If you don't ride but think you might want to, what's stopping you? Don't tell me fear, that's not a good enough excuse.

I have a bright yellow Suzuki Bandit 600 and his name is Zack. I commute twenty miles each way through Los Angeles traffic. I get to use carpool lanes and the ride generally shaves ten to fifteen off the time I would make in the car.

My Bandit is my dream bike. It's perfectly comfortable for my build and the maintenance is affordable. I could handle bigger but my speedometer tops out at 150mph and he isn't even remotely stressed at 100mph, though I've only gone there once or twice. You hear about people becoming one with their bike and I have certainly achieved that.

I ride on several freeways and on the surface streets through various neighborhoods and I'll tell you that the richer the neighborhood the more careful I have to be. But that's LA.

Since many people think I'm crazy for doing this I thought it might make a good story idea. I don't have time to write it right now but every day I ride I get more material.

My pet hate ued to be whenever a passager leant the wrong way going into a curve. With the weight of the bike wanting to go one way, and the weight of the passenger going the other way, it used to be a wrestling match to stay on the road.

I was filling the tank up one day when looking out across the multiple lanes on the road in front of the petrol station I say some bloke skimming past on the surface of the road. I still laugh though it wasn't funny -- he was kind of trying to use his arms to push himself into an erect position, even though he was travelling at probably about 60km (I guess that's about 40mph). A moment later, his Kawa followed him, scrapping a long trail of sparks off the road surface.

When I got to him, he was okay -- fortunately he was wearing a motorcycle jacket with kevlar in all the right places, a good, heavy-duty helmet. The bike was a bit bent, but reparable. It was virtually identical to my own.

Anyway, he was dazed and a little punch drunk, bleeding a little, but seemed fine. We were there for probably about 10 minutes before someone else finally asked what went wrong, and he replied, "My passenger leant the wrong way." And it was probably another ferw minutes before I finally asked, "What passenger?"

We found her further back, lying in a ditch. She was semi-conscious, had at least a broken ankle, but not seriously injured otherwise.

For example:

In Mission Impossible 2 (I think); they shoot at a motorcycle from behind and miraculously hit the gas tank. The tank of course is the big thing that sits in front of the pilot.

In the Indy 4 fiasco; when the kid is riding around town with Indy on the back of his Harley, in traffic, they somehow have trouble escaping the bad guys who are in big cars, in traffic, so that they can have the silly scene where Indy gets pulled through the bad guy's car and comes out the other side. Of course if that situation were real, the Harley would have weaved through traffic and been long gone. No chase, just the back end of a motorcycle disappearing in the distance.

On the good side; Stargate SG-1 had a scene that was very realistic and well shot. Mitchell was racing through traffic, the cars were reasonably spaced relative to his speed and he was holding a tight line and not weaving all over the road. It was the kind of maneuvering any decent rider could do. The really cool thing they did was to focus on his left foot when he upshifted. It's a small thing but it was a great shot that made you think he was going faster whether he was or not. I would also be willing to bet that the shot was conceived by someone who rides.

My boyfriend, who taught me to ride, had worse crashes on his bicycle than he ever had on a motorcycle. I think if you're willing to ride a bicycle in the street than a motorcycle shouldn't scare you. The motorcycle is actually the safer of the two.