yep, ive got my opinions on it, and i act accordingly, but everyone else can do whatever they want. my only caveat is stupid riding on the street because that can impact other people.

 

I could care less if you ride in the nude or wearing a protective bubble. What i care about is that my insurance premiums are based on the masses, you being one of the statistics they take into account to determine my premiums. The fact that you want to ride full monte so when you ditch, you are crayoned all over the road, thus the insurance company has to pay 10's of thousands in skin grafts, and prosthetic limb charges, which means we all as a community pay for your choose to go naked on a motorcycle ride.

Other countries are not like the US. In the US we ride because it is a luxury (in most cases) the majority of the world ride because it is affordable. I have been to part so the world where i have seen several people on a 125 cc motorcycle and on the rider is wearing a helmet. But the risks are not the same. Because everyone rides, drivers are more respectful of the motorcycles, no one cares about lane splitting / filtering because it is allowed. heck i once saw a guy in a car hit a motorcyclist by accident. The car driver was pulled out of his car by a mob and beaten within inches of his life.

to summarize my main point, wear what you want, but i care only because it ultimately costs me money.

 

Ha Some don't care, some don't know better, some don't learn, some learn the hard way. To each his own.

 

Eh, what costs you money is people crashing or getting hit, not people riding without gear. Because we can't run the same scenario with and without gear to see whether there's a correlation between crashes and wearing gear (especially helmets) we'll never know whether helmets cause accidents or lessen the effects of crashes that were inevitable. I have my opinions on it, but it's not provable one way or the other.

 

I think it's safe to say that in any given scenario,, if you are wearing a helmet and other protective gear, there is a good chance your injury/injuries will be somewhat less then if you are not wearing any protective gear.
That being said, I believe oldmanbakers point is, those NOT wearing protective gear will sustain more serious injuries resulting in more expensive medical care which results in the insurance companies having to fork over more money to cover said injuries.
And that cost of course is passed on to the consumer.

 

So ... Just a guess ... Me in a Speedo would be inappropriate and hard on your eyes ?

 

While I agree with the OP in a literal sense I'm not sure why this would be posted here. It's not like beginners are attracted to large touring baggers - when you're in your 20s it's all about horses and "race" worthiness, wheelies and stoppies, and beginners mostly attract to sport bikes. But we've always had squids on sport bikes, in flipflops, shorts and a t-shirt, there's nothing particularly new or novel about this. Then six months or a year down the road they suddenly have an epiphany and now they ride everywhere in full race leathers, but maybe this is more appropriate for someone still too inexperienced to assess risk. Or their epiphany leads them to never get on a bike again as they simply lack the proper mindset.

It's true that beginners lack the experience to make informed risk judgements, but the chord the OP really strikes is that of a presumption that because someone is on a Harley and has made a judgement to ride in a t-shirt and flipflops, or whatever else they were wearing, a few blocks to a store they must be a rank novice to be judged. While performance baggers has changed this a bit, the big expensive H-D bagger is still a bike with very limited appeal among the squid set.

 

On a bike or off the bike would be hard on my eyes.

 

Age tends to bring out the self-righteousness in folks, people buying and riding bigger machines for many years typically have been middle-aged white collar newcomers or switching from an import with nicely structured backgrounds and lifestyles that clash with those they see as beneath their social station or aren't following the rules they have. This said, harleys in general have always attracted those who are a total dumpster fire to watch.

 

Interesting thread - we all do things a little differently.

For me/us, we always wear long pants. If riding around town or to the local dealership in warm weather, we wear tee shirts. On longer trips/highway, we usually wear a long sleeve shirt or mesh jacket. For us, the bare skin in the wind sort of burns us. We just got back from a 1400 mile trip - and it was long pants, jackets and boots all the way.

I will say that we may wear sketchers on a short ride - 10 miles or so; we have a trike with running boards.

As a note - while in Sturgis, we say a guy on his bike - it was hot as heck that day. The lady with him has on a bikini - and she jumped on the back and sat on the FENDER - talk about burning her rear.