for those trying to …damn it, that bastard’s trying to overtake from the left! Who gives these bastards a licence, anyway? – move over to the right, watch that road divider, make sure you don’t crash, and look out for the traffic signals coming up.

All right, you get the idea.

When I think about so simple a thing as driving a motorcycle, I wonder at all the unconscious effort that goes into it. What amazes me most is that it’s not something we have the slightest evolutionary adjustment for, yet we adjust to it and far more complex things. Read a pilot’s manual to get an idea of the complexity of pilot training. And we adjust to all of it.

I just wonder – we’re such an amazing species, we can learn to do so much.

How the hell is it that we also, consistently, make a humongous mess of it all?

Only, thing is, you won’t.

It’s all very well for the papers to report that India’s going to get to import Harley Davidson motorcycles in lieu of America lifting its ban on Indian mangoes. (Er, mangoes for bikes? Sounds like a fish- and –bicycle swap here. Maybe one should ask Gloria Steinem? She made that particular switch.) In any case, while American chins run with the juice of Langra and Alphonse mangoes, Indian roads are supposed to thrum with the vibrations of Harley wheels. They even changed the law to allow the Harley Davidsons’ polluting engines (Euro III unlike everyone else’s Euro IV) to come in without the same checks other bikes get. So – the papers say – motorcycle owners are in for the ultimate in biking experiences.

What is actually going to happen, though?

In real terms, exactly nothing.

Don’t get me wrong. I love bikes, I love the feel of wind in my face eddying through the faceplate of my helmet, and I never drive without one anyway. More to the point, I love pictures of big bikes, and I really love the idea of owning a Heritage Softail Classic or maybe even a Fat Boy. But that’s exactly what I love – the idea of it. I wouldn’t buy one and I would likely not take one if you gave me one for free.

Why ever not? Wouldn’t I give my upper canines for a Harley? I don’t think so.

In the first instance, there’s the little matter of the cost. Harleys are overpriced by any standards, and the idea of paying something around $17000 for one – before taxes that might go to something like 60% – is a bit on the fantasy side, even when these days when the rupee is at last strengthening against the dollar (and for how long? We all know how the export lobby is going to fight for a devaluation, at all costs). For a fraction of that kind of money, I could buy a serious ride…

…which a Harley is decidedly not. Look at it. A motorcycle with an engine capacity of 1200cc or 1500cc? Give me a break. What are you going to use it for? That’s a car and a bit, as I told Kande over on tortoiseboy’s page a few days ago, on two wheels. And it doesn’t even have the car’s only positive point – storage space – and it has all the car’s negatives, such as…

Fuel consumption. A 1500cc engine will have the fuel consumption appropriate to a 1500cc engine, whether you stick it in a car or on a bike. From what I read, Harley Davidson claims something like 20 kilometres per litre on the highway (but on another site I heard it’s 12 kilometres per litre for the Softail Classic). Let’s grant that 20 km figure for a moment, because a bike hasn’t the weight of a car to pull around. So that’s on the highway. Uh, before you get on the said highway there’s the little matter of getting  to it. And for that you have to negotiate urban traffic, of which lesser said the better. Ask him who knows. Ask me. And here in this town we don’t have cows and rickshaws on the street, either.

I can just see the hog stuck fast in traffic, belching out smoke, grinding forward in first gear, and the driver running out of fuel just as he hits the highway he was heading for. Down to reserve, he turns back to the nearest petrol pump, back inside the city, to fill up with our carefully adulterated and absurdly expensive petrol before heading out again to the highway, minus most of his ready money. To get stuck in traffic again.

Oh yes, I can see that all right.

Manoeuvrability. Let’s face it, cruisers are the worst bikes when it comes to manoeuvrability, though they score top of the list in terms of riding comfort and style (IMHO, anyway, and we cruiser riders can’t be all wrong), not to mention safety (with the lowest centres of gravity of all bikes, they are the hardest to spill). But, as I said, they are not manoeuvrable. Not even my humble 125cc cruiser has anything to say for itself on sharp corners, and the bigger and heavier the bike the more difficult it will find it. Harleys are made for countries like the US and Australia with endless stretches of relatively empty open highway, going straight as a ruler from horizon to horizon. That’s the sort of country it’s made for. That’s why Harleys scarcely sell in Europe, where the roads are all curvy. That’s why a Harley on an Indian road (most of all on the sort of narrow hairpin bends like we have where I live) will be in the position of a real hog in an obstacle course. Make that Hogzilla in an obstacle course.

As for a chopper, with those long long forks you won’t even get it round a hairpin bend. Take it from me.

Spares and service. Yeah, my bike breaks down five kilometres from town, and I can just see myself going two thousand kilometres to Mumbai for the necessary spare parts…

Practicability. Almost all my riding is basically to and from work. Most peoples’ is the same. For that, a 100 or 125cc bike – at most, if you stretch a point, a 350cc Royal Enfield – is all you need. At a pinch, it will even serve for a day’s trip (as I have often taken my Yamaha) without either leaving you stranded or denting your wallet all that much.

You’re going to ride a Night Train ten kilometres to work through rush hour traffic? Really? You’d do better to go by the real night train.

So, what gives? What is this putative relaxation of rules going to achieve? Nothing much except a lot of publicity. A few years ago, BMW released a line of 650cc sports bikes in India. Priced at around Rs 650,000 per bike, it never sold more than a few tens – if that. It was overpriced (at then prices, catastrophically overpriced) – even out of the range of the premium segment it was aimed at. And its fuel consumption (even with the far more efficient German engineering) was … a deterrent.

And you want me to believe that people are going to buy a bike more than twice the size, at something like twice the cost – after taxes – and use it?

Even some of the super rich who are planning to buy any admit that they’re only going to use it once in a while – a long, long while. It’s going to form the showpiece of their bike collections, endlessly discussed, its ownership made the basis of exclusive clubs where they talk about the bikes, swap photos, and…never use them.

When they ride, if they ever do, they are going to stick to their 350cc Royal Enfield Thunderbirds, which will cost them a fifteenth of their Harleys and give them twice, at least, of the mileage.

Someday I intend to buy a second bike, for longer trips. My 125cc Yamaha Enticer serves well enough for inner city use, but it’s underpowered for serious highway riding. But I’m going to buy something in the 350cc to 500cc range, no bigger, and when the time comes I’ll choose from the cruisers the market then has to offer.

Won’t stop me dreaming – just dreaming - of my own Road King hog, though.