Some of my friends call me a fast driver. I guess it does depend on a perspective. I have driven my car on a race track. So I know how to push it. I grew up driving a car in a European country with a semi-chaotic city traffic that makes New York driving seem like a walk in a park. With this said I know how to drive both defensively and offensively. To wrap up this somewhat long intro - I know how to drive fast and would occasionally employ that style - guilty as charged. That all changed once I became a motorcycle rider.

I have had my car for almost 2 years now. It is a nice piece of German automobile industry. I really love my car. But as with everything you tend to get bored with things. So earlier this year I was contemplating an idea of getting another German. A bigger, meaner one with more horse powers and a one and a half second faster dash from 0 to 60 mph. Common sense won and I did not make an impulse buy. Some time later I bought my first motorbike. It goes from 0 to 60 one second faster than that meaner German that I almost bought.

Now that I am a rider I believe it really affected my style of automobile driving. I confess, I did sin once. I learned my lesson. And other than that one instance I have been a really good boy. Now when I drive my car I have no inclination of gunning it off the light or going really fast on an empty freeway. I’ve mellowed down. What happened?

A motorcycle among many other things is a small rocket ready to be launched. Weighing approximately about 400 pounds it packs as much horse powers as some of the older compact cars. While the best of the high performance automobile world will accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in approximately 4.5 seconds a 650cc bike will do the same under 4 seconds easy. I will leave it up to your vivid imagination how fast would a 1000cc super sport bike do.

A casual flick of your right wrist will suffice to experience a wide array of emotions ranging from total fear to joy of being free. A light body lean will gently alter your flight trajectory. So now that I possess all these powers driving a car as fast as it could ever be still seems fairly boring and tame in comparison.

I truly believe it would be beneficial for overall road safety if everyone had to learn how to ride a motorcycle and potentially owned one. This way we would definitely see a steady decline in drunk driving (it is really difficult to ride when you are under the influence) and people would have no need for nightly super speed car chases on freeways (I have seen these in abundance). Did you know that America is third after Russia and Ukraine with the highest death rate in automobile accidents per 100 thousand people? Lets make a difference. Sign up for the riders course, get a motorcycle, start riding. I have a dream :).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Racing, Motorcycles, Street, Auto, Cars, Life, Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.