I just read Boris Mihailovic's column in AMCN Vol 55 No. 21.
Crikey.
Encapsulates the message a few people have been trying to communicate about professional lobbying in regard to motorcycling, and actually taking a stand, and saying, "Oi, Government, No!"
I joined in the Anti-Apartheid protests at 15 and it cost me an AFS scholarship to Sth Africa at 16 - photographic evidence you see, but I wouldn't change a thing. I've kind of lost the ability in subsequent years to give much of a shit about anything except the problems two inches from my nose, plus when I do get passionate about something adrenalin makes me look like a bulging-eyed, spittle spraying, fringe looney.
I'm not sure that a protest movement is what's needed. Times have changed and a corporatised government requires a different approach.
We really do need to do something to preserve a culture of freedom in "western" democracy. We've surrendered a truckload of "rights", privileges, and iconic behaviours to peculiar to New Zealand and Australia to forces that, at best, can be described as making Joe Averge average. Janet too.
Motorcycling fell from favour as transport when cars became cheaper, and the current increase in motorcycles on the road can traced to a trend in over 40-somethings getting back into something they gave up to have kids and develop careers. No disrespect intended, but that has cemented the ideal of the motorcycle as a leisure toy. The manufacturers and local motorcycle dealerships are more than happy to cater to this because it means sales, but the segmented nature of the types of motorcycles being sold means that both the seller and the buyer are concentrating on their own immediate satisfaction.
Thanks to cheap fuel and cheap 2nd hand import cars, and the leisure status of motorcycles, traffic congestion on has visited itself on NZ at levels that are only normally seen in "Mega-Cities", like London, Los Angeles, and Mexico City. Auckland in particular is buried under a needless weight of 4 wheeled, single occupant cars - and it's not that densely populated. Don't believe me? Hampshire in the UK has a population of 1,240,800 (2001 figures), is about the size of the Wairarapa, and yet in a year of living there, I never ever saw the M3 stop dead, except for the junction that fed Winchester and Eastleigh, and even then it only lasted for 30 minutes, morning and evening. Take Southampton; 221,000 people live in an area about the size of Devonport, Takapuna, Northcote, and Birkenhead, and yet I could drive through it at peak travelling times between 7am and 9am in about 30 minutes.
London is a bitch in peak our, but I could still do the North Circular in under 2 hours in 1998, between 7:30am and 9:00am. There's a variety of reasons, mostly to do with effective public transport. We don't have public transport in NZ, AND WE NEVER WILL. There are simply not enough people to make the investment required in rail, subway, light rail, and buses cost-effective in a lightly populated sprawl like Auckland. Unless we choose to pay for it.
The motorcycling industry in NZ needs a prod from someone like BRONZ to start actively marketing motorcycling to Government as a congestion buster, rather than continuing their ivory tower approach to let market forces and capitalism regualte sales and marketing direction. The myth of motorcycling being hugely dangerous needs to be challenged by co-opting trained researchers to present the same data that LTNZ uses in a different light. Very easy to to do, plus we need to challenge ourselves to perform better on the road, and to tell Government just what it is that we do to make ourselves safer. There isn't another segment of the "motoring public" doing more to train their participants than motorcycling, but we don't tell anyone. "They" aren't going to look at what we do with everything from track days, to junior motocross, to the training industry generated by the graduated license system unless we tell "them" to look.
There's no longer any sort of Motorcycle lobby group presence in Wellington. No industry led one, no enthusiast led one, no sales arm of motorcycling at all. I'm not putting myself up as "Der Fuhrer", as I can't commit the time, but I do have some ideas of what constitutes a professional voice. If there's a team, I'm willing to work in it.
Anyone else in, or have you all given up?
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Originally Posted by skidmark
Could we trust them? John.
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