The Journal Times out of Racine, WI, has a question & answer section in its newspaper, and today's question is why motorcycles don't have to pay to use public parking garages.

Here's the answer...

The answer is pretty simple. Motorcycles aren't able to use the parking gates on the outside of the garages, Eeg said. The gates are triggered by a metal sensor that raises and lowers the bar.

Motorcycles don't have enough metal, so if one tried to go through there's a chance they'd get hit by the bar as it came down.

Very true!

I've had this happen to me. I was at the airport in Reno, NV, parking my Ultra Classic in the parking garage. You have to pull up to the ticket machine, pull out the ticket, which causes the arm to raise. Except as soon as the arm raised up, it came right back down, and right on to my head!

Fortunately, my helmet saved me. But the arm actually fell off of its brace, and went "CLANG" on the concrete. I just continued into the parking garage.

Labels: Parking