by Steve Manes for Thunder Press East
The New York City RAT (Rider's Association of Triumph) club kicked off its first ride of the year on April 20 with a cruise to Marcus Dairy Super Sunday in Danbury, Connecticut. In attendance were Triumph of America regional representative, Walter Allwine, Country Joe Razzano and Eric Randolph of Big City Motorcycles in Manhattan, Ryan Cunningham, sales director for Precision Motorcycles in Valley Stream, LI and a few intrepid Big City customers looking forward to a nice a day of riding and trinket hunting at the Dairy. Our bikes ranged from a pair of 1997 Triumph T595 Daytonas and a new T509 Speed Triple to a $30,000 Pure Steel big twin.
We shoved off from Big City Motorcycles at 9:45am... me in the lead on one of the T595s... en route to some interesting backroads off the Saw Mill Parkway. In previous years, the immense draw of Super Sundays has attracted the attention of Westchester County and Connecticut uniformed tax collectors resulting in unfair and discriminatory motorcycles-only road blocks at the 684/84 exit to inspect licenses and tags. The spring Super Sunday is particularly fruitful for them because of the motorcyclists who carelessly allowed their documentation to expire over the winter. These traffic stops have nothing to do with traffic safety, just local revenue enhancement. To staff these roadblocks they strip the roads of a police presence to deter reckless driving on a day when the roads are packed with hundreds of rusty riders who haven't ridden in months. There's a silver lining, of course: it also leaves the much more interesting backroads unpatrolled. And that was where we were heading.
Even though we were all legal, or so I thought, I decided to bypass Bronx traffic by taking the Saw Mill North and cutting over to Route 22 . The parkway was full of motorcycles, some of them looking a little unsteady, so we kept a reasonable pace and tried to keep clear of packs of bikes. What was interesting was that I saw no sign of the normally ubiquitous Westchester PD on the Saw Mill.
As we rounded a turn after the 287 exit, traffic had stopped in the southbound lane in front of what looked like a pile of oily rags laying in the middle of the road. As we got closer, it turned out to be a body, and from the dress it looked like a motorcyclist. There were no police at the scene. As we learned later, the motorcyclist was NYPD Police Officer Gene Kermanson, a five-year veteran of the Fifth Precinct in Chinatown. He apparently lost control of his motorcycle on the overpass, struck the barrier and was thrown over the wall and into the southbound Saw Mill. He was killed instantly.
We were shaken up by this gruesome sight, enough that I missed the turn-off I had planned. So we continued on the Saw Mill. A couple of miles up the road, around a blind sweeper, we encountered exactly what I was trying to avoid: a motorcycle documentation stop. I had never seen this on the Saw Mill before and assumed I never would. It's a dangerous road with narrow shoulders, poor visibility around curves and there is a volatile mix of fast and slow drivers. But there it was anyway. A cop stood in the right lane flagging motorcyclists over to the shoulder and cars to the passing lane. Since motorcyclists were mostly in the left lane passing the slower rubbernecks in their Town Cars, it created a dangerous situation where traffic was simultaneously braking, bunching up and crisscrossing in the middle of a highway. Meanwhile, vehicles approaching the melee at 60+ mph were unaware of what was around the blind curve. It was the most asinine, potentially lethal traffic situation I have seen, made all the worse because it was created by the Westchester County police for the stated purpose of "increasing traffic safety and traffic calming".
We were pulled over into a disorderly jumble of motorcycles, which during our inspection grew to over forty motorcycles. Everyone was looking over their shoulders for some confused cager to mow down the pack of parked bikes. No bikes were checked for loud pipes... later the official public statement from the Westchester Public Safety Office rationalizing this discriminatory stop. No one was ticketed for moving violations either.
Unfortunately, one of our group did not have a proper motorcycle endorsement on his NJ driver's license (although he did have a valid motorcycle roadracing license). Cops intended to seize his bike but were confused how to process the motorcycle and it's red factory plates. They relented after we promised to stash it off the next exit and find a licensed rider to drive it back to the city. An hour was shot out of our day so the county could earn its pound of flesh.
We then proceeded on to Marcus. However, the day had turned into such a bummer that we stayed for only a few minutes before leaving to attend to the stranded motorcycle and our traffic offender, who had been left in a Chappaqua parking lot.
As it turned out, the Westchester County Police had been busy bees that day, setting up no fewer than three motorcycles-only road blocks on the Saw Mill, 684 and on the Hutchinson River Parkway. As a motorcyclist, I'm not only offended by the official insinuation that motorcyclists are more of a traffic hazard than the car drivers who have been trying their best to kill me for the last twenty-five years of riding. I am also offended that my tax dollars are being used to finance what is clearly police harassment of a minority for revenue purposes. As a group, motorcyclists are better trained than cagers and ride with more of a sense of their own mortality than the average cellphone-dialing, windows-rolled-up, CD-player-blasting, burger-scarfing, screaming-brat-in-the back-seat, makeup-applying SUV jockey from Katonah. Every one of us in our group had attended elective vehicle proficiency skills schools, which is more than can be said for 99.99% of the car drivers on the road that day. We also know from surveys that upwards of one-third of ALL NY drivers hit the roads without a valid license, registration or proper insurance. There is absolutely no reason or justification why those road blocks should not have included ALL drivers.
I keep thinking about the irony of the killed motorcyclist, a police officer, and the possibility that if the Westchester police had been out on the roads providing a visible deterrent to hot-dogging rather than behaving like uniformed thugs for the county treasurer's office that maybe another cop might be alive today.