Why car enthusiasts love motorbikes, too

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 work shoes won’t do for riding, so they need to be packed away.

And if you get into your riding clobber indoors, you’ll overheat and sweat, which will then chill you to the bone when the wind hits you while riding, so you only finally don your stiff armoured jacket just before strapping on your helmet, and given there are the work clothes, packed lunch and whatever else to carry to the bike, you’ve probably got to take several trips to and from the front door.

Then you’ve got to zip the house keys away securely, strap everything down, finally  put on the jacket and helmet and… oh, you muppet, you forgot to put your earplugs in.

So, yeah, bikes take up less room on the road than cars and don’t get stuck in traffic. But while scooterists whose whole commute is in town will save time, if more of us in the ’burbs rode, we’d actually only shorten the commute times of drivers around us.

Then there’s time to look after a bike. They want more cleaning and lubrication. And unless you only ever ride, rather than have a car too, they cost money, not save it. Plus there are only a few months of the year when the temperature is ‘right’ for this. I don’t ride much in winter, or the wet.

I get very miserable very quickly and having to sort wet bike clothes at work is a pain. Protective clothing on the hottest of summer days can be unbearable too, though. And, yes, I think we should admit it makes you a vulnerable road user: Steve and I have lost friends to biking accidents, and known more who’ve been injured in them. So if you’re not already a rider, I fear I’m not selling this so far.

But that would be a shame. Because forget about the idea of saving time and consider riding instead as one of life’s greatest ways to spend it. For me, riding has the essential pleasures of driving, multiplied.

I like the interaction between person and travelling device. I think it’s the same feeling that makes people want to ride horses, or bicycles, to drive steam trains, fly planes or helicopters or drive cars. I think ultimately it’s the same kind of pull for all of us: the enjoyable application of a skill that sees us go somewhere.

The bike gives me that feeling more than a car. Perhaps any car bar a go-kart, because there’s less of it, and the responses are more immediate. A big bike like my Honda Africa Twin weighs 220kg. That’s less than half of even the lightest car. Part of the appeal of it is how few superfluous things it has on it.

It was engineered to be only as big as it needed to be. Ariel’s Simon Saunders has designed lightweight bikes and cars. He knows the Atom doesn’t have much spare room, but said that finding “2mm in the battery box” of the Ace bike “was a cause for great celebration”. If you love engineering purity, you’ll love the idea of a bike.

And you’ll know what it feels like to interact with even if you haven’t ridden a motorbike, but have ridden a bicycle. In a car, your body movements change levers and wheels that move other components that turn other things that adjust speed or direction while you’re effectively static.

There’s still motive power on a bike too, but your body movements, particularly leaning, have a wonderfully direct influence on the direction you’re going.

It’s a bit of a cliché to say the bike feels like an extension of the person, that human and machine are as one, that it expands your mind. And it’s dreadfully pretentious too. But there’s something in it. And there is science behind it. 

A Tokyo university study showed that riders in their forties increased cognitive function by riding to work for two months. A 2021 study in the journal Brain Research showed riding a bike decreased stress biomarkers by 25%.

“No lab experiment can duplicate the feelings that a motorcyclist would have on the open road,” said one of the professors behind it.

So it’s official. Bikes make you too cold, too hot, wet, they cost you time, cost you money, and make you more vulnerable. And they leave you far, far happier. I’ll be doing it as long as my legs will let me.

Steve Cropley on riding bikes

What I can never get over with bike travel is how much more directly you interact with the elements on a bike than in any car. You notice temperature drops at the bottom of valleys. You smell silage and harvested hay especially keenly. You’re very aware of road surface changes – for safety’s sake – and especially wary of damp patches under trees.