agingrebel.com
There is a Presidential campaign going
on and the result of that, in about ten months, will be an inaugural
parade in Washington. The parade is always led by local motorcycle
police.
D.C. cops ride Harleys. Police in this
country have been riding Harleys since 1908. The D.C. cops have been
riding Harleys since 1917. The capitol has about 75 motorcycle cops and
40 of them are assigned to the Presidential Motor Unit. The Pridential
Unit has been around since 1921.
The motorcycle cops in the Capitol, as
opposed to most other northern cities, ride year round. Sometimes it
snows and sleets in D.C. So, every year around Columbus Day the local
motorcycle cops bolt sidecars onto their bikes for stability and leave
them on until spring. Pittsburgh police, who have been riding Harleys
since 1909, also ride year round and bolt on sidecars in the winter.
Since 1933, the inaugural parade every
four years in January has been led by police motorcycles with sidecars.
And therein lies a brief tale about the changing, American motorcycle
industry.
Void Warranty
Harley-Davidson hasn’t made sidecars for five years. It is worse than that. Peter Hermann of The Washington Post reports that District police do have spare sidecars but they are incompatible with newer Harleys.
D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier told the Post
“the problem now is finding enough older-model motorcycles with
hardware to accommodate the sidecars.” Lanier said, “the most
significant issue is that the automatic braking systems on the new
motorcycles is not compatible with the brakes on the sidecars.”
“We’re going to make what we have work as long as we possibly can,” she said.
There are about 20 United States Park
Police in Washington who ride Harleys in the winter and they face the
same dilemma as the District cops. They ride in the inaugural parade
too, and since they couldn’t get sidecars from Harley that force bought
six, custom made sidecars from a small Seattle company called Liberty
Motors.
The Post reports, “Liberty has
designed a bracket that can fit its sidecars onto the newer Harleys,”
and Harley has assured the Park Police “that if this is done correctly,
the alteration would not void the Harley warranty.”
Until less than three months ago, the
only sidecar motorcycles for sale in the United States were either Urals
( which started as a Soviet knock off of BMWs) and the current
nostalgia incarnation of Royal Enfields.
Then around Christmas, Victory
Motorcycles, a company that is headquartered in Medina, Minnesota and
makes its bikes in Spirit Lake, Iowa, announced it was going to
manufacture a police sidecar motorcycle.