@warthog. your notion that this is is spot on. maybe the government should use this as a motto.

@craig sounds interesting, although the idiots that ride recklessly probably dont have CBT certificates. I disagree with the hi viz vest been made compulsory, but maybe decent jackets should be. also i have no interest in passing a motorcycle test in the near future, dont see the need for it. as previously stated i dnt mind the power, and aint to fussed about riding on motorways or carrying people on the back. when the time comes to do a long haul motorbike trip il see about it then.

one point, the CBT needs a lot of work! maybe make it a test instead of a course?

Look at advertising for instance ,
not so much lately because the poor car manufacturers are feeling the pinch , bless,em .
but they and the government was ripping everybodys pants down 10 years ago with high car & bike prices compared to the US and the rest of europe.
advertising what they want you to buy , never a bike in sight .

i think if the money that it cost to police the cat & fiddle on sundays and bank holidays with two dozen coppers a plane a helicopter etc etc
could probably set up a proper training school for learner motorcyclist and run it for the rest of the year .

CBT instructors can actually refuse to issue certificates and ours do so on a fairly regular basis, particularly for those where its obvious that they haven't even looked at the Highway Code. We always offer the option to come back and re-take the course at no charge. Unfortunately, time is money so the smaller concerns tend not to do this and just issue the certificate. And you're right, the CBT as a whole does need work.

My opinion regarding Hi-Viz is also to draw attention for the benefit of other road users. L-plates aren't enough. It would indicate that the rider in front of them has only completed a rudimentary training course and hopefully give them a wide berth. Wearing hi-vis isn't cool but thats the whole point. Yes, there are a few decent CBT riders out there but they are in the minority and even those riders need training before they are test standard.

initailly this statement p****d me off, but I have to admit its true...although your could remove "CBT Riders" with motorists.

Without a doubt. I'll bet the most new car drivers couldn't pass if they had to retake the test, one month after they passed. Doesn't help that many car drivers seem to be completely blind to the presence of a bike and thats not just CBT'ers.

Well although we have many problems that are, some could say, un-solvable depending which point of view you possess, this cant be the worse country for the 'poor' system provided for bikers.

This being a travelers website; anybody seen anything truly crazy out there?
Something like " all I had to do to pass my motorbike test was spell 'Steve McQueen' "

I'm wondering why bikers think they do have the right to ride with the minimum of training, and yet will all acknowledge the fact that car drivers should pass a test.

People have said the CBT should be more comprehensive, with more of a test element, well then isn't that just a motorcycle test by another name?

As for people saying about it being crazy to have to have someone with you, here's how it works in France. First off you don't go out and buy your bike first, you go to the training school first. You book a course of 40 hours, and you fix the times you'll be doing those hours, maybe 2/3 times a week. You ride the school's OWN bikes, usually de-tuned 600's with LOADS of added crash bars all over. You can borrow ALL the gear if you don't have any or you can wear your own, and they'll fit an intercom in.

Come the lesson and the first thing you'll do is some bike familiarisation OFF the road usually in a car park of a Sunday morning. You'll do a bit of bike control, some riding around cones, you'll ride with a pillion, and you'll do the odd move from one side of your bike to the other supporting it with your hands only thing. Once your instructor's happy you'll progress to road riding.

When out on the road you'll be in a small group all in HI-VIS with your instructor behind in a CAR. He's got all the coms equipment and he can talk to one or all of you. You can reply, it's voice activated. Traffic lights? Roundabouts? Junctions? You ride carefully, you watch your mirrors, you speak to the instructor and they speak to you. If you get split up you just pull over, it's pretty bl**dy obvious you're under instruction, you've got a big HI-VIS on which says so, so if the cops see you pulled over at the road-side waiting, they'll leave you alone because they know you're under instruction.

You'll then find yourself back in car parks/airfields/etc doing more off-road work manoeuvring round cones, performing avoidance manoeuvres, riding with a pillion etc throughout the course.

On top of all of this you'll also have classroom based theory lessons and unless you've passed another vehicle test within the last five years, you'll have to do a thoery test too.

Once you've completed your hours and IF AND ONLY IF your instructor is satisfied he will sign you off. There is no TEST as such as your instructor is fully-qualified to assess you and is recognised by the State as being so. And of course he's far better able to assess you as he's seen you ride for hours and hours. Now you're ready to get your licence from the issuing authorities and go out and buy your bike.

This means that now in France every motorBIKE rider has taken a course. If you want to ride a 125cc, you'll need to have passed either car training and held your licence for 2 years, if not you'll have to do 6 hours of bike training, or proper bike training as above.

Only the 50cc moped-ists are immune and even they have had to do their Brevet de Securité Routière usually while at school aged 13 and stretched over an entire year!! to prepare them for turning 14 and a life on the road.

Of course the great thing about this is, either you've ridden something low powered since you were 14 and so learnt not to be a total TW*T or you've got the opportunity to try before you buy and invest in training, BEFORE you can invest in a bike. Plenty of rider training schools will let you pay by the hour so if you find you HATE it you've only paid for what you've done, and you've had a chance to ride a nice shiny BMW GS650 in the process.

Now people on here are saying it'll kill the whole industry, no-one will ride anymore, the tests will put people off, blah-blah-blah. France from a very lax system to these very draconian measures in one jump. BUT take a look at the number of bikes sold in France and the number of riders over here AND it's FAR higher than the UK.

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As usual France gets it right.

The UK tests are a joke, you base fifty years of operating various vehicles on a few minutes with a bloke whose never seen you before in his life. Allow me to demonstrate:

Car test 1: Failed; was told to pull over in a bus stop and didn't tell the examiner to **** off.

Car test 2: Failed; got the ABS to cycle on a down hill, 40 mph ice covered emergency stop. Apparently you are supposed to just stop and forget the emergency bit. The examiner said "what if the ABS failed" to which my reply "the red light comes on" was too late to change the result.

Car test 3: Passed, but what can go wrong when they take you for a nice little ramble on some country back roads.

Bike test; Passed despite the examiner getting lost and taking himself off on the motorway for a junction and back after I lost him at traffic lights and he took a marked left turn instead of going straight on. Total actual time on test riding was under 5 minutes!

Truck test 1; Failed. Was taken through central York at 9 am and couldn't get a 16 tonner across a box junction the cars were ignoring and queueing across. Push and you fail, don't push and you fail.

Truck test 2: Passed in 10 minutes short of the full time, but it was the last test on a Friday!

UK gov will never sack the power crazed examiners who run the test lottery and replace them with instructors who have a genuine interest in passing only people who genuinely and repeatedly up to standard. The civil service simply won't allow them to trust anyone even if they send examiners round like they do school inspectors. The governments aims are to keep the test fees coming in and the civil service off their backs. There is nothing road safety related about any of this.

Andy

Well that's exactly how the CBT should work, except there is an issue with how the CBT is set up in that schools have to advertise how much they charge for the CBT and that is all they can charge. So let's say 4 people come to do the CBT, 3 of them are good enough to pass 1st time but one isn't and needs extra training, the school can't charge them for that extra time. The longest I personally have had to work with someone to get them to a competent enough level to pass the CBT is 4 days! So for the school that I was working for at the time that was 3 days worth of paying customers that they had lost (£90 per course and as most people pass in a day that it £270 of lost revenue). I was fortunate enough that the school I was working for was more concerned with the people being able to ride safely than in turning people around as quick as possible, but I know of at least two training schools that would have given that person the CBT certificate after half a day regardless.

The current CBT system is flawed in my opinion, and without a doubt there are some riders out on the road with CBT certificates who simply are not capable enough to be riding on their own. For that reason I do think a revamp is required, although not to the extreme that the current proposals suggest.

Now although I am completely against scrapping L platers ability to ride alone, yet I do think getting them (us) to wear the correct gear and practise being hi viz,

I do agree with Steve when he says I should not have passed my CBT course in one day. It was only by going round Ikea car park with a mate who is safe on a bike several times that I really got use to how to control a scooter (started on a vespa). Really I should have been the one to say "I need more training" but the cost was very off putting. Although when my friend took his CBT he saw a guy kicked out within 10 minutes for not wanting to wear protective gloves.

Bike sales are not just down to this. Biking is far more integrated into French culture than it is in the UK. Sure the British ride bikes in large numbers, but this is increasingly a hobby type pursuit.

In France however, people have had bikes in their blood, precisely because their first sense of freedom and independance on the road was a rusty old Mobylette, or a funky Italjet 50 that they cut their teeth on, until they turned 17/18 ( i forget the age) and can get 4 wheels toget about.

This also means that you get the mentality amongst car drivers to register and accommodate bikers, because most have been there in the youth. You don't see gridlocked cars nudging over to let the bike through gap on the North Circular the way you do on the Periph'

So Draconian laws or not, the biking industry in France is more resilient to change, IMO.

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Adventure: it's an experience, not a style!
(so ride what you like, but ride it somewhere new!)

I know of a training school whose way round this is to tell the customer that they are a liability and shouldn't put in for the CBT again! They don't tell the customer they can come back so they can get as many paying customers through as possible.

The French system makes sense, but will never happen here. 40 hours continuous assessment is pretty intense compared to most training schools in the UK saying they can get most people through with just 10 hours tuition. You've then got to ask, are riders in the UK actually being taught to ride or just being taught to pass the test?

Don't you have to train them to pass the test? No one in their right mind would do a U-turn as done on the test, or give hand signals, or do half a dozen left-over ideas from the 1920's test. Unless the test becomes a lot more sensible you have to give even the good students the expected answers to some of the more crazy aspects.

Once you go down that route I imagine it's hard not to train to the test.

Andy

That won't happen. Look at the new (so-called) hazard avoidance test for example. Yes, we've all seen the ad on the TV where the car driver pulls out in front of the bike but what they've done with the test bears no realistic resemblance to that particular situation. Got to question the riding experience of the people who dream these ideas up.

That's what I'm getting at. You've got typically 10 hours of training that is specific to getting through the test, not real world riding. To my mind, what Alex described for the French system makes ours look ridiculous.

[quote=craig76;251373] Got to question the riding experience of the people who dream these ideas up.
/quote]

That's the problem if other branches of government are anything to go by. They'll form a comittee. One guy will know about bikes. The others won't give a stuff about anything except their own little world of finance or health and safety or working directives or whatever. The guy who says the result is *******s doesn't get on another comittee, you have to "respect" what the other clowns say even if it's just noise.

I used to test brake systems on trucks. No where in the EU does anyone measure the actual stopping distance for the simple reason the comittee's got bogged down, lost the plot and came up with a nice complex decel formula they finally all agreed to. The US regs read like they were written by one guy who knew his subject. They measure stopping distance.

Andy