This is going on in the province that I live in.There is a facebook page setup under Ridge Riders.Stop by and show your support.
Ban on RIGID Frame paper write up.
http://dailygleaner.canadaeast.com/rss/article/1394161 A Woodstock businessman and motorcycle restorer is crying foul because the province has revoked a registration on one of two bikes he owns because it has no rear suspension.
Joe Chronkhite of Rosedale near Woodstock says the province has told him that is 1976 Triumph isn't roadworthy because it's a hard tail. That means it doesn't have a rear suspension system. Chronkhite wants answers on why this bike and other vintage motorcycles are being rejected by the province's Registrar of Motor Vehicles.
That decision could have widespread implications for a large number of motorcycle enthusiasts who collect and restore vintage bikes and want to drive them on the open road and in shows, said Joe Cronkhite of Rosedale.
Cronkhite has been driving a 1976 Triumph T140V for several years and never had a licensing problem before.
But he's apparently opened up a bureaucratic debate over the issue of whether hard tails - motorbikes without rear suspensions - are legal on New Brunswick roads.
"Some people call them a rigid. They make bikes like this to this day," Cronkhite said.
"Personally, I like them and I own them. It's kind of an old-school thing."
Cronkhite said his difficulties with the motor vehicle registry came initially not over the Triumph, but over another bike, a 1942 Harley Davidson that he's rebuilding.
When he applied to the province to register the Harley, he was told that since he had rebuilt the bike, he would have to have it certified as safe and roadworthy by a professional engineer.
"No problem. This isn't my first time doing this," he said.
Cronkhite contacted Fredericton engineer David Hoar from a list of qualified people supplied by the province.
"Right off the bat, it was no way. He wouldn't even look at my bike. He just on the phone told me it was impossible and that hard tails aren't allowed on the road, that hard tails are unsafe on the road. So I made the mistake of telling him I own hard tails, including the Triumph, that I had been driving for the last few years. I told him 'You're mistaken,' " Cronkhite said.
"All of a sudden I got a letter in the mail ... from the registrar stating the registrar has received information that caused him to have safety concerns about the (1976 Triumph)."
The March 1 letter from the province, signed by Heather Gorman, manager of vehicle safety with New Brunswick's Public Safety Department, informed Cronkhite that until his Triumph is engineer-certified, his registration won't be replaced, renewed and he can't transfer ownership.
"No one has seen my bike. It's sitting in my garage," Cronkhite said. "The only person we know (who would complain) is Mr. David Hoar."
Cronkhite called the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of New Brunswick to complain.
"It's turned into a pissing competition. I proved him wrong, so he yanked my registration. I pay tax on this bike. I licence it every year. Everything on it is brand new. It's (the Triumph) a perfectly good working motorcycle. Now, they're asking me to recertify it," he said.
"I can't license it. I can't sell it. I can't do anything with it."
Cronkhite said his Triumph has an after-market frame that he bought from British Cycles Inc. that was designed for his bike, so he said it's not like he welded up a frame of his own.
He said when he again pursued the issue again with Gorman at the Department of Public Safety, she told him in an email that New Brunswick doesn't require inspections on motorcycles.
"When the registrar is made aware of a situation where a vehicle has been modified, the registered owner does receive the letter you were sent and they are required to have it examined by an engineer," she wrote to Cronkhite in an email in early March.
Hoar acknowledged in a recent interview that he didn't physically examine Cronkhite's bike because, in his opinion, rigid-tail motorcycles aren't safe to be on the road.
"When people are building things like these rigid-tail motorcycles, years and years ago, that was sort of the norm, as were mechanical brakes and hard tires and a whole lot of things on cars ... Anything that's typically beyond 25 years old, they don't acknowledge on the road. They should go on as an antique. The problem with New Brunswick is that the province doesn't differentiate between antiques and regular motorcycles," he said.
"We really cannot sign off on that. The reason being that the purpose of a suspension on a vehicle is not for the comfort of an operator ... It's to keep the tires in contact with the highway.
"If a vehicle will do over 15 miles per hour, we automatically put a suspension on it just for pure safety reasons ... The problem with these antique bikes with the rigid frames is they have no suspension
"At 30 miles an hour, that bike is going 44 feet per second. If that tire bounces for half a second, he's going to go 22 feet with no contact on the road and if he's into a hard turn and that rear end of that bike bounces, it will come right out from underneath him. If it's known to be dangerous, we really can't sign off on it."
Hoar said one solution would be to register the motorcycles in a vintage or antique class similar to what is done with restored cars, but even at that, those vehicles may only be driven to and from shows and aren't licensed to be on the road on a daily basis.
"The issue with the (hard tail) bikes is that they're absolutely terrible, and typically, we kill at least one person a year on a rigid-frame motorcycle. It's usually a single-vehicle accident where somebody is on a secondary road coming into a turn a little bit too fast," Hoar said.
"It's definitely a safety issue."
The Fredericton engineer said Quebec doesn't register rigid-frame motorcycles, and Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island won't recognize the bikes either.
Hoar said the solution is for the vintage bike owners to convince the province to create an antique motorcycle registration category.
Cronkhite said he still hasn't had satisfactory answers to questions about what motor-vehicle laws are being broken by the use of a hard-tail motorcycle.
"The Motor Vehicle Act requires that motorcycles have one working brake, one working head lamp, one working red tail light, a working horn and (approved) tires. There is no mention of rear suspension according to the Motor Vehicle Act. I am not breaking any laws," he said.
Cronkhite said there are at least four people in the Woodstock-Fredericton area who are into restoring vintage motorcycles and enjoy driving them.
"There are several of us who own these bikes in New Brunswick, which are already registered, and thousands more still on the road in Canada," he said.
"These are historical bikes. These are war bikes. The Canadian Vintage Motorcycle group is really behind us just because there's so many of us that ride these bikes. There are a lot of people that ride these bikes."
Charles O'Donnell, registrar of motor vehicles for the province, said this week that under the Motor Vehicle Act he can't allow a vehicle on the highway unless he knows or believes it to be mechanically sound.
"It's not something left to my proclivity; it's required under the legislation," O'Donnell said.
"But if somebody comes to me with an engineer's opinion that a particular bike is safe by whatever modifications they've made, I'm certainly willing to take a look at it. It's not a question of a bike is absolutely unsafe. Each bike might be slightly different ... If there is an engineer who has a different opinion, I'd like to listen to them."
He said he relies on the expertise of engineers to advise the government.
A couple of weeks ago, O'Donnell said, he met with six engineers to talk about a number of vehicle safety matters, including hard-tail bikes.
"I was quite satisfied that all six of the engineers were unanimous that all hard-tail bikes were dangerous and unsafe to be on the road and shouldn't be allowed to be registered," he said.
cause if the pass it up there how long before Big Brother Does it here ??