I’ve just seen the June Australian magazine circulation figures. About a quarter of the magazines checked by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) have seen increases, the other three quarters have lost sales.

Not to drag this out for too long, Australian Road Rider’s circulation has grown by 4.54% to 21,971. We are the only motorcycle (in fact, the only motoring-type) magazine to have increased sales. Australian Motorcycle News, the closest comparable magazine on the market, lost 6.69% with sales dropping to 21,001.

That means we’re the best-selling pure motorcycle magazine in Australia once again. And we have you to thank for that. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Be assured that we feel suitably humble that you should take us to this position, and that we will do our best to keep providing you with the content, the look and the attitude that you obviously want.

I’m not counting the trader-type publications, which contain mostly classified advertising. As it happens, both of them outsell us but both of them also lost sales in June. Motorcycle Trader is down 2.93% to 26,945, while Just Bikes has lost 3.65% to finish at 33,692. I’m also not counting dirt bike magazines, although only one of them (ADB) is audited anyway, and it lost 2.64%. Two Wheels is not audited and I’m not going to speculate on its sales although there is no doubt in my mind that they are well below ours.

Australia’s two big motoring magazines have copped a hiding with Wheels down 17.93% to 55,868 and Motor down 20.16% to finish at 35,160. Mind you, Diabetic Living is up 18.58%, and Sporting Shooter is up 9.05%. It still only sells 13,963 copies.

The biggest growth for a mass circulation magazine was seen by Famous, which went to 80,593 sales for a growth of 20%. Yeah, yeah, I know – I don’t care either…

Anyway, thanks again for taking us ahead.

Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

Earnestness and self-righteousness are not restricted to car drivers and bicyclists, although they (and especially the latter) seem to abound in both. We get them in the motorcycle fraternity and sorority as well. Currently there’s a bit of a to-do about wearing coloured clothing, which I guess I stirred up in the first place but which has well and truly got away from me.

Just to set the record straight, I do not advise anyone to not wear brightly-coloured clothing, even fluoro vests. All I say is that you shouldn’t rely on this stuff to keep you safe. That takes a bit more than just advertising your presence to those few drivers who actually care about us.

But there are riders who would cheerfully damn anyone who doesn’t dress like an organ-grinder’s monkey, and who are (advertantly or inadvertently) encouraging government authorities to think about mandating it. You might have seen that the Victorian TAC intends to discount compensation payments for riders who were not wearing padded safety gear when they crashed; how long will it be before that includes day-glo clothing as well?

What the people who are so keen to tell other riders what to do are forgetting is that motorcycling is a recreation that is meant to be fun. I have spent many (far more than I care to remember) years trying to reinforce that in everyone’s mind, and to make it possible for as many people as I could to have a good time on bikes.

Please, all of you: go for a ride. Enjoy what you do. Leave other riders alone – except at a personal level, where I think it is an excellent idea to take someone aside and suggest they improve their riding, clothing or attitude.

But while lots of people seem to be happy to write letters and give the gummint ammunition to reduce our freedom, very few seem to have the guts to put their ideas into practice face-to-face.

That’s no fun, eh?

Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

Maybe it’s a side effect of advancing age, but I enjoy the ramblings of the Republican American writer P.J. O’Rourke. Unlike most conservatives he comes up with quite a few fresh ideas, and manages to serve up even the slightly stale old ones in an attractively humorous new coating.

In his recent book of collected articles and columns, “Driving Like Crazy”, he tells of a bike tour that he and some friends went on in 1979, and muses on danger as an element in the attraction of motorcycles, and the effect this has on riders.

“Motorcycles are dangerous,” he writes to non-riders. “You should be scared of them… people who ride motorcycles are doing something that’s so scary in the first place that they are statistically unlikely to be scared of you…”

He thinks that both Thomas Keneally and Stephen Spielberg missed a vital aspect of Oskar Schindler’s character in both the original book and then the film “Schindler’s List”.

“Oskar Schindler had been a successful motorcycle racer,” writes O’Rourke. “[So] There’s no mystery about what he did at his factory. He felt like it. And there’s no mystery why he wasn’t afraid of the Gestapo. He wasn’t afraid of anything. Pencil-necked punks in fake leather raincoats…”

And while he admits that “the appeal of the motorcycle is not rational” and despite the danger, he’s very much in favour of being able to yield to the siren call of the powered two-wheeler.

So am I. Oh, maybe I should have mentioned right at the beginning that I’m currently riding a Harley-Davidson V-Rod Muscle. I should probably be scared of it, or at least of what it keeps telling me to do… but I’m having too much fun.

Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

Sometimes you really do have to wonder where academics and bureaucrats get their priorities from. Here’s a quote from a Sydney Morning Herald story, published today (14-8-9). It concerns a proposal by a couple of La Trobe University academics to introduce so-called “telematic technology”, with all vehicles fitted with tracking devices.

“The devices… would feed information to a database that would then level charges, which would vary according to vehicle type, the road being used and the time of day.

“[One of the academics] said that by charging more for busier roads and during peak hours, motorists would change their travel habits and ease congestion, which is projected to cost $20.4 billion by 2020 unless action is taken.”

Right.

What I’m hearing here is not that the roads are there for us, to get us to where we need to be when we need to be. It’s not the road network that needs to be fixed. No, it’s us, the road users, who need to be penalized until we can’t afford to even get to work or get the kids to school any more. Make no mistake about it, that’s what this means. If we’re priced off the road there’s no more congestion! Bingo!

The fact that people don’t drive or ride in peak hour for fun seems to have escaped these blokes. We don’t choose to do this, we need to drive because public transport is rubbish or overloaded already, or because there is no public transport where we live or work, and for any number of other reasons.

Let me repeat that. We need to drive or ride. Making it prohibitively expensive is going to make our lives harder, and more unpleasant.

What do you reckon, is mum going to start dropping the kids at school an hour or so early (and who will look after them?) to avoid congestion tax? Is dad going to go to work an hour late (and what will his boss think of that?) for the same reason?

No.

What they will do is scrape up the extra money, because they have no choice. It’s yet another tax, and on some of the people who can least affords to pay it.

Oh, and if you don’t like that idea, our friendly academics have an alternative ready to reduce congestion. Increase petrol excise by 10 cents a litre. The effect is the same, a tax on working people, but I guess at least we save the enormous expense of fitting those tracking devices so Big Brother knows what we’re doing.

And let me just say that I have a very simple way of answering the question I asked at the beginning of this blog. Are the roads there for us, or are we here for the roads? Well, we paid for the roads. They didn’t pay for us.

Damn these people. And the worst thing is that we pay for this mindless, heartless nonsense with our taxes.

Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

Okay, here’s the deal.

We get a lot of stuff either to test, or at launches, or just out of the goodness of the bike industry’s hearts (no, seriously). Some of it we truly love, like the Ducati USB drive I have with my name engraved on it. You ain’t gettin’ that. But some of it gets a bit... well, duplicated. Or we feel a bit bad about hanging onto it. Or our garage reaches bursting point. Or whatever.

Obviously we wouldn’t want to sell this, because we didn’t pay for it in the first place. Equally obviously we don’t want it just lying around because that’s not fair to the people who gave it to us. They want some value from it, see it out there, and if it gets exposure here on the website then so much the better.

So... we’re going to give some of it to you. Every month, we’ll announce the giveaways in the Road Rider newsletter and put something up here on the website. Anyone who leaves a comment on any blog post within the month goes into the draw. We’ll pull a name out of the hat and advise the winner at the same time as we post the next item.

Just to kick things off big time, we’re offering two items:

FREEBIE THIS MONTH:

Go for it! And remember, check here every month to see what we’ve found to give away – it could well be a one-off that you’ll never find anywhere else.

Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

Reality check time. If you’re squeamish, don’t read on.

How many motorcyclists die in Australia each year? Six hundred or so? Each one is a tragedy; it would be better if each death could be prevented. And it’s up to all of us who ride to keep that number down as much as possible.

How many people do hospitals in Australia kill each year? Kill, not allow to die or watch over while they die etc etc. According to a Sydney Morning Herald cover story, Australia’s hospitals cause 4550 unnecessary deaths a year. Each of these is a tragedy too, but while most of us (those who aren’t doctors or nurses) can’t do anything about them, we hope that that number will be minimised as much as possible too.

Now, on a regular basis an organisation of doctors (from memory, the Royal College of Surgeons, is that right?) obtain money from the government (that’s you, the taxpayer – they don’t use their own money) to run campaigns on the backs of buses to tell you how to ride your bike. To save lives.

Err, please sir, please sir – can I make a suggestion?

If surgeons want to save lives, how about you wash your hands? Apparently lack of hospital hygiene is one of the prime causes of those 4550 unnecessary deaths. Think of all the lives that could be saved that way.

I’ve got an idea. Let’s get the government to give money to the Motorcycle Council to run a campaign to improve hygiene in hospitals.

Makes just as much sense to me.

I was down at the newsagent’s this morning, talking care of my usual chores – you know, putting copies of ARR and C+T in front or on top of all the other bike magazines – when I saw a cover that stopped me in my tracks.

It was one of the “comics”, as Lester refers to them, the magazines devoted to pages and pages of small ads flogging second-hand bikes or end-of-range runouts that the shops haven’t been able to sell off the floor. The cover, at first glimpse, looked very familiar.

Now you need to know that I’ve just been to the US to ride Honda’s new chopper, the Fury, for Cruiser+Trike. First ride by an Australian motorcycle writer, folks, and the first time anyone put a decent bit of distance on the bike: I did 2000 miles.

It is a knockout both to look at and ride, and going by the reaction I got from everyone who saw it – riders and non-riders alike – then it will sell its wossnames off. But here it looked like the Fury was on the cover – of another magazine!

A closer look disabused me of that idea. The bike was actually a specially-built chopper, although it did look remarkably like the Honda – even down to the shape of the tank and the front guard.

But here’s the crunch: the bike on the cover was advertised for $39,000. The Fury will probably cost half that, or less. And it will come with a full factory warranty, Honda’s usual reliability etc etc.

The line forms on the right, folks!

Oh, that’s after we get ours. We’ve put our hand up to customise one.

Here’s your chance to see BMW’s fantastic new S 1000 RR superbike in the metal! IT will be doing the rounds of BMW shops and sports events from right now until October. Make sure you get along to the venue nearest to you, and check it out!

July                          

25 Southbank Motorcycles Southbank VIC

August

5 Fraser Motorcycles Concord NSW

6 Procycles St Peters NSW

8 - 9 ASBK Rd 4 Eastern Creek NSW

11 Procycles Hornsby NSW

13 Worthington Motorcycles Kariong NSW

15 Eastern Creek Ride Day Eastern Creek NSW

18 Brisan Motorcycles Newcastle NSW

20 City Coast Motorcycles Wollongong NSW

22 Rolfe Classic Motorcycles Philip ACT

27 Adelaide Motors Fullarton SA

29 - 30 ASBK Rd 5 Mallala SA

September

8 Auto Classic Motorcycles Victoria Park WA

11 - 13 Perth Motorcycle Show Perth WA

22 Morgan & Wacker Newstead QLD

23 Morgan & Wacker Southport QLD

24 Coastline BMW Caloundra QLD

28 Mackay Motorcycles Mackay QLD

October

3 Euro Cycles Townsville QLD

5 Westco Motors Cairns QLD

16 - 18 Moto GP Phillip Island VIC

21 Phillip Island Ride day Phillip Island VIC

27 Seaside Moto Cycles Ballina NSW

29 Rock Motorcycles Port Macquarie NSW

November              

3 Blacklocks Prestige Albury NSW

9 Launceston BMW Launceston TAS

20 - 22 Sydney Motorcycle Show Olympic Park NSW

28 - 29 ASBK Rd 7 Venue TBC