Will you both please go back to what I wrote in the first place? If I run a 39 year old bike with none of the wires exchanged, with 3 Ohm coils (a mistake) a 60 Watts halogen, the rest standard, apart from the Voxbell horns that draw almost 10 Amps and every time return with a better charged battery than I took of with, why can't others? That must have to do with the riding you do and my personal goal is to avoid traffic lights and city traffic as much as possible. Whenever I meet too many traffic lights, I simply switch the lights off whilst waiting.
But why so sensitive when somebody calls those running lights 'silly'? Can you or the US legislators produce any report that show those lights help improve safety? And if that would be the case, why is it the rest of the western world hasn't seen 'the light' of all the extra lights on bikes, cars and trucks? My goodness, if you stand at the side of an US highway, it's one exuberant Christmas tree passing after the other, notably trucks. All those lights are not functional, come on, it's show-off. What improved safety a lot is: belts, helmets and roundabouts. And a good headlight ofcourse and that's not the miserable headlight US models came equipped with.
Much to my surprise I've come to the conclusion that contrary to what people in Europe think Americans don't travel that long distances at all, not on motorcycles. I've found enough proof of that in this forum and in my travels in the US. I've never calculated how many km we did on our Wing in 1989, but it must have been way over 10K. We learned that the average American worker has two weeks vacation only, where in our tiny country you start with four weeks. Every time somebody in this forum announces he'll do a similar trip we did, he is wished well and receives lots of advice of what to bring, etc, etc. Seriously, come on!
