Celebration day

It's World of Bollocks Edition #125! Yes folks you're absolutely right, that's not really worth celebrating and neither is this: your correspondent ceases to be a twentysomething in about an hour and a half. At 6.30pm NZ time to be precise, correcting for time zones and daylight saving. Is this, one might ask themselves, going to turn into a self-immersed whinge about how turning thirty is arse and your best years are behind you and you're no longer in the trendy sought after target demographic for marketing, music and TV shows and all that sort of indulgent sulking wank? Well, no. But '90s Britpop band Reef had it right when they said: Hide away boys, you're no longer in favour; you're yesterday's news and no longer the flavour. Yer old, yer old, yer old, yer old, yer old, yer old.

Suffice to say, turning thirty IS arse. And so's this.

Kill a biker, make a dollar
I love motorbikes. I don't ride motorbikes. I'd like to, but Lucas probably needs a father. The stats on bike rider longevity, particularly the nutters, mentalists and assorted Subway-store-short-of-a-picnic types who pedal R1s, Fireblades and the other hyperquick Japanese superbikes, are not good. Particularly the mid-life-crisis munters who decide to relive their yoof in their fifties by getting back on two wheels, usually predicating their getting off two wheels and getting into the front of a truck, bus, poorly-driven Korean hatchback, powerpole, irrigation culvert or other assorted roadside furniture. Bikes are fun, but they're seriously fuck-off dangerous. Scratch that: bikes are fun BECAUSE they're seriously fuck-off dangerous. And because fanging around scraping kneepads pretending to be Stoner, Bayliss, Doohan, Gardner and/or Rossi (for the continental types) is both big AND clever.

But what doesn't help are reprehensible government fuckers who aren't afraid to use spilt biker blood as an excuse to make some coin and some political advantage.

In NZ the hoary old chestnut of bikes being forced to hard-wire their headlights on at all times (so ignorant fucks in their Corollas have one less excuse for not seeing them when they nail them at roundabouts) has resurfaced as a 'road safety initiative' - this was promoted in the '90s in Australia but finally rubbed out on the grounds that in the few countries this has been tried, it achieves fuck all other than making a lot of money for manufacturers of motorcycle batteries, electrical systems, alternators and headlight globes - but in an election year, with a desperate incumbent government facing an electoral arsekicking (unfortunately they're from my side of politics too - unfortunately because they're travelling so poorly I'm finding myself agreeing with the evil capitalist fucks on the other side) they're up to trying anything. Now this is table stakes, as an old boss of mine would have said; an annoyance, really, rather than a big issue.

However in Australia they're really taking the piss. The Victorian road safety bureaucracy VicRoads has authored a report pushing strongly for the introduction of front-facing numberplates on bikes. The argument for this is supposedly as follows:
1. Speeding kills people.
2. Speed cameras stop people speeding.
3. Motorcycles are more difficult to detect by speed cameras because they don't have front plates.
4. Motorcycles therefore have to have front plates because otherwise they will speed and die.

Where to begin with such an unceasing farrago of utter plop?

1. Speeding has fuck all to do with people dying on the roads. Shit roads, shit cars, shit conditions and above all shit driving standards are why people die on the roads. Internationally, there's a strong correlation between speed limits and road tolls; wherever highway speed limits have been elevated, such as in several US states (from 55mph to over 70), road tolls have fallen, and where speed limits have been reduced, road tolls have risen. In the Northern Territory, where an open-road speed limit has been introduced where previously there was no restriction at all, the death toll has blown out by over a third in the last year.
2. That's just bollocks. Speed cameras stop people speeding topically, in the same way camomile lotion isn't that good at treating Ebola. What speed cameras DO do is make a shitload of money for the relevant authorities, but anyway.
3. This would be true, if speed cameras were set up to point head-on at traffic. But most are targeted at cars as they pass - in fact in NSW it's the only way a permanently mounted camera is allowed to operate.
4. This presumes that motorcyclists are all inveterate sociopaths who only speed because they think they won't get caught. Which, while at least partly true, is something of a gross generalization.

However the dodgiest part of this whole deal relates to point #3, which gets at the crux of the issue behind why VicRoads are pushing this. Speed cameras don't read front-facing plates, but Melbourne's monumentally expensive tollway cameras do, and VicRoads are in bed with the tollway operators to the tune of billions of dollars. The tail is wagging the dog; the tollway corporates want the government to change its laws, on the pretence of road safety, solely to make them more money. No matter that no other industrialized nation on Earth, other than India and Singapore (simply because of being unchanged from their British colonial past), has laws enforcing front numberplates. No matter that international bike manufacturers would have to custom-engineer front numberplate solutions for all their bikes (plus retrofit setups for all existing bikes) which won't compromise engine cooling, aerodynamics and looks of the products they design for the rest of the world. No matter that this Australian-only R&D spending by the manufacturers will make bikes cost more. And no matter that the various states' most recent efforts to improve 'road safety' for bikes has amounted to lining the highways of Australia (and NZ) with miles and miles of cheese-cutter wire fencing - with the result that emergency crews attending accidents involving bikers going into this stuff are routinely offered post-traumatic stress disorder counselling after having to scrape diced pieces of torso off the road. American journalist decapitated by Islamic cunts on interweb: international incident. Tasmanian biker decapitated on Zeehan-Strahan highway: mentioned only in Two Wheels magazine.

But, unlike the wire fencing itself, while front plates are a despicable plot by goverment lackeys to make money for their corporate string-pullers, one hopes they're not going to result in MORE biker deaths on the roads. Whereas the story in old London town is very much along those lines.

London mayor Ken Livingstone is very big on appearing interested in environmental matters in order to appeal to the champagne socialists among his constituency who are fervently pastel-green in their eco-politics (i.e. not actually that green but definitely wishing to appear to be green in order to be seen to be doing something about polar bears being harpooned by Japanese whalers because of the El Nino effect, or something.) Livingstone, who personally vetoed the vaguely amusing idea of Bernie Ecclestone running a Formula 1 Grand Prix around London's streets, is massively in bed with the city's strangely powerful cyclist lobby, so much so that the entire city has been recast in order to please them. Cars are struck with a debilitating congestion charge, levied by weight and engine size, and most arterial roads are laced with bus lanes, upon which cyclists have preferential rights. (Or so I understand. I'll have to check this out for myself in the European summer when the World of Bollocks visits Londonium en route to o glamourous Ghent, East Flanders, home of skanky-tasting wheat beers, a large Ford Mondeo assembly plant, and an even larger evolution and development conference. Excitement minus.)

Anyhoo, recently an 18 month trial was conducted in which motorcyclists and scooterists (which, like in Australia and NZ, have increased exponentially in number in concert with petrol prices rising) were permitted to ride in bus lanes along with cyclists (and, surprisingly enough, buses.) This was apparently a massive success, with deaths and injuries amongst operators of 'P2Ws' (powered two-wheeled vehicles) dropping by almost 50 percent. Likewise, collisions between bikers and pedestrians and even between bikers and cyclists were also down by almost half. These figures, reported by Two Wheels' Euro correspondent Kevin Ash in their March '08 issue (referencing for the pedantic) were detailed in the official report compiled after the 18 month trial. Except that the report was never released, with the London council's transport authorities officially declaring the report was inconclusive. As you've probably guessed, the problem wasn't that the findings lacked conclusions, it was that the findings reached precisely the wrong conclusions for Livingstone's political convenience.

So instead of releasing the report (and thus offering urban centres worldwide valuable new information on how they might prevent biker, cyclist and pedestrian deaths), Transport for London suppressed the report, citing a need to rewrite sections of the report to emphasise that cyclists are opposed to motorcycles in bus lanes and avoided those in which they were allowed. Or, to put it another way, they wanted the results lied about in order to prevent their cyclist pressure group pals from spitting the dummy. And they got it, with the final report deleting large swathes of key data which would have been favourable to bikes in bus lanes, in favour of giving much more weight to the anti-bike opinions of cyclists - even though less than 50 actually responded to the survey questionnaire in the report, making it about as scientifically relevant as the Journal of Creation Science.

In short: governments are cunts, and will happily trade a pile of dead and dying bikers for votes from pressure groups, or cash from corporate 'partners.' It makes you just want to crank a wheelie through your local front-facing red light camera on your GSX-R, flipping the bird at the relevant authorities.

I have grown old writing this. I am now thirty. I blame the relevant authorities, and the inventor of time. I'm off to get drunk now. (Monkey Bay, a fairly handy Marlborough cab merlot, since you asked.)

The Doctor is OUT.

Salud.