Cult of Dualsport

Bike sales still down for 2010

Motorcycle USA reports on the latest stats from the Motorcycle Industry Council. The bad news? Sales are down by 18% from last year. The good news? Dual sport sales are down the least, with only a 3.8% drop.

Off-Highway vehicles and dual sports, which actually sported a promising sales growth in March to end Q1, were unable to continue the trend and are year-to-date down 14.4% and 10.5% respectively. However, the dual sport category (which is less than a tenth of the total On-Highway volume) appears to be the closest segment to stabilizing with just a 3.8% drop in quarterly sales compared to 2009.

Jesus would ride a dualsport

The guys at MISSIONmoto were interviewed by the West Seattle Herald recently. My favorite quote?

"Jesus would drive a dual-sport ... You can get anywhere."

America's Great Outdoors

A post over at Motherlode Dualsport has information on the Obama Administration's "national dialogue about conservation in America."

Save The Trails, ARRA and American Landrights teamed up to post alerts recently asking people to VOTE for IDEAS to help ensure the President's Great Outdoor Initiative was about keeping public lands open to all forms of recreation, including Off Road Recreation.

If you want your opinion to count, visit the AGO site and create an account. Then vote for or against -- "promote" or "demote" -- the ideas that have been posted by others. Or, you can also create your own idea for others to vote on.

Save the Trails has posted quite a few pro-OHV ideas and listed them here. Please promote or demote these ideas, as you see fit.

To be quite honest, I'm not convinced that the President or his administration will take pro-OHV ideas seriously. But AGO seems to be an open forum, and at least there's someplace where we can register our opinions.

Nice roundup of electric motorcycles

Popular Mechanics has a buyer's guide for plug-in bikes. I've blogged about the Quantya, Brammo and Zero, but there are a few others here that I haven't heard of. Like the Ultra Motor A2B Metro below, which is cool but clearly not offroad capable ... well, not in my hands, anyway!

When it comes to electric propulsion, motorcycle companies are way ahead of carmakers. While electric cars such as the Nissan Leaf are still in the development phase, there are around a dozen credible e-bikes on sale today that offer a lot more than just green credentials: near-silent operation, running costs that amount to pennies per week, low insurance rates, little maintenance and uniquely fun performance.

100,000 miles of secondary and unpaved roads

Thanks, guys! The Backroads Touring - Kansas site has this to say about the 100,000 miles of "secondary and unpaved roads" that they ride:

We consider ourselves most fortunate to have access to the tallgrass prairie and other unique areas of Kansas, and are committed to leaving those areas just as we found them. To those folks who live where we travel to .... we are pledged to "tread softly and leave nothing behind". As a group, we only ride public access roads and do not ride on private roads without permission. When we cross unfenced open rangeland via public roads, we will remain on the roadbed so as to not cause possible damage to the prairie or raise the ire of landowners. We will also take precaution to not "spook" roaming herds of livestock when riding through open range areas.

Moab

Awesome photos of Moab here at Mojave Dualsport. This is the kind of riding that Wildlands CPR and other groups want to ban.

Adventure riders of years past

A few cool old photos here at Two Wheeled Texans.

And here at AdvRider.

The Max Factor

I wonder if this ad sold more lipstick, or more motorcycles?

Roost: Helmet Hair Magazine.

Sacramento Bee commits journalistic crime

The Sacramento Bee says that grave robbers and tattooed parolees are terrorizing California's state parks, and there aren't enough park rangers to stem the tide of crime.

I'm getting pretty fed up with the government-media complex and its penchant for publishing crap and calling it "news". Check this out: "Rising crime dims luster of California state parks."

Holiday visitors seeking a quiet day off beside the water at Folsom State Recreation Area on July 5 instead had front-row seats to a pursuit, as park rangers chased an assault suspect on foot through throngs of picnickers.

It was like a scene from a big-city television crime drama. But this was a state park.

Crime is on the rise in California's state parks, up nearly threefold in the last decade, according to Department of Parks and Recreation data analyzed by The Sacramento Bee.

A few years ago I would have laughed it off. In the age of JournoList (see also here) stories like this make me wonder about the newspaper's political motivations. And, true to form, the Bee leaves out many facts which would undermine its central theme. Let's take a look at some of the "crimes" that are  "more common ... in the eight off-road vehicle recreation parks."

I live close to Prairie City, a big OHV park near Sacramento, so I looked at the the Bee's Park Crime and Maintenance Database to see what is actually listed. There are over 800 events listed for this park, and I looked at them all. Most of the Incident Types are listed as "Crime". What kind of crimes? Violations of the California Vehicle Code. Here are a few repeat offenses:

• CVC 38020: Identification Requirements: Violations
• CVC 4000A: Registration Required
• CVC 38205: Application for Transfer
• CVC 38170: Display of Identification Plates
• CVC 38300: Unlawful to Disobey Sign, Signal, or Traffic Control Device
• CVC 22350: Basic Speed Law
• CVC 38305: Basic Speed Law

Do any of these violations sound like "crime" to you? Sure, some dudes on their motorcycles got cited and there was even one drunk driver. But reading the first few paragraphs of the Bee article, one might think that crazed motorcycle gangs of tattooed parolees are murdering motocross moms every weekend.

The truth is that the worst "crimes" I found were "Possible Pipe Bomb" (not a crime at all unless an actual pipe bomb was found, and the database doesn't contain that information), "DUI", "Public Urination", "Dog Off Leash", and "Fence Knocked Down". There was even a "crime" listed as "No Violation."

A few of the events labeled "Incident" were pretty funny:

• Dog bit a person, lady hit dog
• Medical - Rock to the head
• MX Down (no kidding, at a motocross track?)

Does the Bee list these items? No. Rather, they say, park rangers must contend with "car surfing" and "grave robbing" and "illicit sex".

The article is probably just the result of a breathless reporter reporting breathlessly on the urgency of government intervention. Or it may be just another in a long string of articles designed to create fear in the minds of Americans. Whatever it is, it's bogus. Maybe I'll ask the folks who wrote it:

This story was reported by McClatchy Newspapers' five California papers: Matt Weiser and Marjie Lundstrom at The Sacsramento Bee; Rosalio Ahumada at the Modesto Bee; Tara Albert at the Fresno Bee; Jamie Oppenheim at the Merced Sun-Star; and Kathe Tanner and David Sneed at the San Luis Obispo Tribune. It was written by Weiser and Lundstrom. Contact The Bee's Matt Weiser, (916) 321-1264 or mweiser@sacbee.com; or Marjie Lundstrom, (916) 321-1055 or mlundstrom@sacbee.com.

Faster, faster, faster! In Dutch.

Over at Faster and Faster there's this image. The graphic indicates it came from somewhere over here. (Use Google Chrome if you want to quickly translate the site from Dutch.)