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New anti-motorcycle legislation sweeps Europe



Posted in Europe, What's New? by Kevin Williams / Survival Skills on June 21, 2011


Dramatic headline?

Maybe, but slipping under the radar of the average rider is a raft of
legislation across Europe that is chipping away at motorcycling.

I’m not about to open up that hoary old can of worms that is ‘riders’
rights’ but to try to highlight some of the many changes in motorcycle
legislation that are being rolled out across Europe.

The 3rd Licence Directive has received a fair amout of attention but
many of the other bits of legislation are much less well-known. The
sheer scope of some of these are worrying to say the least, whilst
others seem ridiculously trivial.

A common theme seems to be that aside from the major driving licence
debate, many of these changes are being pushed through by national
governments without consultation with the riders’ organisations in those
countries or with Europe-wide bodies.

One effect of this piecemeal legislation is that definitive
information isn’t easy to find. Whilst there are briefing papers on the
individual issues on various websites, they are often out-of-date or
incomplete, or foreign-language.

There doesn’t seem to be one single, definitive list of what’s
already changed and what’s planned for biking in the next few years.
Even FEMA doesn’t seem to have a full briefing on what’s going on across
Europe. As a result, I’m sure there are mistakes and inaccuracies in
this particular article, and I’ll be glad to accept any corrections.

But the following list will give you some idea of just how much motorcycling is under threat.

• At the head of the list is the European 3rd Licence Directive, which
  will introduce an intermediate A2 tier of licence between the current
  33hp ‘restricted’ category which can be gained by passing a test at age
  17, and ‘direct access’ to full power bikes. Direct Access to full power
  bikes will be put back to 24 from the current 21.
  
• New rules on braking systems on all new bikes, which will be imposed
  shortly. All new machines will have to have either linked brakes or ABS
  fitted as standard.
  
• New laws will also allow for ‘anti-tampering’ measures to prevent
  and/or make it illegal to improve performance. This seems to cover parts
  like alternative sprockets and aftermarket exhausts.
  
• Type approval is being extended to cover some replacement parts,
  specifically mirrors, brake pads and brake shoes and tyres. This would
  make it illegal to replace any of these parts with a non-approved part
  and goes far beyond the ‘e-mark’ legislation currently in place.
  
• Compulsory protective clothing in Belgium. Belgium imposed new rules
  on 1 January 2011 which required all riders and passengers on two
  wheelers to wear long sleeves, trousers, gloves and boots that cover the
  ankle (plus the obligatory helmet, of course!). There’s no requirement
  for this to be ‘protective clothing’ as far as I can see, so it would
  appear to be a very minimum standard. But it’s still compulsory
  
• Compulsory protective clothing in the UK whilst taking your bike
  test. In a very similar measure, the DSA recently announced that
  candidates turning up for their bike test in ‘inappropriate’ clothing
  could be turned away untested. Whilst the ‘appropriate clothing’ is no
  more than as recommended on CBT (ie, helmet, stout jacket and trousers,
  gloves and ankle-protecting footwear), it’s been rushed through with no
  apparent consultation with the motorcycle industry.
  
• Compulsory hi-vis clothing in France for motorcyclists from 1
  September 2011. This one’s kicked up a terrific stink in France with
  riders, with an estimated 100,000 turning out in demos on Sunday 18
  June, in numbers which paralysed cities and towns up and down the
  country. According to reports, more than 15,000 bikers clogged up the
  heart of the capital blocking the Periphique, Lyon (France’s second
  largest city) saw more than 10,000 bikers, 7,000 demonstrated in Lille,
  and Toulouse was totally blocked by 8,000 bikers. Smaller demonstrations
  took place in dozens of other cities.
  
• France to ban bikes over seven years old from cities centres. This
  was announced just before the hi-vis demo, so almost certainly added to
  the turn-out.
  
• New French laws will also ban filtering and force all riders to
  remain stationary in traffic jams and retro-fit bigger rear numberplates
  [Rather bizarrely, Belgium has just legalised filtering on 1 January
  2011, so long as it's within limits - you can't ride faster than 50Km/h
  or more than 20Km/h faster than the traffic you're filtering past.]
  
• New French laws will give the police power to seize GPS units
  ‘capable of storing the locations of fixed speed cameras’. In the past,
  it was illegal to use a GPS to locate speed cameras and your GPS could
  be confiscated if used in this way, but it’s not clear whether this
  means any GPS capable of POI alerts contravenes the new regulations even
  if there are no such POIs in the memory.
  
• Compulsory hi-vis in Ireland. The law was introduced a couple of
  years ago, but after a softly-softly period, it’s apparently been
  announced that it’s now to be strictly enforced.
  
• Spain has banned headphones in helmets. It applies to car drivers
  too, but it means that using bike to bike/passenger intercoms is illegal
  south of the Pyrenees, as is using an earpiece to listen to GPS
  directions.
  

You may not be worried by any of this. You may feel it’s an
intolerable assault on motorcycling and the ‘lifestyle’ that goes with
it. I’m not going to argue for or against either viewpoint, but if
nothing else, this list should give you an idea of the potential
minefield that travelling in Europe is fast becoming.

Far from having pan-European ‘rules of the road’ which was one of the
goals of a single community, travelling across Europe is fast becoming a
minefield of different national laws and petty rules of which we’ll all
have to be aware when crossing borders.

But the worrying bit is that all these measures seem to be happening
at more or less the same time. A conspiracy theorist might think that
wasn’t entirely an accident. And that’s what’s adopted by one country
might seen be seen as a ‘good idea’ for the rest of the EU.