Is it correct that US states have different regulations regarding what's legal and what's not? I know the helmet regs vary and you need to know the rules as you cross from one state to the next. Same with lane splitting (fortunately totally legal here!). As has been pointed out, here in the UK a rear red reflector is legally required and without it an MOT should fail. Last month my brother had to buy a £1.50 stick-on reflector from the shop before the Triumph dealer would pass it. Generally though, most MOT inspectors aren't bothered. No other reflectors are required on a bike, so those nasty forks things can go. Octoberon mentioned number plates. I'm guilty of messing with the size, I've done it on every bike I've owned. I think the smallest I got down to was 4" x 5" and yes, that was a sports bike. The legal requirement is 7" x 9". At the moment my Triumph plate is 6" x 8", which sounds pointless but it really does make a difference to the way it looks. But I know some people will be thinking it's daft to risk a £100 fine. Fortunately my local MOT man is very pro-bikes and never mentions reflectors, number plates or loud exhausts, the last of which is pretty much discretionary (at the moment).
My Tiger came with two side reflectors on the factory pannier rails. But this was on a 2018 bike which didn't come with rails as standard, the 2017 models all came with rails so considered a permanent fixture. No doubt I had the leftover design from pre 2018 bikes. But why rear side reflectors in the first place? The first one fell of when the bike was 3 weeks old, never to be seen again, the other six months later. Three years later my rear reflector fell off, the way they attach is pitiful. We can legally have a small190 x 152mm (7.5" x 6") number plate in Ireland which suits a lot of bikes.
I would like to fit a tail-tidy and a smaller, more aesthetically pleasing number plate to my MV. It's very tempting but I don't want to draw unecessary attention. Having said that, I may do something and see what happens. Provided it's not completely taking the piss perhaps I don't need to worry too much. My other half's Streetfighter 848 came with a slightly smaller plate. At first glance I doubt most people would even notice. They stuck a small, round red reflector on it to comply with that MoT regulation, which is a bit ironic.
I'll be honest with you regarding my dodgy number plates. I got busted back in 2020. Covid lockdown was keeping most traffic off the roads but I had a legit reason for being out, I was getting one of the Hondas MOT'd. Two bike cops passed me in the opposite direction. I hadn't seen another vehicle on the road. I saw their brake lights come on, one did a U-turn and followed me along twisty country roads for half a mile before sticking on the flashing blues and pulling me over. I reckon he was just bored and had nothing better to do. He gave the bike the once-over, checked all my details via his radio. I was very polite and suitably deferential. Everything was, of course, spot on. He then declared that my number plate 'didn't conform'. I expected a warning and notification to get it sorted asap. But no, the bastard gave me a ticket and hence a £100 fine. Yes of course I was at fault and I hadn't got a leg to stand on, but as he obviously wasn't going to take back the ticket he'd just issued I decided to argue. Did he really need to do that? Wouldn't a warning have sufficed? Hadn't he got anything more useful to do? etc etc. No, of course it didn't make any difference, I just wanted him to know he'd lowered my opinion of traffic cops considerably. Naturally he couldn't give a toss. I did change my plate. It's now 6" x 8". Still not (quite) legal..but they say lightning never strikes twice!
An understandable level of irritation. I'd have been equally annoyed. I wonder if anyone else has been busted for their number plate here? If the stories come flooding in I may err more on the side of caution.
Yep, I was moving job and location. Had all my luggage on my old Tuono and was 10 miles from my destination. As I came round a roundabout there was a police BMW X5 in front of me. I was in no rush and fully loaded so sat behind them, they started to slow so I matched. They eventually got down to 35mph so I had no choice but to go past, as soon as I did the lights came on and they pulled me. As above was polite and helpful, one seemed ok but the other was clearly going to go for it......while writing the ticket started telling me about the fatal bike accident he had attended a few weeks previous. I did want to ask whether a small plate had contributed to the accident but didn't want to antagonise until he was done. He then asked me why I had removed the baffles on the exhausts, second guy rolled his eyes at that point. £100 later.......was a 7x5 plate on a tail tidy so from the height of the X5 he couldn't read the top line of the plate when close up They were clearly looking to pull me as they hadn't been behind me at any point to see my plate, just wanted me to pass so they could check the bike out and pull me
My two Hondas are grey imports, both nearly 30 years old. Their rear mudguards are part of the undertray that runs under the seat and has the red reflector attached, which juts out a bit, below the number plate. Japanese number plates are smaller than ours. So when these bikes came into this country the importers lopped off the red reflector to accommodate the larger UK plate. Consequently an 'uncut' undertray is a very rare thing and highly valued by owners of the NC35 and NC29, who want their bikes to be 100% original (yes, it's that OCD again). Last year, after many years of ownership, I found the Ark of the Covenant (so to speak). Not just one, but an uncut undertray for EACH bike! I paid £300 for the NC35 undertray. Bonkers? Probably. I have since seen a NOS one going for £600. So why am I rambling on about Honda undertrays? Well, in order to fit a full size UK plate I would need to (yes, you guessed it) lop off the reflector. Not a chance in hell! By the way, a 6" x 8" plate just squeezes in if I use spacers.
Wow. The things we take for granted in the US. Don't you just hate it when they take the "I'll be super nice about being a total dick" approach? So that guy didn't know your plate was non-spec until he pulled you over, or did he claim the plate was his reason? Cops here pretty much can't pull a vehicle over without "probable cause." You have to be doing something wrong. An improper plate would be such a thing. This can vary from location to location(city, state, etc) but overall a legal reason is required for them to target you. Of course LE here is absolutely rife with arrogant bullies who have no lives that simply LIVE to intrude into peoples' affairs and will just fabricate a reason to stop you… a favorite one is "improper lane change." They'll just lie and say that you did it 2 or 3 miles back and rely on you second guessing yourself. Believe it or not, a bogus broken tail light stop is another that is not unheard of. 99.99% of the time you won't actually inspect the light, nor will they typically let you. Once you drive off and the ticket is signed, you're in the system and have to prove things in court. They've pretty much won. These same thugs are typically looking for a reason to escalate the stop into an actual criminal offense too, and ideally an arrest. The "traffic stop" is just an excuse. These guys are definitely the exception and not the norm, let me make that perfectly clear, but they are prevalent enough for it to be a genuine concern of motorists at large. Prevalent enough that some kind of recording equipment like an aimable dash/handlebar cam is extremely advisable in this country to the point that you're foolish if you don't have one. Commercial vehicles here are another story. They can pretty much be spot checked at any time, but they are on public funded roads conducting business.
The cop said his reason for stopping me was because there had been a lot of bike thefts in the area and he was doing a spot check. They're set targets, or numbers of bookings, they are expected to make (although this is never admitted), so I guess I was just making up his score. Wrong place, wrong time. I don't understand how US cops can prevent you from checking your tail light if they're using that as a reason to pull you over. That would be the first thing I'd do.
That stop is pretty much a car thing, not a motorcycle thing. They can often prevent you from exiting your vehicle depending on the circumstances. One motorcycle specific persecution I've seen is stops for "improper eye protection." One dude I know had a 3/4 helmet and Aviator Glasses on(below). Cop claimed they were inadequate and slapped him with a $75-$100 ticket. Dude told me another biker rode by wearing Wayfarers but I guess those were OK. This was in a small coastal town in S.Florida, of which the S.Florida coast is a continuous chain of small municipalities, each with specific and often widely varying laws and regs, populated by upper class, well monied citizens, and with PD's that have nothing better to do other than fuck with people to generate revenue. Many are simply 1/2 mile long speed traps. Some of them are really bad. They have laws in place that profile certain demographics. Improperly installed registration stickers are another one.
It's pretty much the opposite here. If a car is pulled over the driver is usually asked to get out. If there's more than one occupant, sometimes at least one is put into the back of the police car (after being searched), while the cop sorts out their details. Never heard of anyone being pulled for improper eyewear. But we have plenty of those money-making speed traps.
Pulling people out of their cars, searching them, and detaining them in the cop car by default during traffic stops would almost certainly meet with SERIOUS political pushback here. Representatives in DC, the ACLU, NAACP(it would likely be seen as targeting minorities), and maybe even POTUS would get involved to name a handful.
I have slightly smaller plates on a couple of my bikes, both perfectly legible but not "full size". As well as minimum size, legal plates must also carry the plate suppliers name (can be the bike dealer) and stamped with the relevant BS number. I fancied a silver on black period plate for the Triumph but I think that would be a step too far. The smallest plate is on the dirt bike, still perfectly readable but dang! if it doesn't get covered in mud in the few metres of lane riding!
It is the very nature of government to push its boundaries. As long as our system is consistently upheld as per The Constitution/Bill of Rights, I'd definitely prefer our's. Therein lies the problem over here. US cops adhere to an unsung quota system as well. They get busted enforcing it fairly regularly but still deny that it's there.
I’d be very wary of using any kind of chemical or lighter fuel/petrol etc on matt paint when removing sticker residue. I removed all the warning stickers on mine by just warming them up with a hair dryer then gently peeling them off. There was no residue left, but you could see a feint outline where the sticker had been. I found just giving the area a wipe over with a damp chamois leather cleaned it all up nicely. I think the stickers are designed to be removed. One of them is for the running-in instructions. Why on earth would that be meant to stay on permanently!?
Rego sticker what's that we have done away with them. The reason They COST TOO MUCH to produce, they have to stock them ! You can register a vehicle for 1,3,6 or 12 months ! So they can't predict how many of each month that are required ! Any way the POLICE have onboard computers linked to the Motor Registration Board .. ! So by the time you have stopped , They KNOW everything about the vehicle and owner.
Same in the UK. Plod will know all about the bike and owner by the time they have a chat with you. As for rego sticker, sorry i don't have a scooby !!!
MotoMick. Welcome to the family. Do hit the upload a file button bottom right hand corner and show your bike of to the inmates. Joe
On helmets, not to my knowledge but I could be wrong. They just need to be DOT(Dept of Transportation) approved. Interesting enough when I had my Harley I had a non-DOT helmet for the vast majority of my time on it. Thing was like a single serving salad bowl. I just Googled "smallest non-legal motorcycle helmet" and everything I saw was bigger than the one I had. I called it "my yarmulke." As many tickets as I got on that bike… probably 8-10 to include the "improper eye protection," they never caught on to the helmet. I wish I'd kept it. Cut scene, a few years later, the State of Florida rescinded their helmet laws. You can bareback it there now. Several states allow this. Lane splitting definitely varies by state. In some it's perfectly legal, in some it's illegal. In some it's actually considered "not illegal," meaning there's just no law in place saying you can or you can't lane split. Weird huh? There are a few more draconian states that may scrutinize helmets, but overall a DOT approval is all you really need. Connecticut and Massachusetts come to mind. Those states are socialist nightmares to begin with that would regulate hair cuts and shoe laces if they could. I've never heard of any strict reflector enforcement in the US but there again, there very well could be some that do. My exposure to US riding is strictly in East Coat states. Well I guess we can afford them here. They're usually 2" x 1" and I've never heard of anything less than a 1 year duration. I actually have 2 year registrations on my vehicles- I keep them registered in Florida where they offer the 2 year option(I don't live in Florida but I maintain legal residency there). Most other states by far don't, it's 1 year or nothing. A lot of people, and in particular immigrants, don't apply the stickers correctly. They'll do it sideways or every year they'll use an empty corner of the tag to place their most recent sticker. You'll see plates with stickers going back four years in each corner, 5 if they slap one in the middle of the plate, which they WILL do. That's risking a stop. I've had cops tell me when they need to write up more tickets to meet their quotas they target those plates because they know they're likely to get them on 2 or 3 other infractions like no insurance, suspended license or "no seat belt," esp. if there appears to be a foreigner behind the wheel. Our blue boys have the onboard laptops as well, but as @beerkat pointed out, his guys passed him going the other way, turned around, and lit him up with the specific purpose to sniff his bike. They couldn't run his plate until they were at least turned around and closing distance a bit. On the books you can't do that for any reason in the US, but like I said, there are droves of cops who just do things their way and make up lies in order to persecute John Q Citizen. The advent of dash cams and to a certain extent chest cams have kept a lot of them in check but pretty much a couple days cannot go by here without you reading about cops getting jammed up by either their cameras, or their victim's camera, especially because commercial dash cam footage is all backed up on clouds now, whereas before the footage was stored on the device itself and had to be downloaded into a computer. Back then many a camera and cel phone would mysteriously go missing from the vehicle or the memory would be curiously deleted. They can't destroy that evidence anymore, and believe me when I tell you- they've tried. However bottom line a personally owned vehicle can't be pulled over in the US for the expressed purpose of a "routine safety inspection." One thing definitely I'll give UK cops and European cops in general is that they're much more even keeled and pleasant to deal with than in America. US cops are overall far more grumpy and disagreeable by nature. It's like they have a certain contempt for the public at large. Bobbies don't take things so personal out on the beat. They're far more diplomatic, even when the situations and encounters are heated. That tendency toward hostility and escalation here is IMO one of the reasons we have such a rift between LE and the public at large these days in the US. There are certainly exceptions to this in Europe(Paris cops are pretty snotty) but overall their demeanor is to be commended. When US cops are cool… they're SUPER cool. Problem is a good chunk of them are suspended in a perpetual state of spite.