Muddy Waters: Choosing Your Ride

International manufacturing makes for some muddy waters. We want to buy American, here in America, but the USA only makes hogs, which are NOT fuel efficient or economical. They're image, not transportation. You have to dress like a Pirate if you ride a Harley. And those engine parts are made in China, sometimes who engines too, then assembled in the USA, but not Milwaukee because the union members wanted to keep their health insurance. So HD moved their plant to Non-Union Tennessee and cut wages by about 33%.

Victory is basically a harley with another badge on it and some interesting sheet metal. So that's not an option.

That leaves some oddities. Cleveland Cycle Werks is an interesting inexpensive bike, made from parts from China, by US workers in Cleveland. Its meant to be a starter bike. Its cheap, $3200 new. Very basic, but its economical and reasonable transportation, 230 cc engine like you find on an older Honda Rebel, and it'll get you there. Its probably a good choice for most American riders.

This is where it gets a bit more muddy. The parts come from China. They get shipped to ports like Alameda or Long Beach or Stockton (yes, Stockton is a major shipping port despite being 70 miles inland), container offloaded, inspected by customs, loaded on a train, hauled overland to Cleveland, unloaded by CCW, and the parts sorted, warehoused, and eventually assembled into motorcycles, then loaded into individual crates and shipped to dealers around the USA, or parts picked and shipped to customers via dealer network or UPS. I'm already near the West Coast. The train tracks carrying that container go by about 18 miles south of me. If the parts are already coming from China, why all the extra hassle and travel? Particularly since post-oil is coming, wherein railyards will be places of major delay due to using a lot less diesel than long haul trucking, in exchange for huge delays in delivery time. You exchange efficiency for time, after all.

Yamaha YZ-125 2-stroke

So what are your realistic options for post-oil motorbike? Anything asian will get here faster than anything Italian, even though the parts are still made in China. Japanese bikes are half made in China, half in Japan. Since much of Japan's auto industry was levelled by the Tsunami a few years ago, many of the bikes that were made in Japan aren't made at all anymore as the manufacturers try to outsource production and assembly. And its sort of working. Their cheapest bikes, like the CBR250R is made in Thailand. Suzuki does the same. Its a ready market, after all. A 250cc is a very sensible machine on largely unpaved roads where going fast will just kill you. You gotta slow down and accept that getting there eventually is much better than a trip to an emergency room, if you're lucky.

When Brazil saw its economy default its debts in the 1970's, it lost all imports. To survive, they used the patterns for Yamaha 125cc 2-stroke motorcycles, brought in as farm bikes and manufactured in Brazillian factories under license since they're cheaper than horses, and just made those over and over again. Not excellent, but good enough and able to be maintained. If you want to tour Central or South America, that's the way to go. Everybody has them, they're easy to get parts for, and everybody knows how to fix them. Simple, really. Yes, it's a 2-stroke, yes it's noisy, and yes, you'll need to do some engine work every few weeks of travel, but it can be done. People do it.

And once you start thinking about Yamaha, you recall they make several good small displacement bikes well suited to riding offroad in nice quiet 4-stroke models. The XT250 and WR250 are decent Enduro models. I see them here a fair bit. Goes everywhere a jeep does, but far more easily. You can't really get stuck on one, so long as you don't actually break it.

Suzuki DR200SE, 90 mpg

Suzuki, another Japanese motorcycle company, also makes good Enduro bikes, from 200cc to 650. The DR650 is famously good, being a torquey engine with decent power to weight ratio and fuel economy. Honda has some interesting road bikes, good as long as the roads stay paved, but a Post-Oil bike should be readily adapted to post-asphalt roads, since those are made of oil (tar) and thus going the way of the dodo in all but the most wealthy urban areas, and even then going away just slightly slower. In the real world, once the pavement goes, one good rain can put 20 inch ruts into a road, and any heavy vehicle going through that will make it worse. Mud bogs are really nasty in a car, but can be slipped past gracefully on a motorcycle. Many mud bogs form on roads near streams or springs, and because they are the most sensible place for serious pavement and drainage, are the least likely to have it. Its one of those ironies. Perhaps in future, all mud bogs will be carefully paved with concrete so the water won't wreck the road.

Still, while sport bikes require you to wear a Power Ranger suit, and cruisers require black leather pirate outfits, Enduro bikes often call for pointy chin helmets, chest and leg armor so the brush can't break your kneecap or stab you in the heart (not joking), and I really hope that if you end up living on some singletrack overgrown, you personally cut it back with hand clippers to save your own life. Anywhere you use regularly is going to be your responsibility to keep clear.

I also strongly disagree with the childish "loud pipes save lives" nonsense. Lights attract more attention. People in cars have their stereo on and the motorcycle is already in danger when 200 feet away, which is mere seconds from collision at 35 mph. Only the loudest fools on Harleys have any hope of getting drivers attention with noise. Everybody else had better be visible and assume the driver can't see them, so don't speed up needlessly, daring the driver to turn into you. Or weave through traffic like a fool.

Most motorcycle accidents are caused by the rider themselves, usually poor decision making at work. This is also the primary reason that new motorcyclists are recommended to start on small displacement 250cc engines, not 650cc. Learn to respect the bike, and don't give yourself enough power to get into trouble easily. It's important. A 250cc is also twice as fuel efficient as a 650, averaging around 75 mpg. They're NOT fun at freeway speed, but no motorcycle is, from what I understand. The wind and poor pavement are unpleasant. Secondary roads and 2-lane highway are much more fun on two wheels. If you route your travel, you can avoid the worst, even through Donner Pass there are a lot of secondary highway 40 available for much of the trip. You still have to get on and off I-80, which is often terrifying, but once off, Highway 40 is pretty nice, very peaceful. After oil goes away, mostly, much of the terrifying fast traffic will simply be gone, and big interstates are likely to become greenways in a few short years. Maybe they'll give up some lanes, at first, and maybe one side will be abandoned instead. Concrete doesn't last forever, and filling washouts or clearing mudslides will get to be expensive and probably not a high priority for locals with no federal funding. After all, our tax dollars will be paying for socialized medicine and interest on the national debt, not roads or defense or putting out the fires, right? We're on our own for that stuff. Good luck, too.

Its all going to be interesting, and no matter where you live: inevitable. Inevitable is a painful word to most. Many deny deny deny because they don't like the thought of losing all those easy answers. I say make the best of the future. Its more comfortable if you do. I can't afford restaurants so I got better at cooking. I can't afford a motorcycle so I research such that, when I can, I will get one I don't regret. I do yard work to improve my soil and Dad and I grow tomatoes, and zucchini and herbs (basil and marjoram and rosemary) to make our food taste better. These are things I can do, that I can control. I can't fix broken govt, I can't solve trade imbalance. I can't make Harley Davidson into a commuter bike company from its very careful "mystique!", but I can buy a Cleveland Cycle Werks bike someday, or a Yamaha or Suzuki. It'll be fine. And I will ride cautiously, as I always do, because getting hurt sucks. And with the new "Obamacare", is probably bankrupting. But we can raise chickens for dinner and eggs, feed them cracked corn or just buy eggs raised by locals even more desperate and needy. Either way works. There are run down farms all over the place that would probably be happy to start growing food again, if they could sell it reliably. Restaurants too, if that's the only place they can get food is local because Peak Oil makes wholesale pricing non-competitive. Stuff happens like that. Inevitable can sometimes be tasty. I remember that hippies are stinky and useless right up till they figure out some good bread, cheese, beer, or wine to make and sell for a profit.

This cheese? Made down the road at the Goat Farm I passed by twice a day on the way to school for 13 years. The daughter got car sick in the back of the bus and puked all over me when I was 7. Nasty. Still, life is filled with embarrassing moments and I'm sure she'd be mortified to be remembered for that moment. And its really good goat cheese. That's something useful a hippy did after years of kinda annoying everyone else. Maybe the local hippies will make good when they can find their niche? I like to hope so. So many wineries in Sonoma and Napa counties started that way in someone's garage. Now they're huge and well respected. And that's a wonderful thing.

I dearly hope that when the streets wash away and we're all kinda baffled at how far things have fallen, we admit to ourselves that just perhaps, maybe, we should have done something about it all those years ago. Pity.