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AFFILIATED CLUBS - THE COALITION OF SANITY by Ian Mutch
What Peter Fonda did for road safety ....
Does advanced training cut accidents ? The short answer to that is that we don't know but the Roads Minister
wants to see the fatality numbers falling and he is not alone.
MAG has been very successful over recent years in winning preferred status for motorcycles. This is evidenced by growing bus lane
access, increased parking, exemption from congestion charging and from some bridge and tunnel tolls. The downside is that the more rabid elements of the road safety lobby are demanding to know why biking
is being encouraged when we somehow manage to account for one road fatality in 6 whilst only
representing 1% of road traffic. That's an ugly statistic and every way you cut the cake it doesn't
taste good.
MAG has presented its suggestions on dealing with the problem in response to the Minister's request for ideas. Training forms a major part of our response but my feeling is
that the really big factor is attitude and culture.
Partly thanks to many of the mainstream bike titles, a culture of racing on the road has developed in this country and that is a big part of the
problem.
Now telling people that something they enjoy is bad for them is a recipe for getting their backs up, whereas telling them that they might enjoy something slightly different could be a
winner. When making a presentation on this subject to a road safety conference, I told the delegates that I thought Peter Fonda had done more for road safety than any pious instructor in history.
Given that in "Easy Rider" Fonda rode stoned out of his head on a bike with no front brake and the handling of a dumper truck, the remark raised a few eyebrows but it sometimes helps to
overstate your case in order to make a point. My point was that in that iconic movie, the motorcycle was reinvented as an expression of freedom, with travel and style providing the focus in lieu of speed.
Of course there are a lot of more sensible compromises between the extremes of an R1 and a hard tail chop, and certainly a lot of more comfortable options and it is in those directions that
we must channel enthusiasm.
I see MAG operating as the catalyst in a cultural shift that will cut fatality rates without coercion. I think we can achieve a shift simply by promoting the
positive and de emphasising the negative elements of the motorcycle spectrum.
In short, motorcycles must be seen as a means of discovering the joys of this world rather than as a painful short cut
to the next.
In pursuit of this objective, media pressure and peer pressure are our tools and foremost in our armoury is our newspaper "Streetbiker" which we use to advise, educate and
introduce riders to the world of sustainable motorcycling. Unlike the commercial titles we don't have to make a quick profit and are therefore not subject to the pressures of shareholders who might
demand that editors pamper to sensationalist appetites in pursuit of sales.
Right now MAG print around 20,000 copies of Streetbiker but how much impression could we make if that figure was
100,000? I reckon there are at least 100,000 sensible long term riders of bikes in this country who will agree with these sentiments. If you were all to join MAG tomorrow, as I hope you will, would
we just be preaching to the converted?
Not so, because we would then have the financial muscle to print well beyond the volumes needed to satisfy our members and so spread the cultural influence
of sane riding further. The knock on effect of such an enlarged organisation will be massive with the consequent ability to employ more staff to work on the national media and promote the cultural
counterweight to the rabid influence of the adrenaline press .
I call my plan "The Coalition of Sanity" and I have directed this outline of it to your club magazine as I think that
riders who join clubs have a long term commitment to motorcycling and therefore have most to gain or lose at the hands of legislators.
MAG appreciates the decision of those clubs who have
affiliated to it but we cannot over-stress that this does not fuel the organisation financially. We need every club member to sign up to the coalition I have described by upgrading to full individual
membership.
Only by doing that can we really get this cultural initiative off the ground. If you are a member of an affiliated club then if you join by standing order mandate your club is entitled
to a £5 donation to its funds from MAG.
We encourage standing order subscriptions to develop the consistency of support that we need to plan ahead. MAG holds a long term view of motorcycling
and by making a simple decision to join us you will help ensure the future of riding is safeguarded from the extremists without and the loonies within.
You can join up on line at www.mag-uk.org or by
Phone 0870 444 8448 during working hours.
Ride safe, have fun
Ian Mutch MAG President
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