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