#134 Changing the Rules, Mixing My Emotions

All Rights Reserved © 2015 Thomas W. Day

On the last October weekend of the 2014 MMSC training season, I taught a “Seasoned Rider” class (aka Experienced Rider Course, ERC, BRC II, etc.) for a few Polaris company employees. Because the course had some experimental qualities (“There will be a test.”), the course was prepaid to the college regardless of the number of students. Saturday morning was right at freezing and no one was compelled (either by work or because they’d laid down $60) to be there, so only four students showed up. On top of that, due to the lateness in the season and the “test,” the Polaris employees were allowed to ride the course on the state’s 250-and-under motorcycles, instead of bringing their own rides. Due to those points, I was the only guy on the range who rode to the range. The first 3 1/2 hours were identical to the usual course, but it was pretty obvious that we all had a different kind of edge on due to the impending “evaluation” (PC for “test”). The students, because they were in a pass/fail situation and instructors because we’d never conducted a BRC II with a test at the end.

The big exception to this course was the students were offered the choice of riding their own bikes or the state’s. Because it was specially offered to Polaris employees by Polaris and some of them are beginning motorcycle owners and may or may not actually own a motorcycle, it made for an interesting experiment. By design and purpose, the BRC II is intended, I think, to be ridden on the students’ bikes. At least, that’s the way we’ve always done the course as long as I’ve known about it. And, of course, there has not been an evaluation at the end to determine what has been learned in the course during the time I’ve been an instructor. That has not always been the case, though.

I took my first prototype-ERC at Willow Springs Raceway, back in the late 1980’s. It wasn’t called the ERC, as I remember, but I don’t remember what it was called. There was a fair amount of lecture along with the usual emergency stop, obstacle avoidance, turning, and riding technique instruction. There was a short performance test at the end of the course and, as I remember, we were presented with a certificate that could be used for a drivers’ training discount with our insurance companies. The next time I took the course was in Denver, at Bandimere Speedway, the drag racing track. The “range” was a marked-up and coned section of the speedway where the cart racing is today. The course used the same kind of exercises, along with an opportunity to play panic-braking on their big training-wheeled 500 Nighthawk. You could wind up the bike to about 40-50mph and hammer the brakes and the skids kept the Nighthawk from falling over. I don’t think there was a test with that course. The last time I took the course as a student was in Minnesota on the Guidant parking lot in Arden Hills. The parking lot had been oiled earlier that week and employee cars had been sliding into each other at low speeds, morning and evening. I know because I worked there. I usually bicycled to work, so I missed out on the parking lot fun until Saturday at the ERC. The course continued the sliding and crashing the cars had demonstrated earlier in the week. Almost everyone in the class crashed at least once and a lot of chrome and plastic looked worse for the wear. I “anticipated” the emergency swerve exercise because I didn’t think my Yamaha TDM would look better coated in greasy black oil. The next week, another asphalt contractor cleaned and recoated the parking lot, this time with materials that didn’t come from the county oil recycling sludge pit. That’s the history of my student experience with the ERC and it’s ancestors and all of that was on my own motorcycles.

That behind me, I had a little built-in resistance to teaching the course to “experienced riders” on what most of those riders would consider to be “beginner bikes.” The fact is, a lot of experienced riding course students do not ride well enough to be called “experienced.” Maybe that’s the motivation for the recent renaming of those classes as “Basic Rider Course II” or “Seasoned Rider Course.” Another fact I have often expressed is that I think about 90% of Minnesota motorcyclists choose motorcycles that require skill levels far beyond the riders’ capabilities. Unlike ABATE, the AMA (the motorcycle group, not the doctors’ AMA), and the Industry, I believe tiered licensing is just common sense and that our current license testing is a joke. Not a funny joke, but a cruel, sarcastic, vicious joke that costs lives and billions of dollars in death and injury. From observing street riders over half-a-century and training them for a dozen years, I’d estimate about 50% of Minnesota riders should be limited to 250cc-and-under motorcycles, 90% should be limited to 650cc-and-under, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the 10% who are smart, competent, and safe enough to be on 650cc-and-above would probably choose to ride their big bikes on closed courses 90% of the time.

All that baggage under my belt, we started this course with a little apprehension. A lot of my doubts dissolved quickly, though. After the first couple of exercises it became clear that our students were riding a lot more aggressively and testing their skills more confidently than the typical BRC II class. Some of this was because this was a younger-than-typical class, but I have to give a substantial credit to the fact that we all ride small bikes more competently and confidently than large ones. We decided that I’d administer the test, since I’d studied the BRC II test procedure and had a couple of on-line conversations with California MSF instructors who’d done the test in the BRC II’s early years. The BRC II test is more like the DOT’s test. Which means all four sections of the test are performed by each student, more or less non-stop. More concentration is required, along with competence, memory, and attention, all qualities directly related to being safe on the road. Again, this was a small class filled with better-than-typical students, but at the end they all scored well enough to be qualified as MSF instructors.

I thought about this class for several days afterwards. There are some subversive reasons I am inclined to like the whole concept. The test is more important than I’d imagined. We often have old, unskilled, and/or arrogant riders who simply ride through the harder exercises on their abysmal hippobikes, imagining that there is no relationship between low speed closed course exercises and their delusional “real world.” The apehanger crowd that is overrepresented in mortality/morbidity statistics is typical of this character. Handing them a card that indicates successful completion of the course is particularly galling. Mostly what that group achieves is four hours of an out-of-control riding demonstration on an overweight, unmanageable motorcycle that has put the other riders and the instructors at risk. Most of that alcohol-demented bunch would totally blow the BRC II test because they’d forget half of it before they left the gate. If they were allowed to perform the test on a small bike or their own, the result would probably be the same; massive failure. Nearest and dearest to my heart, allowing these intermediate-level riders to do the course on our small motorcycles might encourage some of them to consider, or reconsider, their choice of motorcycle. A tiny percentage of riders might discover that “small is fun” and take that lesson to the street. If that, alone, happened, I’d be all for letting BRC II riders take the class on whatever motorcycle they chose.

#133 The Trouble with Being the Solution to A Big Problem

All Rights Reserved © 2014 Thomas W. Day

Pretty much all of the major problems on today's highways are fairly obvious: according to NHTSA statistics 2012's Big Three causes for highway fatalities are 1) drunk driving 31%, 2) motorcycles, 14%, and distracted driving, 10%. Solve all three of those riddles and you have taken away 56% of US highway fatalities. What is the miracle cure for all three of these highway safety problems? You might think that's a stupid question.

"You'll never stop people from being drunks or from playing with electronic toys while they drive and nobody's ever gonna teach me how to ride or make me wear a helmet."

Actually, I know the solution to all three of those problems and so does NHTSA and DOT and all of the car manufacturers. How do you stop people from getting drunk, satisfying their cell phone addiction, playing with their makeup or shaving on the way to work, or keep them from crashing their motorcycles? Those are the wrong questions. The right questions are how do you get the first group out from behind the wheel and how do you get motorcycles off of the public's roads? Simple. You make cars that are smarter than the average driver.

That's not a particularly high bar to leap, if you think about it just a little bit. The average American driver imagines himself to be a NASCAR racer, drafting the car in front of him with less than a fraction of a second of safe margin at speeds that are best described as "terminal." From the vantage point of a motorcycle seat, where I get to see all sorts of clueless drivers, distracted to the point of unconsciousness behaviors, physics-disabled punks suffering from "the fast lane is mine" video game reality distortions, and motorcyclists and scooter pilots who have almost enough skill to get out of their own driveways uninjured but not nearly enough talent or intelligence to ride competently and safely. With typical reflexes, reacting to a hazard takes at least a second and, more likely, a couple of seconds before you've even decided what to do about a disaster unfolding in front of you at 70mph. At 70mph, you're traveling 108 feet/second. If you're tailgating at 50 feet when a wheel comes off of a truck in front of you or a blowout puts the car you were "drafting" into a spin, you are solidly entangled before you even think about applying the brakes. On a motorcycle, you're in the air wishing you'd worn a helmet before you can even touch the brake (probably the wrong one used poorly, if you do manage to slam on the brakes and toss your bike into a sliding "stop"). On average, there isn't enough driving talent on our highways to overwhelm the capabilities of a 1980's Z80 processor and a MS/DOS controlled text-based program. Mostly, the folks we're trusting our lives with on the freeways and country roads are unfit to pilot bicycles, if they could load their lard asses onto a bicycle seat without bursting the tires. With all of those facts in hand and with the motivation of "societal cost of crashes" estimated at $230 BILLION, there is more than enough incentive from all directions to do something about the solvable problems of the Big Three. The fact that the solution is likely to do some serious damage to the other 44% of highway deaths is just icing on the cake.

In TheKneeslider.com, Paul Crowe wrote an article titled "Riding Motorcycles Among the Robots - You're Going to Need A Transponder." He pipedreams, "The thought of blasting through that digital parade on your human controlled and non transponder equipped Electra Glide may no longer be an option." If only that were likely. Like most of the motorcycle industry, he avoids the question, "Why would highway planners make any accommodations for a vehicle that contributes less than 0.001% to commuter traffic but 15% of fatalities?" Do you seriously believe that Harley Davidson and Polaris have that kind of economic clout? Harley Davidson's whole product line amounted to $5.9B in 2013 sales. Polaris grossed about $4B in 2013 for all of their products combined and sold about $1B in Polaris and Indian motorcycles. Out of a $17 TRILLION GNP, that is pretty insignificant and if you include our 15% of the nation's "societal cost of crashes" that $5B is pretty overwhelmed by the $34B motorcycles crashes cost the country. Remind me, again, why should the 99% of society who don't ride motorcycles on a regular basis, or ever, care about our "right to the highway?" 

If you don't think motorcycling's awful public image, our overrepresentation in highway injury statistics, or our low tech tendencies are a long term problem, you are not paying attention. The freight train of Change is blasting down history's tracks at revolutionary speeds. We are about to go from travelling by poorly manually piloted vehicles to a managed transportation system that makes decisions on a macro level, reducing traffic congestion, optimizing resource use, providing dramatic improvements in travel safety and efficiency, and transforms society as dramatically as giving up the horse-and-buggy did about 100 years ago. The only way motorcycles are going to get to play in this new sandbox is if we provide some value to transportation. Otherwise, the industry and population of users will resemble the tiny demographic that has clung to horses and horse sports since those animals were shuffled off of public streets. The trouble with being part of the solution to one of society's big problems is that you get swept up in a whole lot of things that are a lot bigger than you (or your industry). In manufacturing a rule of thumb is "the best way to idiot-proof a system is get the idiots out of the system." We are pretty tightly aligned with many of the idiots on the highway and we're going to get swept up with the drunks and distracted drivers when our transportation system evolves. The only way I see to avoid that is for motorcycling to move away from being part of an obvious solution to highway deaths.

A Last (?) Short Season

My 2016 MSF/MMSC training season appears to be pretty much indicative of the motorcycle training business in general. Due to a physical problem, last year’s fairly normal season got cut short around late July. Since 2001, I’ve been doing 15-25 Basic and (recently renamed) Intermediate classes a year along with the occasional Skills Retest and Maintenance class. Last year, I’d signed up for 16 classes and managed to teach a dozen before my right foot turned into a pain generator and I had to bail out of the last portion of my season. I hadn’t missed a class in 14 years before that season.

This year, I decided to downsize my participation to the minimum 4 classes.Honestly, I didn’t have much fun last season and have been wondering if I’m near the point where teaching anything to anyone has lost its appeal. I have been doing some sort of education function for almost 40 years; either as a corporate trainer or a college instructor. My father was a high school math and accounting teacher and I never imagined myself following in his career footsteps, but I did; sort of. My tolerance for fools has never been well developed, but it appears to be vanishing altogether in my cranky old age. I can put up with miles of inexperience, but I can’t move and inch to fix deliberate stupidity. When I first started training technicians, in the mid-70’s, I was ruthless when it came to putting up with a tech who wanted the planet to revolve in his direction. Several of my employers moved asshole employees into my departments because they didn’t have the balls or personal organization and disipline to fire them. I have always believed in saying (and documenting) what I am going to do and doing what I say I will do. If I say, “Screw up three times and you’re fired,” you should assume that when you’re at two strikes you better not swing at a bad pitch.

Part of what convinced me to quit my college teaching gig was that my ability to make the classroom rules and enforce them had vanished. Probably the worst thing about activities like for-profit education, healthcare, resource management, and like things is that management can rarely remember the purpose of the organization, beyond providing large salaries to management, for any length of time. When the rules for an activity are changed to keep the income steady for mismanagement, the rules no long exist and neither does the purpose of the activity. And so it went for my college teaching career.

The rules for motorcycle safety instruction have never been designed toward improving motorcycle safety. The MSF is OWNED by the MIC, which is all about putting butts with credit or cash on motorcycle seats. “Safety” is just the smokescreen used to justify avoiding the sort of government regulations that motorcycling’s awful safety record would warrant. Any other activity that would cost the nation’s taxpayers a good bit over $16B per year while providing little-to-no valuable utility (except guns and “financial services”) would see the regulation hammer drop like a brick on an ant. Like most for-profit organizations, the MIC has no strong reason to care if its customers die shortly after handing over their cash or the dealers sell the loans to some TBTF bank. It’s not like motorcycling has a long future in sight for these folks or that their execs have a financial motivation to provide for the future of the companies they mismanage.

In fact, the MSF program carefully orders instructors and program managers not to make claims about the MSF’s training having any effect on motorcycle safety. And that’s because it doesn’t. Not only does the MSF know that training doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, it doesn’t appear to work anywhere. One of the attractions to teaching is the feedback an instructor gets when people learn a skill and begin on a path toward mastering it. Trust me, it’s not about the money. Take away the hope there was a reason for spending a hot summer weekend on a parking lot walking 11-miles-per-day putting down and picking up cones, avoiding and preventing injury from a runaway motorcycle and motorcyclist or ten, and listening to people whine when they manage to fail the grossly-easy “skills test” at the end and you kill a lot of instructor motivation. 

Teaching the “Intermediate Safety Course” (IRC) is often way less fun or advanced than the “Basic” course. Overcoming the myths and objections of so-called experienced riders is wearing. I’ve dealth with two-year-olds who were more informed than the majority of over-50 Harley riders; especially the “club” characters who are just making the motions toward motorcycle safety to justify their gang patches and pirate parades.

One of the main consumers of the IRC has been Polaris, with a requirement that employees must obtain a motorcycle license and take both the BRC and IRC before they can  “check out” bikes from the company’s reverse-engineering inventory and Indian/Victory loaners. To accomodate those wannabe “motorcyclists” who want to ride but don’t want to have to actually buy a motorcycle, we ran an experiment a couple of years ago with allowing IRC customers to use the BRC bikes along with taking the MSF’s IRC test at the end. The results were pretty good, but the outcome was that we’re now allowing IRC students to use the small bikes but we’re blowing off the test. If there was ever evidence that we are not serious about providing actual results from motorcycle training, it was this for me.

So, at the end of this season I’m going to be spending the winter contemplating my motorcycle safety training “career.” Like most teaching gigs in the US, I think the average length of a motorcycle trainer’s career is less than 3 years. You’d think getting to play with motorcycles for fun and profit would be a better gig, but it isn’t in most states. Again, it’s the feedback reinforcement that overcomes the downsides to teaching and they aren’t there.

This May be the Last Time

Last year's MMSC training season was pretty much a bust. The first 3-4 months were a clusterfuck of mostly Century College classes that I signed up for because I assumed I'd be shuffling between our new home in Red Wing and the house we were selling in Little Canada. Instead, the Little Canada house sold in March and I ended up trying to make the 60-mile-one-way commute less miserable by checking into hotels for a day so my wife and I could pretend we were getting something out of the trips. The season ended with a foot injury that almost turned me into an invalid for the last months of that summer. Century has been my home school for almost ten years and when I tried a couple of classes closer to my new home I was reminded of my original reason for keeping it close. Unfortunately, there are some really awful instructors out there and I'd just as soon not even know them let alone work with 'em.

The sign-up process for MMSC classes has been a giant hassle since the first year the state took over the program. Each college has it's own meeting (I hate all meetings) and instructors are asked to select class dates 5-10 months into the future for the next year's season; usually sometime between November and early January. It you want to teach at four locations, four meetings at various inconvenient times. Way back in 2002, the state tried an on-line sign-up but too many of the seven or eight 90-year-old long-term instructors couldn't figure out the pipes and wires of "the new-fangled intrasnet-thing" and instructors with senility pulled rank and bawled until the system was drug back to the 1800's.

This year, I decided to give myself a break for the first time since 2001. I only went to the Red Wing sign-up. Later, I ended up volunteering for an IRC (Intermediate Rider Course) that turned into this television PSA: "Experienced motorcyclists most at risk for crashing." So far, one of my four classes has cancelled (due to low turnout). This weekend will be my only BRC of the season. Sometime in July, I'm supposed to do another IRC in Red Wing. After that, I'm free for the first summer in 15 years. The purpose of this break is to see if I miss it. If I don't, this will be my last MSF/MMSC season.