General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

I think the bike thing depends on what age you are, in that us circa 60yr olds were part of the 'ped' generation, that was because the British motor cycle scene, post war and up until the Japanese started to sell their bikes in this country in the 1960s was very different to what emerged in the 1970s

First of all I think that British bikes of the 1950s and 60s and what was left of them in the 1970s were horrible, they were noisy, hard to ride, the brakes were crap, they were unreliable, expensive etc, and they looked horrible, and you would meet British bikers with their foot in plaster, when as they would say I was kicking me bike up, and it kicked me back
But yoo had the die hard British bikers, they hated the Jap bikes with a passion.

Also in 1960s and 70s they brought in new regulations, in 1971 they raised from 16 to 17 the age you had to be, to be able to ride a motorcycle, but remember that before that the choice of bikes those 16yr old had was limited to those horrible British bikes.


So the Japanese entered the British market in the 1960s and by the 1970s they were manufacturing beautiful bikes, they were eye candy, and far far more advanced than British bikes, and the new age restrictions meant that 16yr olds could only drive mopeds, so the Japanese bent the moped regulations as far has they could, and made the 'super peds' amusing to older bikers, but heaven for 16yr olds

In 1977 the government bent the regulations back, and limited 'peds' to 30mph and that killed off the peds

The Jap bikes were getting faster and faster, and the first true 100mph 250 emerged in the late 1970s the Suzuki X7 and a lot of the 'ped' generation had grown up into the 250 generation, they had never bothered to have motorcycle training and take their tests, there was back then the RAC-ACU training scheme, but what happened was that these 250 riders on L-Plates started getting killed, because of the lack of motorcycle training, and the increase in speed of the 250s and so there was a drastic change in the way that motorcycle riders were licensed, and the way they had to take a test within a period of time, and they halved the capacity of the bikes they could ride down to 125cc and I think that these new regulations killed off a lot of the motorcycle riding in the early 1980s the young uns learned to drive a car instead

Motor Cycle Regulation History