75-year-old scooter pilots use the roads too

IN THIS hurried and angry world we live in few things get people quite as cross as parking spaces. People have even been killed in parking areas when somebody nips into an empty place that somebody else had been waiting for. When I worked in the CBD and often rode into town on my motorbike I was often amazed and a little scared by the fury that was generated if a couple of motorbikes shared a parking space intended for a single car. At one stage there were no designated motorcycle parking spaces in the city centre, so we bikers used to park on pavements. This infuriated motorists, who complained and the traffic cops started ticketing bikes on pavements.

Eventually in desperation all the major motorcycle clubs got together and very early one Saturday morning a cavalcade of bikes rode into the city centre and by 7.30am every single parking space in the CBD was occupied – each by a single motorcycle.

When the usual Saturday morning rush-hour traffic arrived there was nowhere for them to park.

The CBD became a log-jam. The city more or less ground to a halt. Bikers fed their parking meters coins like law-abiding citizens and when the meters expired every bike simply moved one space forward and fed the next parking meter. The traffic department got the point after that and we were once again allowed to park on pavements unmolested. Motorists still resent bikes using parking spaces. Godfrey wrote to say he resented the fact that the designated spaces in shopping mall areas were always sited close to the main entrance.

“Most of the bikers seem to be of the strong, strapping, athletic type,” he writes, “So it cannot be a health or disability issue.”

He feels bikers should be tucked away far from the mall entrance, because they are fit and can jolly well walk a few extra metres.

I regularly use one of two bike parking areas in the village, both close to the entrances of shops, and I am a moderately fit, healthy 75 year old. I don’t think health or fitness comes into it.

Maybe the shopping centre managers are just grateful for the small spaces taken up by motorbikes, while single shopper moms arrive in great big 4x4 “urban tractors” that take up two big spaces.

We should remember that motorcyclists are perfectly entitled to use a whole parking space designed for a car, but we don’t. We politely leave the full-sized parking spaces for cars.

I would like to believe that in gratitude for the amount of parking space we bikers save, they offer us special demarcated spaces in easily accessed places.

If that annoys anybody, we can always happily go back to using regulation sized spaces. The roads belong to all of us, even 75-year-old scooter pilots.

Last Laugh

An old man walked into the shopping mall shouting all sorts of rubbish at the top of his voice.

“Who’s that silly old bugger?” one of the shoppers asked. “Oh, don’t pay any attention to him,” said his friend. “That’s old Mr Fosdick. He always talks to himself, but he’s quite harmless.”

“But why is he shouting at the top of his voice,” the friend asked.

“He’s very deaf.”