Les Motos

LES MOTOS

LIVING IN FRANCE HAS ITS benefits, especially if you're a motorcyclist. Take these neat stamps, for ex-ample. I’ve stopped sending e-mails and reverted to old-fashioned letters just so I could use ’em.

Although French bikers-like American riders-complain they’re treated as second-class citizens, these stamps further illustrate the fact that motorcycling is much more a part of everyday life in Europe.

My neighborhood is ¡ a maze of cobbled streets and ancient | buildings. Much of it is ggp closed to cars, but even ^ where they’re allowed, parking is impossible. Whenever I go to the market, I’m reminded that in France, anywhere a pedestrian can go, motorbikes are welcome, too. Bikes park on the sidewalks with impunity.

What accounts for this difference in society’s attitude toward two wheels?

It helps that many French car drivers started out on a moped or scooter. French bikers are far more unified and politically active than their American counterparts, too. Recently, mass rallies protested diesel spills and slippery paint on crosswalks. (Picture the AMA with the aggressive political savvy of the NRA and you’ll have the general idea.) The weekend of the Bol d’Or endurance race, motorcycles get special lanes and free passage through highway tolls. In 1983, feeling exploited by insurance companies, motor cyclists formed a bikes-only insurance company, Mutuelle des Motards-'Biker’s Mutual”-that now covers 150,000 riders.

The French attitude has always been vive la difference. Maybe that’s the most useful lesson to take from French motards. In the U.S., sportbike riders won’t talk to Harley guys and Ducatisti snub even each other. Scooters? Fuggedaboud ’em. And freeriding extremists hardly speak at all (communicating, perhaps, by tattooing and piercing coded messages on their bodies...)

In France, when all motorcyclists speak together, the whole country listens.

Mark Gardiner