Thunder Roads Magazine of Oklahoma/Arkansas November 2014 | Page 6

FEATURES 23RD ANNUAL MID-SOUTH M.I.L.E. Let’s talk a bit about the folks who work diligently and full time to protect our riding freedoms. We all throw a leg over, fly down the highways and byways feeling fairly secure that the road is going to be cleared of debris, the railroad tracks don’t buck us off our bikes and the construction zones are clearly marked of looming dangers ahead. If you think that this all happens because your Department of Transportation is so thoughtful about bikers that they never forget us, you’ve got a few things to learn from this article. There are far more dangers on the highway than we would ever recognize until it’s too late. In Arkansas, up in the North end of the state, there was a successful push by riders to get rid of ‘tar snakes’ (wiggly cracks in the asphalt filled with hot tar) along Hwy 62 after several riders had gone down causing injuries and death due to the instability of this type of patching. In Kansas, you will not find more than 8 miles of cable barriers, or lovingly called ‘cheese graders’, along their highway medians because the freedom fighters of that state went to bat with the Department of Transportation proving that they were not the best form of barriers for vehicles and that they caused more serious injury to motorcyclists )ѡ