The staff and freelancers present at the MotoGP test in Qatar are to be offered the chance to be vaccinated against Covid-19.
The Qatari government has agreed to vaccinate all staff who want to receive the vaccine starting from tomorrow morning, before a large section of the paddock flies home in between the two tests.
In the State of Montana, Senate Bill 9 was just signed into law, and if you are a motorcyclist, that should mean something to you because it means that lane-filtering is now legal in the Big Sky State.
Montana becomes the third state to approve of the practice, following California and Utah, with many other states contemplating similar laws of their own.
The Beaver State is set to consider a law on lane sharing in 2021, as Oregon Senate Bill 574 aims to legalize the practice, with a number of caveats coming from the proposed law.
You may have already seen the news from yesterday, where California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order that will require all new cars and passenger trucks sold in the Golden State to be zero-emission vehicles by the year 2035.
The order also goes on to say that the state will phase out all new medium and heavy-duty trucks that are not zero-emissions by the year 2045, thus setting up the state to push electric vehicles onto its roadways in a big way.
There is a third provision in this executive order though, and it is getting far less attention than the other two, but it will greatly impact the motorcycle industry.
This is because Gov. Newsom’s executive order also says that by 2035 California will ban the sale of all new off-road vehicles that are not zero-emissions, where feasible.
Effectively, California has just set an expiration date on the sale of new dirt bikes, side-by-sides, and ATVs within its borders.
COMOTO the parent company to RevZilla, Cycle Gear, J&P Cycles has just settled a dispute with the California Air Resources Board (CARB) for the alleged selling of non-exempted add-on or modified motorcycle parts in California.
In total, COMOTO will pay $1,937,500 to resolve the alleged violations, in a mixture of fines to CARB and payments for environmental projects that benefit the community.
For those of us who have been venturing outside of the home, the coronavirus pandemic has come with the silver lining that it has become easier to travel by road in the United States.
With more people working from home and sheltering-in-place, the need to get in a car and drive somewhere has fallen by the wayside, and we as motorcyclists have seemingly benefitted from having fewer vehicles to share the road with as we ride.
However, data from the National Safety Council (NSC) – a non-profit organisation chartered by US Congress – should give us some pause, as it suggests that those trips out have been substantially more dangerous than usual.
For our friends across the pond, this year and next were to be critical years for the motorcycle industry, as the first stage of the Euro 5 homologation requirements was to come online – first in 2020 for brand new motorcycle models, and then in 2021 for existing motorcycle models.
This first stage of the Euro 5 requirement for motorcycles affects primarily the noise emissions from the vehicle, and it will be several years before motorcycles sold in Europe will have to adhere to the full Euro 5 package, which is quite stringent.
The delay on the full Euro 5 implementation comes over concerns about the costs and R&D associated with meeting emission targets, but even this first stage is proving to be difficult for OEMs to implement, and the reason for that is because of the coronavirus outbreak.
The Trump administration is about to take on the California Air Resources Board (CARB) in a battle for the rights to set emission standards.
The first blows in this showdown have already begun, with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) sending a letter to the CARB saying that the organization had violated federal law by making an agreement with several automobile manufacturers on higher emission standards
The Trump administration doesn’t seem to end things there though, with the expectation the President will announce plans as early as today to do away with California’s emissions waiver from the Clean Air Act.
While it seems like politics as usual and centered around the auto industry, such a move will have huge implications for motorcycle manufacturers.
The day of the loud pipe is slowly coming to an end, and it is technology that is killing it. No, I am not talking about the rise of electric motorcycles. Instead, I am referring to noise enforcement cameras.
The idea is about to be tested in France, just outside the Paris Orly airport, and the concept is pretty simple. A calibrated microphone picks up when a vehicle has exceeded France’s noise limit for cars, trucks, and motorcycles, and then a connected camera takes a picture of the offending vehicle.
The license plate in the photo is then run through a police database, and within a short period of time, and ticket arrives at the offending party’s address – similar to how a speed camera system works.
Two months ago we wrote to you about efforts underway to legalize basic lane-splitting in Oregon. While the bill has considerable support in the Oregon State Legislature, HB2314 is stuck in the joint transportation committee.
In order to get HB2314 the vote that it deserves, the motorcycling public of the Pacific Northwest needs to reach out to the members of the committee leadership as well as Speaker of the House Tina Kotek.
Thankfully, the folks behind the Oregonian lane-splitting bill have made it very easy for us to reach our representatives, so that they can see the support the motorcycle community has for this bill.
Call it a win for motorists, as the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that in certain circumstances the marking of tires on parked vehicles with chalk amounts to an unreasonable search and seizure.
As our American readers should all know, the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures is protected by the 4th Amendment of the US Constitution, and here the 6th Circuit ruled in favor of an interesting argument to find that chalk marks on parked vehicles rising to this level of thinking.
The crux of the story centers around the town of Saginaw, Michigan, which has been using tire chalk to measure the time a vehicle is parked in designated parking zones.