Quote Originally Posted by Steve 0080 View Post
Trust me...it is beautiful.....but...I miss the point where you park your bike for 7-8 months???
Unless you live in the deserts or sub-arctic, no true biker parks their bike for 7-8 months. We're a lot colder than upstate NY, and mine sits from November to end of March, 5 months, and that's only because of ice and snow on the streets.
Cycle Canada magazine published an article about the riding season in the US. It was based on an algorithm from Aerostich. It's available as a poster from Aerostich for $10.
Aerostich's owner, Andy Goldfine, came up with his numbers based on " how much time and trouble one might reasonably take to dress for a typical urban-distance ride of up to 15 miles." Those assumptions were based on his riding experiences using Aerostich clothing and then applied to US Dep't of Agriculture temperature statistics. On the poster, Aerostich defines a rideable day as "a day when, with combinations of Aerostich gear, it's always fun, comfortable, safe , easy and practical to ride". That type of day would be when the average maximum high and the minimum average low is between 95F and 25F.

The bottom line here isn't about the where these numbers came from, it's about the comparison between comfort levels in riding around the US. Here's some interesting numbers:

San Francisco had the longest riding season at 365 days (duh!)
Phoenix had the shortest riding season at 214 days.
Others of interest were Bismarck ND at 222 days, Duluth MN (home of Aerostich) at 238 days, Austin TX at 229, Anchorage Alaska at 233, Tallahassee FL at 277, Los Angeles at 361, Chicago at 307, NYC at 327.

So, would you rather live in the hot desert, like Phoenix AZ (214), or more northerly states with real winter, like Chicago (307) if you owned a motorcycle?

Again, this is all one man's subjective description of a riding day. I'm just quoting what I read in the article, so don't flame me, flame Aerostich if you disagree.