Lance Wiggs

Sue’s back, and so check out her first installment of her motorcycle trip - to Broken Hill. This is the part that I joined her for before heading back to Sydney. Sue has tons of great photos and describes the journey eloquently to boot.

I’m trying not to be jealous of the fact that her trip was for 40 days or so and mine for about 8. Trying.

A fun sojourn in New South Wales…

Wishing everyone a great holiday season.

I’m off on a motorcycle road trip in NSW for about 10 days so blogging will take a break.

A timely topic as we head out on the annual Christmas travel-fest. It’s dangerous on those roads, and we all need to do something about it.

The NZ Government has come up with their list of measures to reduce fatalities on the road:

Increased demerit penalties for crossing stop lights
Increased demerit penalties for faster speeds as % of limit
Faster loss of license for reoffenders
Easier to confiscate cars
Less material fines
Longer training periods
BOC stays at 0.08%

Those are pretty good - I’m a big fan of the stop light one, but they don’t address the major reason why the USA, say, has a much lower rate of road death than we do.  It’s the quality of the roads, an segregation of the traffic.

BHP Billiton, meanwhile, is also passionate about reducing injuries, especially fatalities. BHPB worked on identifying the leading causes of fatalities, and now are spending considerable time, money and inconvenience to reduce them. (It is rather more inconvenient to die of course).

Here are some of the measures from one of what BHP Billiton calls  “Fatal Risk Control Protocols“.  FRCP 1 aims to eliminate fatalities from Light Vehicles across their sites.

If we were serious about moving from 300 to zero deaths per year, this is what you would see introduced:

15-20 kmph speed limit, depending on site
Zero tolerance for disobeying road signs
ABS and airbags mandatory in all light vehicles
Rollover protection mandatory for all 4WD vehicles
Reflective tape and a light colour
Segregation of pedestrians and traffic where possible
Segregation of light vehicles and industrial vehicles (or use flashing light & flag)
0.00% tolerance for alcohol for everyone on site
Comprehensive pre-start check for each vehicle each day by the driver
Lights on at all times
No mobile phones while driving

Penalties: Kicked off site, out of work, and difficult to get re-employed elsewhere in industry as you are clearly a safety risk.

That’s a great list, though that speed limit is never going to work on the open road . But frankly on a BHPB site I’d have no incentive or felt need to go any faster - safety is much more important to everyone than how quickly you can get from A to B.
Above all, safety on the road starts with the individual. You decide whether you will be safe - and that means making sure you are safe even when everyone else is not. Motorcyclists are very familiar with this approach - there are plenty of times when cars will kill you unless you take action, but there is no sense in being dead and right.

Looking at those BHPB requirements, which are derived from hard evidence, we see that many of them are eminently adoptable by ourselves.

e.g.
Buy a white car with ABS  & turn those lights on
Don’t drink anything before you drive.
Never go through a stop light
Drive within the limit of the road, vehicle and yourself.
If you are a motorcyclist, then make sure you wear light colours with reflective bits - if you are sliding along  the road you want the cars to see you.

And so - how am I going?

I have white, red and bright orange motorcycles, with lights always on
I almost never drink and drive, and when I do it is max two drinks and lots of time.
I have a pathological need to stop on orange lights (while looking in my mirrors)
I ride fast, but in control, and slow right down near people.
My bike clothing is light and reflective.
But sadly speed limits are relatively arbitrary for me. It’s safety first, limits second. Expect me to be under the limit in a small busy town, and don’t be surprised to find me well above the limit when overtaking.  The speed limit to me has been guidance, and while we should throw the book at people for ‘dangerous driving’, a few kms over a poorly crafted limit is no big deal to me.

So I’m not a fan of the increased demerit points for exceeding a speed (100 kmph) I can do in 3 seconds or so from a standing start.  But I do understand why it has to be this way.

But now let’s fix the roads.

Dave Moore writes on the motorcycle vs Police Car crash in the  Buller gorge. A police car did a three point trn on a narrow incredibly curvy road to case a motorcycle, and 2 more crashed into him.

There is a systematic safety culture failure that really scares me here.

First - what made the Police Officer think he had a hope in hell of safely pursuing the first bike? It’s extremely hard to speed over the speed limit on that road, and the sorts of bikes these chaps were riding can safely use all of their lane to straighten corners like a car cannot. A Commodore has no show, and even the Subaru Legacy’s that Police used to use would have no show. A pursuit would be incredibly dangerous and involve cutting corners, and in a car that frankly is marginal even in big straight West Australian roads.

Secondly - the three point turn. There is just no way that was remotely safe, and the Police driver is lucky that a decent sized SUV without motorcycle quality brakes wasn’t the next vehicle to come around the corner.

Thirdly - the attitude after the bikes hit of  “they were speeding”. That’s clearly not taking personal responsibility for lowering the road toll.

The first and foremost duty of everyone on the road it to ensure safety - that of ourselves and that of other drivers.

A Police Officer has an even higher standard. They are held to account for helping everyone increase the safety on the roads - which means reducing hazards on the road and helping us reduce our own idiotic behavior that leads to hazardous situations.

This Police Officer clearly put ticketing before safety. This much we can glean from the above three points.

Through his actions he created a life threatening situation - he was not thinking Safety First. He was not believing or living Safety First.

Note - this all applies even if the motorcyclists were speeding, or even more so as he has a duty of care to help them slow down safely.

So - where was the duty of care? Where was the safety first value?

This is more than just a single Police Officer, but a sign of a system that is placing tickets before safety, at least in one geographical area.

I, for one, want an enquiry as to how this situation could ever occur, and how we can ensure that Road Safety is a value not an afterthought for our Police Officers.

Will this will be the overlanding bike of choice for the next few years? he question is whether the F800GS combines the best or the worst features of the dependable but heavy R1200GSA and the light but underpowered F650GS.

Either way I want one. The photo above is a snippet from one of several over at Touratech.

More information at MCN

Well my cunning plan of having Leopard sent to me failed - it didn’t show up in time before the goods inward at work closed on Friday, and so I went out and purchased another copy at 6:20pm on that night.

All is not lost - my parents will now be the proud owners of Leopard - Family version. At least they will be if it turns up at work before I head to NZ later this week.

So here is the whole sordid install story. Relax and look on in amazement as you’ll see hundreds of thousands of backup years, the actual moment of death of Tiger, not one but two spinning balls of death and, of course, plenty of refreshing eye candy.

The Install

Oh good - the bike courier has arrived with Leopard

Goodbye Tiger, let’s start the Leopard install process…

Continue reading ‘Leopard. The Install in pictures.’

Apple, at the same time as the new iLife launch, launched a very overdue upgrade to the dot mac product.

I sent some photos from the new iPhoto to a new feature - dot Mac Web Gallery. The process is to select your pictures in iPhoto, and, err, push a button (or click a menu item).

The upload process worked pretty well, unlike that of iWeb which was unreliable to the point of uselessness, and the reason one of my previous attempts at blogging died.

I did have problems at the beginning with the sync though - getting duplicates and all sorts of things after I tried to change the order and add additional photos while the sync was underway. Things went more smoothly after I deleted that and started again. I still cannot figure out how to change the order of albums.

So here are a selection of my North and South America motorcycling photos. Check out what happens when you mouse over an album.

I’m impressed with the very simple elegance of the product, both for uploading and viewing.

I finally got out into the bush today.  No snakes or kangaroos, but some distinctively Australian scenes. First - some bush:

A great track which made me feel like I was in the middle of nowhere:

A somewhat awkward pose as I rush to get in place for the timer..

..”Aerial Burn Planned” - time to get out of here…. Continue reading ‘Aussie bush motorcycle excursion’

Tempting. So much to see over here, and today was the first real sunny weekend day where I could motorcycle around. I had a ride on an x650 today which was a giggle, but, astonishingly, vibrates more than my KTM 950. Roll on summer.

Turns out Mod has plastered my photo all over his nice Brass Monkey article in the latest edition of KiwiRider. Gave me quite the shock when I was reading the mag on the flight back to Perth. It was an awesome Brass though.

I’m becoming addicted to Dave Moore’s Drivetalk. I’ll let Dave’s resume speak for itself:

“Dave Moore is Motoring Editor for The Press and The Dominion Post and blogs for Stuff on all things automotive. His words also appear regularly in other Fairfax titles, including NZ Autocar, and he can be heard every week on NewstalkZB. He is the current Qantas Transport Columnist and Transport Feature Writer of the Year. “

He’s also a very good bloke, and yes, a very good writer. Although I certainly don’t agree with everything he says, there are some excellent posts.

I’ve had a few folk ask about the picture above. It was taken near Amersfoot, in South Africa. I was on the BMW off road course, run by the amazing Jan de Toit from Country Trax.

The course starts with learning the correct technique for picking these monstrous 1200cc bikes up, includes getting those things airborne, blasting around an oval track and plenty of water, dirt and sand. We had a particulalry stong group, with some guys with years of enduro experience. On the second day we went for a ride about the place, and a few of us tried the canal.

It was strictly volunteers only, and 4 of us stood up. 2 others first, then we had some lunch, and another guy and I decided to give it a go. We followed Jan into the canal and blasted around, jumping out and braking to a halt on some thin grass covering dirt and rocks. After we did it we were told that less than 10 people had ever done so, and that I was the first non South African.

Given that I almost wiped out into the next bend of the canal  my third run, I would not recommend this. Jan figured out the entry and angles and speed (80kmph) when the canal was being built and bereft of water.

A selection of the pictures I’ve uploaded to Flickr

Day 1 - a perfect run to Arthur’s pass from Blenheim, via Murchison and some dirt

Twilight at the rally site in Central Otago- day 3, after a interlude in Auckland for a meeting via ChCh.

It was wet…

crazy people below…

I’m off on the brass monkey for a few days. brrrrrr.