I just returned from a week in Great Britain, a place where the motorcycling experience, if you hadn’t heard, is a true pleasure. Unlike here in the States, two-wheeled travelers are permitted by law to enjoy something commonly known as “filtering.” This is a fun term for a perfectly legal license to split lanes, ride on either side of moving traffic, and even pass along the center line nearly everywhere. Currently, only California and a couple of other US states allow legal lane-splitting, but even in these locales, we’re still forbidden from merging ahead of traffic queues (or jams) at stoplights the way British riders can. The result is traffic that flows more fluidly and continuously without motorcycles and scooters being required to occupy the same allotment of space that cars and larger vehicles do.
It’s neat to experience how well-educated British car drivers seem to be regarding two-wheeled traffic; I’m often amazed to have drivers pull to one side to allow my motorcycle to pass between theirs and another car and there’s none of the arrogant, threatening horn honks and road rage we experience here at home when passing a car too closely. I’ve only seen this on the US West Coast where traveling along the steep, winding roads in So Cal, motorists will happily move aside to permit faster-moving motorcycles to pass. In some areas of the Golden State, transportation officials have even made sure that some roads popular with riders have small laybys cut into the right-side berms where cars can scoot out of the path of bikes if need be.
It would be a blast to see similar accommodations spread across the US, but given my choice, I’d dig seeing our country adopt a UK transportation concept that really could make riding motorcycles more efficient and pleasurable. Check out the image here of a Motorcycle Only public parking space spotted last week in the bustling Chiswick section of West London. Parking spaces in this neck of the woods are as rare as sunny winters in England, but the government has seen to it that the British capitol’s hundreds of thousands of bikes, scooters and mopeds, have access to convenient public parking spaces wherever possible. I’ve seen rows of spaces set aside for two-wheelers at museums, shopping centers and other public amenities, and when these aren’t available, it’s perfectly legal in many places to park a motorcycle on the sidewalk, as long as it doesn’t intervfere with pedesrians.
In our own country, only bicycles enjoy such full cooperation from local and state governments and I’ve frequently wondered (OK, griped) about how pedal bikes have become so widely accepted and catered to when motorcycles- whose owners are taxed and licensed, by contract- are still considered outsiders in the overall transportation game. Maybe the pedal bike crowd is better organized with more lobbyists on their side, or maybe we just haven’t been working hard enough with politicians to make our riding experience what it truly could be.
