This opinion story was originally printed in CarBuyer #228, but since then motorcycle COE prices have skyrocketed to nearly $5,000 – and look set to go even higher.

Motorcycles continue to be one of the most misunderstood forms of transport/leisure around. One story, by ex-Animals guitaris Eric Burdon, has Steve McQueen, the King Of Cool himself, turning up at a fancy Hollywood eatery on a bike with his wife on pillion, only to be turned away because of their mode of transport. 

When faced with the topic, the first thing out of the mouth of a non-biker is either “I hate it when they try to squeeze around my car” or “I know a biker who got mangled/died horribly/castrated/defenestrated and basically the motorcycle itself got up and stabbed him in the face with a spoon.”

Thanks to two-percenters and motorcycle ‘outlaws’, bikers still have a bad rep, and it shows in how we’re treated – both by normal people and the authorities. But once you get past it (like everything else in the world), bikers are just regular, nice people. And motorcycling is in fact, one of the quickest, most convenient and cost-effective ways of getting around.

A study done by Piaggio in 2007 showed that increasing the mix of scooters from 10 percent to 20 percent in mid-town Manhattan resulted in an annual decrease in delay of 4.6-million hours per year, 26,000 tonnes less of CO2 emissions, and a fuel saving of more than 7-million litres. That’s the equivalent of removing 325,000 cows – and everyone knows cows are The New Evil – or 8,609 Corollas driving 20,000km.

A similar study by a Belgian consultancy showed that a 25-percent shift from cars to bikes eliminated congestion entirely.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see why. Peek at the cars around you at rush hour – most of them contain a single person. Your average car is about 4.6 by 1.6-metres and weighs 1.3-tonnes or more. The biggest bike you can get, a full-dress tourer like a Honda Goldwing, is 2.6-metres long and 330kg. The metal-to-person-being-carried ratio is much, much less.

Or let me put it this way: Have you ever seen a non-crashed, non-ice cream guy motorcycle block traffic for any length of time? So the answer to why bikers are ‘always squeezing around your car’ is simply that your big, bulky car is in the way of efficiency.

Bikes don’t cause jams, yet the reduction in COE quotas have hit bikes very hard indeed. At the last round of COE bidding in October, the certificate price for a bike was at $4,412. A Cat A car cert, sold for $63,990.

That’s nothing, say car drivers. But let’s make this clear: Bikes aren’t cars.

Bike COE prices have never fluctuated as much as car certs, but this year saw a new record for two-wheelers. $4,412 is about 11 times as much as the low price of January 2006, which was $401. If you paid by the same proportion for a car, the Cat A COE would be $88,009.

Now we’ve mentioned in CarBuyer that ‘low’ (depending on your definition of low) COE prices may be a permanent pipe dream, but here’s the thing: Under the current quota system, out of every 100 bikes, 15 of them get turned into cars. That’s because Category E, which is basically the spillover category for Cat B alone, is made up of 15 percent every other quota.

So back to our imaginary rush hour sequence – if every 15 bikes that passed you suddenly metamorphosised into other cars, what would happen? Bingo. And while we’re on that line of thought , you can fit at least three bikes into the space a single car occupies, so why is the ERP charge for bikes half that of a car and not less?

It’s all bass-ackwards, given what you just heard about bikes and the fact that the COE system is supposed to reduce congestion and over-population of vehicles on the road.

But what if there are too many motorcycles on the road? Not going to happen any time soon. To compare, there’s less than a quarter bikes here compared to passenger cars – 144,307 versus 621,345.

And it’s not much easier in other aspects of ownership either. For instance, it’s not a regulation that motorcycle parking needs to be provided for with a new building, although car parks are. And if you ever thought modifying a car is tough in Singapore, modifying a bike is twice as bad because there are no clearly-defined regulations on it. I once asked an LTA official about this and was told to ‘follow the same rules as for cars’. At that point, I was too stunned to answer.

I’m under no illusion that high prices are just a passing phase of transport here in Singapore, but it would be nice for bikes to be treated as proper, first-world modes of transport rather than falling between the cracks. The numbers show that bikes can be beneficial to a crowded city like Singapore, if managed properly. It’s high time bikes received the proper management and laws they deserve.

READ MORE:

BMW R Nine T: The Best New Retro?
The Perfect Bike Jacket For Singapore’s Weather