WHY DO WE RIDE?
by Ian Chadwick.
Riding is more real
Sitting an a automobile, we see the world as if it were on a television screen. Outside exists on the other side of the glass, another, slightly unreal world that doesn’t conform to our controlled environment inside. It’s like watching a newscast from some foreign land, something vaguely worrisome, but that doesn’t quite touch us.
We listen to the news of smog alerts and deteriorating ozone on the radio while we idle our cars in parking lots in order to maintain our air conditioning. We half-listen to news reports of road rage and traffic fatalities while we weave in and out of the flow of cars, distracted by cell phone conversations. We buy ugly, bloated, gas-guzzling SUVs that promise off-road adventure and excitement when we never leave the pavement except unwillingly at highway construction sites.
Most of our driving is to such exotic locations as the local mall, school or the parking lot at work. We carry carloads of kids or coworkers, groceries and yard sale treasures. In order to deny the dullness of our lives, we buy into the advertising hype of automobile manufacturers because they promise to lift us out of our boredom. We purchase over-powered, gaudy and uneconomical vehicles in a vain effort to ease the monotony of our daily lives.*
Cars have become unreal and artificial environments, a protective metal shell that isolates us from the world outside and limits its intrusion into our personal space. In effect, it becomes our personal space. Inside our vehicle we have the devices to strengthen barriers between those inside and outside: music systems, a plethora of dials and devices, cell phones, climate controls, clocks and thermometers - even television sets and GPS indicators. The plush chairs lull us into believing we’re in a living room rather than a speeding mass of metal.
Inside the automobile, the art of conversation dies while the kids in the backseat watch their mini-TV sets or squabble over their handheld electronic games. Or proves impossible when we crank up the volume on our in-car stereos to ear-damaging volumes. We roll up the windows and turn on the air conditioning. The sounds of the world we’re driving through cannot get past the barriers of the raised windows.
Private space becomes defined by the boundaries of the vehicle. It is a social environment only inside - we don’t include those outside the shell as part of our social contacts. In fact, we often hide ourselves by tinting windows so the world cannot see us inside. Our relationship with outsiders is increasingly sociopathic because we no longer relate to them as real people, but instead perceive them as simply images outside the vehicle, like TV cartoons.
The automobile has become ubiquitous, its use an automatic reflex. We get in the car to drive two blocks to a store, rather than walk. Our vehicles are an extension of our personal space. We hurry because everyone else is rushing and we’re part of the pack mentality. We speed along, uncaring when we run over cats or squirrels on local roads. We never look back to see if some pet’s owner is crying by the road over the death of their pet under our wheels.
Speed limits are annoyances best ignored in our rush to get to and from locations, not regulations or requirements.*
The automobile is a wheeled isolation chamber that further alienates us from our neighbours, eroding the links that make these relationships into communities. We never walk any more: we drive everywhere. We turn valuable core land into tiered parking lots, tear down beautiful vintage buildings to erect faceless parking lots to accommodate more cars.
Our suburban culture has turned neighbourhoods into ugly suburban sprawl, unimaginative, cookie-cutter designs shoe-horned into the agricultural perimeter of our cities. Our inner cities die while suburbs designed to maximize the automobile consume valuable farmlands and green space around the urban cores. Driving isn’t simply for transportation out there: it is a necessity in North American sprawl culture. Without the car, you are immobilized - there is little or no shopping outside the distant malls. Neighbourhood convenience stores, the ‘mom-and-pop’ variety operation - have been zoned out of existence in favour of massive box store plazas, strip malls and other concentrations of commerce, each surrounded by hectares of asphalt required to hold the daily swell of vehicles.
As the suburbs have evolved into architectural and aesthetic monocultures, and look-alike housing with all the charm of cold porridge has developed as the preferred home for our working class, the automobile has also changed to suit its new environment. Cars almost all look alike today, pumped out with Stalinist conformity that bludgeons the senses. Vehicle after vehicle displays the same uninspired engineering and derivative design. Mini-vans and SUVs in particular create the impression of a traffic stream full of clones.
Several years ago, I was camping in Kluane Park, in Canada’s Yukon. Late in the evening, my then-wife and I sat at a small fire, enjoying the beauty of the late sunset over the mountains and its reflection on the still water. A large RV pulled up beside us - taking the adjacent campsite when dozens of empty sites were available all around the campgrounds. The driver, a middle-aged man, got out of his vehicle and built a substantial fire in his camp’s pit - a fire larger than the need for cooking or heat would demand. Huge flames licked the sky and sent upwards clouds of dangerous, dancing sparks. Then he and his wife retreated inside to watch it from the security of their seats, all the windows rolled up, the engine running. Eventually they retreated into the interior and we could see the flickering blue light of their TV set arc across the night.
That for me defined the modern relationship most North Americans have with their vehicles. It summed up how most drivers perceive the real world: 'experienced' through the filtering windshield, seen but not participated in, a cartoon of reality.
On a motorcycle, the real world is never excluded from the experience of travelling. There are no cell phones; most bikes don’t have stereo sets or radios to distract us. We can smell the world we travel through, feel the wind buffet us, hear the sound of traffic; we are aware of environmental relationships, of the road conditions, and of our surroundings.
We are acutely aware of other vehicles on the road, even if the car owners are blithely ignorant of us. We notice pets, pedestrians and potholes. You cannot run over anything, cannot contact another vehicle or person on a motorcycle without considerable trauma. We are vulnerable when we ride, to both the physical and emotional realities of the world.
We ride in the world, never merely past it. Motorcycles are not our shells, they are our transport.
Riding is more demanding
The trend in automobile technology has been to distance the driver from the actual process, from the mechanics, of driving. Thus the development of the automatic transmission - it removes from drivers the need to shift gears, but handicaps them by alienating them from the actualities of driving. It is a sad but true fact that million of drivers, especially in North America, are so unfamiliar with real driving and so unskilled that they cannot drive a car without an automatic transmission. Manual transmissions confound and frighten them. This is similar to people who can turn the pages on a book, but cannot read the letters on its pages.
by Ian Chadwick.
Riding is more real
Sitting an a automobile, we see the world as if it were on a television screen. Outside exists on the other side of the glass, another, slightly unreal world that doesn’t conform to our controlled environment inside. It’s like watching a newscast from some foreign land, something vaguely worrisome, but that doesn’t quite touch us.
We listen to the news of smog alerts and deteriorating ozone on the radio while we idle our cars in parking lots in order to maintain our air conditioning. We half-listen to news reports of road rage and traffic fatalities while we weave in and out of the flow of cars, distracted by cell phone conversations. We buy ugly, bloated, gas-guzzling SUVs that promise off-road adventure and excitement when we never leave the pavement except unwillingly at highway construction sites.
Most of our driving is to such exotic locations as the local mall, school or the parking lot at work. We carry carloads of kids or coworkers, groceries and yard sale treasures. In order to deny the dullness of our lives, we buy into the advertising hype of automobile manufacturers because they promise to lift us out of our boredom. We purchase over-powered, gaudy and uneconomical vehicles in a vain effort to ease the monotony of our daily lives.*
Cars have become unreal and artificial environments, a protective metal shell that isolates us from the world outside and limits its intrusion into our personal space. In effect, it becomes our personal space. Inside our vehicle we have the devices to strengthen barriers between those inside and outside: music systems, a plethora of dials and devices, cell phones, climate controls, clocks and thermometers - even television sets and GPS indicators. The plush chairs lull us into believing we’re in a living room rather than a speeding mass of metal.
Inside the automobile, the art of conversation dies while the kids in the backseat watch their mini-TV sets or squabble over their handheld electronic games. Or proves impossible when we crank up the volume on our in-car stereos to ear-damaging volumes. We roll up the windows and turn on the air conditioning. The sounds of the world we’re driving through cannot get past the barriers of the raised windows.
Private space becomes defined by the boundaries of the vehicle. It is a social environment only inside - we don’t include those outside the shell as part of our social contacts. In fact, we often hide ourselves by tinting windows so the world cannot see us inside. Our relationship with outsiders is increasingly sociopathic because we no longer relate to them as real people, but instead perceive them as simply images outside the vehicle, like TV cartoons.
The automobile has become ubiquitous, its use an automatic reflex. We get in the car to drive two blocks to a store, rather than walk. Our vehicles are an extension of our personal space. We hurry because everyone else is rushing and we’re part of the pack mentality. We speed along, uncaring when we run over cats or squirrels on local roads. We never look back to see if some pet’s owner is crying by the road over the death of their pet under our wheels.
Speed limits are annoyances best ignored in our rush to get to and from locations, not regulations or requirements.*
The automobile is a wheeled isolation chamber that further alienates us from our neighbours, eroding the links that make these relationships into communities. We never walk any more: we drive everywhere. We turn valuable core land into tiered parking lots, tear down beautiful vintage buildings to erect faceless parking lots to accommodate more cars.
Our suburban culture has turned neighbourhoods into ugly suburban sprawl, unimaginative, cookie-cutter designs shoe-horned into the agricultural perimeter of our cities. Our inner cities die while suburbs designed to maximize the automobile consume valuable farmlands and green space around the urban cores. Driving isn’t simply for transportation out there: it is a necessity in North American sprawl culture. Without the car, you are immobilized - there is little or no shopping outside the distant malls. Neighbourhood convenience stores, the ‘mom-and-pop’ variety operation - have been zoned out of existence in favour of massive box store plazas, strip malls and other concentrations of commerce, each surrounded by hectares of asphalt required to hold the daily swell of vehicles.
As the suburbs have evolved into architectural and aesthetic monocultures, and look-alike housing with all the charm of cold porridge has developed as the preferred home for our working class, the automobile has also changed to suit its new environment. Cars almost all look alike today, pumped out with Stalinist conformity that bludgeons the senses. Vehicle after vehicle displays the same uninspired engineering and derivative design. Mini-vans and SUVs in particular create the impression of a traffic stream full of clones.
Several years ago, I was camping in Kluane Park, in Canada’s Yukon. Late in the evening, my then-wife and I sat at a small fire, enjoying the beauty of the late sunset over the mountains and its reflection on the still water. A large RV pulled up beside us - taking the adjacent campsite when dozens of empty sites were available all around the campgrounds. The driver, a middle-aged man, got out of his vehicle and built a substantial fire in his camp’s pit - a fire larger than the need for cooking or heat would demand. Huge flames licked the sky and sent upwards clouds of dangerous, dancing sparks. Then he and his wife retreated inside to watch it from the security of their seats, all the windows rolled up, the engine running. Eventually they retreated into the interior and we could see the flickering blue light of their TV set arc across the night.
That for me defined the modern relationship most North Americans have with their vehicles. It summed up how most drivers perceive the real world: 'experienced' through the filtering windshield, seen but not participated in, a cartoon of reality.
On a motorcycle, the real world is never excluded from the experience of travelling. There are no cell phones; most bikes don’t have stereo sets or radios to distract us. We can smell the world we travel through, feel the wind buffet us, hear the sound of traffic; we are aware of environmental relationships, of the road conditions, and of our surroundings.
We are acutely aware of other vehicles on the road, even if the car owners are blithely ignorant of us. We notice pets, pedestrians and potholes. You cannot run over anything, cannot contact another vehicle or person on a motorcycle without considerable trauma. We are vulnerable when we ride, to both the physical and emotional realities of the world.
We ride in the world, never merely past it. Motorcycles are not our shells, they are our transport.
Riding is more demanding
The trend in automobile technology has been to distance the driver from the actual process, from the mechanics, of driving. Thus the development of the automatic transmission - it removes from drivers the need to shift gears, but handicaps them by alienating them from the actualities of driving. It is a sad but true fact that million of drivers, especially in North America, are so unfamiliar with real driving and so unskilled that they cannot drive a car without an automatic transmission. Manual transmissions confound and frighten them. This is similar to people who can turn the pages on a book, but cannot read the letters on its pages.
I been there twice, once to Cancun and Tijuana another, But since lately all you hear about is drug wars and killing after killings going on down there I have no desire to go back.
however it's not necessary to cross the border toe have an epic adventure such as yours......
one day i will as well.