Bikers

Baltimore has made a great deal of progress in making itself more bike friendly ("Cycling advocates fight proposed helmet law, preferring 'safety in numbers'" Feb 13). As a homeowner in Baltimore City, I enjoy the convenience of jumping on my bike to make short trips to run errands rather than driving. This newly proposed bike helmet law promises not only to make this more inconvenient for me and many of my fellow neighbors who also ride bikes, but also to ironically make it more dangerous to ride.

Really, Mr. Conaway! In his defense of dirt bike riders ("Don't penalize city kids for riding dirt bikes," April 25), Baltimore Circuit Court Clerk Frank M. Conaway Sr. places blame for this problem on the Baltimore Police Department and their vendetta against black youth. The inner city is rife with Mr. Conaway calls a "nuisance" while Baltimore drivers see it as a clear and present danger. I have slammed on my brakes numerous times and swerved into other lanes trying to avoid a collision.

A reader finds the motorcycle caravans commemorating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks an empty, self-serving gesture by publicity-seeking bikers who enjoy disrupting traffic in order to see themselves on TV As a former New York City bus driver who witnessed the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, I find the "patriotic" motorcycle caravans, such as the recent one through Harford County on I-95, an empty, self-serving gesture by obnoxious, publicity-seeking bikers who enjoy disrupting traffic in order to see themselves on the evening news.

As 20 Harley-Davidsons growled across the asphalt at the Maryland Cruise terminal Monday morning, "Easy Rider" met "The Love Boat. " After a briefing from their tour leader, the bikers inched their machines up the ramp and into the yawning hold of the 2,200-passenger Enchantment of the Seas. Next stop: Labadee, a private port resort on the north coast of Haiti. Motorcycle cruising might be the ultimate surf-and-turf dream, a chance for bikers to ride off a passenger ship and onto sun-drenched Caribbean back roads.

Die-hard bikers, put on your helmets and get ready to learn how to save yourself when you really need to. The Bike Shop of Bel Air offers a survival maintenance course that can help you while you are riding and encounter a problem with your bike. The course “covers the proper and impromptu ways to repair a bike to get you home safely. Topics include simple changing of a tire to more complex issues of what to do if you crash and break spokes,” says instructor Shawn Ransford (right)

They've been refused service in restaurants and barred from neighborhood taverns. Some business owners have taken to posting signs on the door to warn them away.And all they did to merit such treatment was to ride a motorcycle."I'm a single, white Jewish male with hearing loss," said Michael Sage, a bald and bearded biker from Rockville. "I can't be discriminated against for any of these, but because I ride a motorcycle, I'm being denied a seat in a restaurant."Wear leather clothing, a Harley-Davidson T-shirt, or boots and a jacket with zippers on the sleeves and increasingly, you may not get served in establishments from Baltimore to Ocean City, motorcycle enthusiasts told members of the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee yesterday.

Confrontations between motorcyclists and Maryland legislators have produced some of the General Assembly's more embarrassing moments. Year after year, it seemed that all bikers had to do to squelch any attempt to enact sensible helmet legislation was simply show up in Annapolis. Similar measures -- requiring that motorists wear seat belts or that infants and small children ride in special seats -- are taken for granted. Bikers, however, insist that a helmet requirement would be an infringement of their freedom on the open road.

A rally of motorcyclists commemorating the Sept. 11 attacks will be departing the Pentagon in Northern Virginia at about 6:45 a.m. Saturday, according to America's 911 Foundation Inc. The convoy will be taking I-395 to the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. They will then be going from the parkway to I-95 for a stop at the Maryland House rest area, about 24 miles north of Baltimore City in Harford County. They plan to depart Maryland House at about 9:30 a.m. and continue north on I-95 to Delaware.

NANCY BRIGHT is a biker chick. Most people know Bright as the personable financial secretary at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church in Crofton. For 13 years, she has been a mainstay of church operations, helping with religious education programs and, more recently, serving as financial administrator. Everyone knows Bright as a woman with a ready smile and a friendly and generous spirit. But a biker? Until recently, the Severn woman was intimidated by motorcycles. For more than 20 years, she has ridden on the back of her husband Wayne's motorcycle.

THEY ROARED into town on their ''hogs,'' long hair and beards flying and tattoos blazing in the noonday sun.In leather and chains, and their gals in bikinis, they looked like the promo for a scary film starring Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.About 25,000 of them, men and women, vrooming in for the annual Harley-Davidson Dealers Association's Spring Rally at Myrtle Beach, S.C.I had gone down for a short, relaxing vacation at one of my favorite stomping grounds, never dreaming in my wildest nightmare that bikers would pick the same time for their pow wow.I wondered ''What's a nice little ole lady like me doing here, trying to get from the T-shirt shop to the beach with all these bruisers driving four abreast and taking up my space?

Letter writer Kevin Strickler says that requiring bicyclists to wear helmets will lead to fewer bikers ("Helmet laws will reduce number of bikers," Feb. 19). I say that not wearing helmets will reduce the number of bikers in a most unpleasant way - by more deaths on the road. Using the same theory as Mr. Strickler proposes, not using car seat belts should reduce the number of drivers. Come to think of it this could be a most welcome result as there would then be more parking spaces and more room on the roads.

Baltimore has made a great deal of progress in making itself more bike friendly ("Cycling advocates fight proposed helmet law, preferring 'safety in numbers'" Feb 13). As a homeowner in Baltimore City, I enjoy the convenience of jumping on my bike to make short trips to run errands rather than driving. This newly proposed bike helmet law promises not only to make this more inconvenient for me and many of my fellow neighbors who also ride bikes, but also to ironically make it more dangerous to ride.

"12 O'Clock Boys," a documentary looking at West Baltimore dirt bikers, will get its world premiere at next month's South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas. Director Lotfy Nathan's film was one of eight documentary features chosen to be screened at the festival, out of more than 900 submitted for consideration. The film centers on 13-year-old Pug, who desperately wants to join the West Baltimore dirt-bike gang that gives Nathan's work its title. The SXSW website says the film "presents the pivotal years of change in a boy's life growing up in one of the most dangerous and economically depressed cities in the U.S. " Director Nathan, who began working on "12 O'Clock Boys" in 2008, is currently trying to raise $30,000 through kickstarter.com to complete post-production on the film, including color correction, sound design and mixing, music licensing and getting to SXSW.

Die-hard bikers, put on your helmets and get ready to learn how to save yourself when you really need to. The Bike Shop of Bel Air offers a survival maintenance course that can help you while you are riding and encounter a problem with your bike. The course “covers the proper and impromptu ways to repair a bike to get you home safely. Topics include simple changing of a tire to more complex issues of what to do if you crash and break spokes,” says instructor Shawn Ransford (right)

If you knew what actually happened to Georgia Gould in 2008 as she regained consciousness on a stretcher in California, IV sticking into her arm, your first question might be a lot like Georgia's. What happened? She knew she'd blacked out on the mountain biking trail in Santa Barbara during the Santa Ynez Valley Classic professional race. She knew she'd come to at the finish line, transported there by medics. She'd been told she'd been in a bad crash. She just couldn't remember it. But if you knew what actually happened to Olympian Georgia Gould, you would know that she couldn't remember the crash because she didn't crash at all, that she'd stepped off her bike in midrace, delirious with heat stroke, and had passed out on a hill.

For Gary "Pappy" Boward, the prospect of the tread stripping off an aging tire on his van or car is scary enough. The possibility of it happening on his motorcycle is downright terrifying. Boward, chairman of the motorcycle rights group ABATE, came to Annapolis Tuesday to call on the General Assembly to pass a bill that would require tire dealers in Maryland to inform consumers of research showing that tires deteriorate with age and that a federal agency recommends they be replaced after six years even if the tread depth is adequate.

ANNAPOLIS -- They came to town with a roar, a parade of steel and chrome, leather and rumbling horsepower.On a glorious fall day, hundreds of motorcyclists celebrated their last helmet-free weekend with a protest ride, loudly motoring through the narrow streets of historic Annapolis, past the State House and legislative office buildings.The only things atop their heads were bandannas, caps and hair -- a great deal of hair in many cases. They paused only to show their contempt for the governor and legislators who deemed that beginning this Thursday they shall have to wear helmets whenever they ride.

At the end of a long winter, the words "road trip" have a particular appeal, especially if you're headed somewhere that's warm and has listless alligators in fetid pens as a tourist attraction, which we'll get to in a moment. So with gas cheap and hotels practically giving away rooms, my buddy Ed and I loaded the suitcases and golf clubs in the car and hurtled down Interstate 95 for a week of R&R in the great state of Florida. One of the dangers of driving south on 95 is that you'll go insane from the mind-numbing parade of Shoney's and Stuckey's billboards that line the highway, not to mention the 4,000 signs for the ever-tacky Pedro's empire at South of the Border.

Representatives of Baltimore's biking and hiking community gathered Saturday for a "state of the trails" summit to set a course for creating more opportunities for recreational users and commuters. Despite a sluggish economy and a tight budget, the city is continuing work on several projects, said Fran Spero, an official with Baltimore's Recreation and Parks Department. Extending the Jones Falls Trail 2.5 miles from the Inner Harbor to Pennsylvania Station continues on time, as does planning for the $5.9 million segment that will connect Cylburn Arboretum to Mount Washington.

A reader finds the motorcycle caravans commemorating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks an empty, self-serving gesture by publicity-seeking bikers who enjoy disrupting traffic in order to see themselves on TV As a former New York City bus driver who witnessed the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, I find the "patriotic" motorcycle caravans, such as the recent one through Harford County on I-95, an empty, self-serving gesture by obnoxious, publicity-seeking bikers who enjoy disrupting traffic in order to see themselves on the evening news.