Free Let's Ride by Sonny Barger

continuously create potentially life-threatening situations for the duration of the trip.
    RISING FATALITIES
    I N RECENT YEARS, UNFORTUNATELY, there’s been a tremendous increase in the number of motorcycle fatalities. In 2008 motorcycle fatalities increased for the eleventh year in a row. A lot of reasons account for this, notably the fact that in 2008 motorcycle registrations also increased for the eleventh year in a row. More motorcycles on the road mean more accidents. But that’s not the whole story.
    I blame at least part of the increase in motorcycle fatalities to the rise in cell-phone use. Recent studies have shown that drivers yapping on their cell phones are impaired even more than they would be if they were drunk. This means bikers have to concentrate even harder to prevent accidents. I always tell new riders, “It doesn’t matter who is at fault in a collision with a car because you are the one who will get hurt.”
    Sometimes preventing accidents is impossible, but some ways of preventing wrecks are in our control. For example, you always should avoid riding while drinking alcohol; even if you’ve just had a beer or two and don’t feel like you have a buzz, your reaction times are slowed down enough to put you in danger. We can control whether or not we ride at the same speed as traffic, at least if our bikes are fast enough to keep up with the rest of the vehicles on the road. How fast that is depends on the road. If you live in a western state with lots of open space, traffic moves a lot faster than it does in the congested and heavily patrolled urban areas in the East. If you live in New Jersey or New York City, you might never need to go more than 70 miles per hour, but if you live in Aspen, Colorado, you may find traffic moving at 90 miles per hour on the freeway into Denver.
    If you never leave a congested urban area and never ride on a freeway, you might be able to get by with a 250, but then you won’t have the option of leaving town or using the freeway when you need to, and sooner or later that will happen. Even a 400- or a 450-cc motorcycle might be too small to be a practical bike for most people. Your best bet is to get a bike that’s at least 500 cc to 650 cc to start. If you’re a larger person, you might even consider something as big as a 1200 or 1300 for your first bike.
    SPECIFIC TYPES OF MOTORCYCLES
    A S I MENTIONED EARLIER, motorcycles have evolved into highly specialized machines. Instead of that one BSA Gold Star that could do everything, we now have a wide variety of styles of motorcycles from which to choose, each one focused on doing just one thing well. The trick is to decide what you need your bike to do and select the type that best meets your needs.
    The main types of street-legal motorcycles include the following:
Dual Sport
Supermotard
Cruiser
Touring Bike
Sport-Tourer
Sport Bike
Standard
    The first specialized motorcycles were purpose-built race bikes. Companies like Harley-Davidson and Indian engineered bikes purely for racing purposes even before World War I, but since race bikes have always been non-street-legal machines, we won’t go into them here. Besides, purebred racing bikes weren’t available to the general public then, and they’re still hard to find (and very expensive).
    Dual Sports
    Off-road motorcycles were the first specialized bikes that were widely available. These began to show up in the 1960s. At first they were just street bikes with long-travel suspension and high pipes, but they became increasingly specialized and competition ready. Today you can buy a bike that’s ready to go motocross racing right off the showroom floor. Again, these were (and are) purely racing machines, but as they grew in popularity, manufacturers began to offer dual-purpose motorcycles that had some of the characteristics of these off-road racers in street-legal packages. Back when they first appeared, these were called “enduros,” named after a type of mild off-road