It seems that even over the July 4th holiday I still can’t get away from CUNY. Well, I have to place a caveat on that statement because I wasn’t really doing anything CUNY related. In truth, I spent most of the weekend at Lehman College taking a basic rider class sponsored by the Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF).
Everyone close to me knows that I have been thinking about buying a motorcycle for a few years. I had a bike briefly during my freshman year at Colorado College and loved it. I rode it for a few months until common sense, and fear of pissing off my basketball coach, got the better of me. I stopped riding
“dirty” because that kind of irresponsibility can be “somewhat” excused when you are a jerky freshman in college, but it is much harder to condone now that I am a nearly 50 year old man. So to get legal this time around the wife and I took a 2 hour MSF Introductory class at the Bronx Motorcycle Safety School last year.
The introductory course is designed to give you an idea of what riding a motorcycle entails. My wife and I planned to take the next level course together but she had to do it by herself. The stress of my publishing revisions, final tenure review, and the New Media Periodic Program Review made it difficult for me to fully concentrate on getting the license so I kept putting it off. How since all of those things are no longer a factor, and the wife and kids were away at camp, there was nothing to stop me from finally getting my motorcycle license this summer. But like most things in NYC, getting a motorcycle license can be overly complicated.
To obtain your motorcycle license in NYC you have to provide your own motorcycle, a car, and another driver to chauffeur the evaluator around to watch you take the road test. So for me just to take the test I would have to borrow a car and a motorcycle from my friends, and then convince one of them to take off a day off from work to serve as the chauffeur. That is just too much for most people to coordinate. The MSF Basic Rider Safety course is a viable option and one of best ways to get trained and licensed to ride a bike in NYC. If you take the class and successfully complete the curriculum you are provided with a road test waiver that the DMV will honor. The MSF classes are held at multiple locations throughout the city. I signed up to take the course at the Lehman College location because it was the easiest one for me to reach by public transportation.
The course was two and a half days (Friday night through Sunday morning) and covers many of the basic skills a new rider will need to master in order to stay alive. The skills training is conducted on a closed course by a team of experienced instructors. Small 250cc training motorcycles are provided to ensure that students will be working with machines within their limits. You can bring your own helmet (I did) or use on of theirs. The class is fairly demanding for people with no previous motorcycle riding background. Only 8 out of the12 students that took the MSF course passed the final road test. The instructors make safety a priority and it shows. On the second day one student was dropped from the course because they were unable to master essential basic skills and posed a potential danger to the other students. Luckily no one got hurt, but this brought home the fact that riding motorcycles can be an extremely scary and dangerous thing if you are unprepared.
Overall I had a great experience this weekend. I met a great group of people and got much better at riding than I had hoped. I have to give a big shout out to instructors Jason Hernandez. Brett Schaffrick, Daniel Power, and Monica Holmes. They ran a very safe and professional class and I would recommend this course to anyone thinking about buying a bike. On a more personal note, I am still trying to figure out what to bike to buy for myself. The MSF class caused me to seriously downgrade what I was going to get. I was initially going to snag a Kawasaki KLR650 but now I am going to go smaller and swap it out in a year or so after I have more riding experience. I know need more practice than what was provided in MSF course before I am ready to ride on the streets near my apartment in Manhattan. Now I was just need to figure out where in Manhattan can I find an empty parking lot to practice slow maneuvers and my clutch and shift work.