The Motorcycle for a Month Manifesto

It's not likely we will ever see dollar-a-gallon gas again. There's a lot of people that get blamed for the higher prices of gas, but one cynic whose name escapes me best summed up the biggest reason with this pithy if not quite technically correct line: "They aren't making any more dinosaurs." Realistically, the best way to do something about the price of gas is to use less of it.

And I use a fair amount of gas driving to work. I've got a fairly long commute, about 40 miles each way. Moving closer to work is a difficult option. So if I were to use less gas driving to work, I'd need to find a more fuel-efficient means of transportation.

Atlanta's actually got pretty decent public transportation if you live inside the I-285 area, at least compared to some cities where I've been. Trouble is, my commute's from Covington to Suwanee, which goes through some areas that are reasonable candidates for mass transit, but also through some farmland areas where I can't see anyone setting up a bus system, let alone commuter rail. It would be nice to be able to sit down and read a book, or type up a new book on a laptop, on the way to work, but that's not an option.

A lot of the typical "alternative" transportation things aren't really practical for a 40 mile trip; it's out of range for a bicycle, Segway (perhaps one of the worst cases out there of a solution in search of a problem), etc. But there's one vehicle sitting out in my back yard that can cover the distance, on less than a gallon of gas. My motorcycle.

Commuting by motorcycle has some obvious problems - I don't care much for riding 40 miles in near freezing weather - but if many people commuted on two wheels, we'd have less congested roads and use less gas. I'm putting up this blog to advocate using the motorcycle as a means of commuting, and my plan is to demonstrate what it's like to do this, the good along with the bad.

So my plan is, starting in April, to ride my motorcycle to work, every work day, for an entire month. I'll only make an exception if I have some sort of medical problem that makes it unsafe to ride, or if my work duties explicitly require me to drive something with four wheels to work for business reasons. And for every day in April where I do have to take a car, I'll add an extra day of motorcycle commuting. Other than that, there's no exceptions. While I have picked April because it's not likely to have extreme cold, this means that I'm riding the bike to work even if it's in a thunderstorm. I'll post how many miles I put on the bike and how much gas I'm using each day, and anything else about the trip. You'll get the bad along with the good here. My goal is to present an honest look at what it takes to ride a motorcycle to work.