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Today was a big day for motorcyclists traveling in Oregon, as the Oregon Legislative Assembly has now passed Oregon Senate Bill 574, which allows lane-sharing under certain conditions on Oregonian highways.

On May 5th, the lane-sharing bill passed the Oregon Senate by a vote of 18 to 6; and now today (May 17th), the Oregon House of Representatives approved the bill with a vote of 42 to 14.

The lane-sharing bill now goes to Governor Kate Brown for signing, and if signed, it will go into effect later this year.

Mark this as a win for those in favor of seeing lane-splitting becoming legal in the United States as the State of Utah has just passed a law that makes it legal to filter lanes in the Beehive State.

Signed into law on March 21st, the law (HB 149) doesn’t provide for full-out lane-splitting in Utah, but it does make it legal for a motorcyclist to filter through traffic when the automobile traffic is stopped and where the speed limit is 45 mph or slower.

This effectively means that lane-splitting won’t be legal for Utah riders on the freeway, and the pragmatic result of the bill is that it will allow motorcyclists to move through stopped urban traffic during rush hour commutes.

Legalizing lane-splitting in Washington State just got a step closer to reality, as the State Senate of the Washington State Legislature has passed a bill that would allow lane-splitting under very specific circumstances.  

Senate Bill 5378 (SB 5378) would allow lane-splitting only during slow traffic conditions – up to 10mph faster than the flow of traffic, but no faster than 25 mph – and only on numbered highways that have a median and multiple lanes of traffic in each direction.

The bill passed the senate with 32 “yea” votes from both Republicans and Democrats, while the 17 “nay” votes came solely from Democrat members.

Oregon once again is trying to join the 21st century when it comes to pragmatic transportation laws, and as such State Senator Jeff Kruse (R-Roseburg) has re-introduced a lane-splitting law to the Oregon legislature, with the hopes that it will get voted on later this year.

That might be a tall order to ask from the Oregon legislature though, since the proposed lane-splitting law is no different from the one that Oregon shot down back in 2015

Both proposals aimed to make lane-splitting legal under very stringent conditions: only on roads where the posted speed limit is 50mph or more, only when traffic is traveling 10mph or slower, and only at a rate of no more than 20mph.

In most of the Western World, motorcycles are seen as a means of easing inner city traffic congestion. But, in some parts of the world, even the efficient transportation options of motorcycles are not enough to keep the roadways moving.

Such is the case in Vietnam, where there is a movement to ban the use of motorcycles within the Hanoi city limits. With the roads already resembling something out of a Mad Max scene, even scooters and small-displacement bikes appearing to be to many in number there (Note: I’m not sure I agree with this premise -JB).

The idea of a motorcycle taxi sounds like a novelty in the Western World, but in Southeast Asia they are an effective and affordable way to cut through the massive traffic jams that occur in these developing countries.

It is only logical then that we see disruptive services appearing in this already lucrative space, so enter into the scheme UberMOTO.

The concept is as simple as the name, UberMOTO is just like Uber’s citizen-based taxi cab system, which allows you to hail a cab from the comfort of your smartphone, except instead of cars, it utilizing motorcycles.

No sooner has Google built its first autonomous car, and been granted its autonomous vehicle driving license in the State of California, than the Silicon Valley company has begun paving the way for autonomous two-wheeled transportation.

Writing an email to the State of California to do away with legal wording that restricts autonomous vehicle licenses just to cars, Google’s Ron Medford hopes to allow driverless/riderless trucks and motorcycles on city streets, provided they prove the same safety standards as with Google’s autonomous car program.

“It is certainly possible that future testing could include motorcycles or larger commercial vehicles,” said Medford in his email. “If some innovator can demonstrate that testing autonomous technology on such vehicles is safe, then they should be allowed to test.”

Despite the fact that the business side of motorcycling is run by a small close-nit group of curmudgeons, Neanderthals, and Luddites, the world outside of motorcycling continues to press on without us.

And while various parts of the motorcycle industry are busy trying to figure out how to adapt to this whole new “internet” technology fad thing (it has only been commercialized for over two decades now guys), the same group of people are busy trying to maintain the same business models and practices that came from the post-World War II economy.

In other words, when it comes to technology and the motorcycle industry, we are all pretty much fucked.

WSBK’s worldwide television audience grew by 33% from the 2009 to 2010 season. According to Infront, the “championship reached a cumulative audience of 498 million” for the 2010 season, meaning each WSBK race garnered around 40 million viewers. While still a considerably smaller number than MotoGP, which claims around 300 million viewers for each race, this is the sort of jump in audience that makes sponsorship dollars appear more easily. The official WSBK website had “a 30% increase of unique visitors compared to 2009,”with a total of four million individual visitors in 2010.

What gets rewarded, gets done. That’s a concept I learned on my first day of business school (big shout out to Dr. Denny Gioia). While we were being taught in the context of managing a workforce, it applies just as easily to people in general, for example in a government’s influence over its citizenry. This point was clearly not lost on Kevin Richardson, an American who answered Volkswagen’s call to build a better speed camera for traffic enforcement.

A part of Volkwagen’s Fun Theory experiments, Richardson designed, built, and implemented a sort of speed camera lottery. Ticketing motorists it catches speeding, Richardson’s speed camera also rewards people who comply with the posted speed limit, entering law abiding citizens into a lottery whose pot consists of a portion of the fines collected by speeders caught on the camera. Brilliant! But does it work?