What’s so great about motorbikes and why do many car fans also ride? Matt Prior makes a case for biking
PHOTOGRAPHY JACK HARRISON
When I searched online for studies into why people ride motorbikes, I didn’t expect the top result to be a page published by my neighbouring county council, Northamptonshire, encouraging people to get onto powered two-wheelers.
What a thoroughly enlightened place. Given it’s home to some of the world’s smartest automotive minds (such as the Mercedes Formula 1 team) and top destinations (the Silverstone F1 and MotoGP circuit), maybe it’s understandable. But clearly Northants knows what those of us who ride also know: you can feel pretty good riding a bike.
What I couldn’t find are statistics to say whether car lovers are more likely to ride too, thus slightly undermining the brief that acting magazine editor James Attwood pinged me after Steve Cropley and I banged on about bikes yet again during our car podcast, asking me to explain why car people also like bikes so much.
I think more us of do. There are 3.6 million motorbike licence holders in the UK, and a little over 40 million car licence holders. Ostensibly, that makes just under one to 10 riders to drivers. There are six active riders across two Haymarket car magazine editorial teams, which would about match that ratio, but which I think is misleading. There are 32.17 million cars on the roads but only 1.34 million bikes, so there are proportionally a lot more riders not riding than there are drivers not driving. If it’s reasonable to assume a lot of riders also drive, what that means is that the statistics are doing my head in but that I seem to know a lot of motorcyclists.
What’s the appeal? Northamptonshire puts ‘save time’ as its first reason to ride. I think this is the biggest myth in biking. A motorcycle can take 16-46% less time to cover the same trip through congested traffic than a car, it’s true. And the average commute is just under half an hour.
Let’s assume a third of it – 10 minutes – is congested. And let’s assume you’re flying through that on the bike. So riding is taking five minutes off of each commute. Bravo.
But bikers have got so much kit to get ready. The car’s probably already outside: the bike’s probably locked in the shed. You can’t just throw a lunch box onto the passenger seat. It has to be locked away in a bag. You can’t take a cup with you, so you’ve got to finish the coffee before leaving the house. Those w
