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MSF Shifts Training Focus: 40% More Perception Content, 30% More Cornering

The Motorcycle Safety Foundation updated its Basic RiderCourse curriculum in 2026 with a fundamental shift in what new riders spend their time learning. The revised program adds approximately 40 percent more content on rider perception and seeking escape paths, approximately 15 percent more practice time for swerving and collision avoidance, and approximately 30 percent more classroom and range instruction on negotiating curves and cornering. Those are not curriculum tweaks. They are a recognition that the mechanical skills a rider drills on a closed range — clutch, throttle, balance — are only part of what keeps someone upright when the road opens up in front of them. The updated BRC now emphasizes rider behavior, risk awareness, and emergency responses in real-world traffic, and it makes the MSF Basic eCourse mandatory before a student steps onto the range instead of optional. This shift matters because it acknowledges a gap the training sector has avoided naming clearly for years: r...
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Traffic Compression Isn't a Navigation Problem - It's a Discipline Problem

Balloon Fiesta started this morning. For the next nine days, nearly a million visitors will compress into one corridor during the two-hour window when most riders are heading to work. I-25 northbound between downtown and Paseo del Norte becomes a parking lot. Merge points you rode through on autopilot yesterday now have unfamiliar drivers making last-second lane changes. Traffic that normally flows at highway speed compresses into stop-and-go queues. Most riders treat event traffic as a navigation problem — find the alternate route, leave earlier, avoid the corridor entirely. That works when you can reroute. But when you cannot — when your commute crosses the compression zone, when the event runs for days, when the alternate adds an hour you do not have — navigation does not solve it. The answer is discipline: the mental and mechanical skills that let you ride compression on your own terms instead of being carried by it. What Changes From the Saddle Event traffic is not heavy traffic. ...
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Balloon Fiesta Starts Today: What a Million Visitors Do to Your Morning Commute

Balloon Fiesta Starts Today: What a Million Visitors Do to Your Morning Commute The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta begins this morning and runs through October 11. Nearly one million visitors will arrive over the next nine days, and the single largest traffic impact lands precisely when most riders are heading to work: the mass ascensions between 6:00 and 8:00 AM. If your morning commute uses I-25 northbound anywhere between downtown and Paseo del Norte, today is the day the route changes. The construction moratorium that has been active since September 26 means major arterials are clearer than usual — no active lane closures at Roy Avenue and Tramway, Osuna Road, or 2nd Street, and Old Town and Uptown routes are open — but event traffic more than offsets that improvement. The New Mexico Department of Transportation opened all three lanes in each direction on I-25 for the Fiesta starting tomorrow (October 4), but today riders face the pre-event surge on whatever lanes are...
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Binary Inputs: The Pattern Behind the Grab and the Lunge

There is a control failure mode common enough that it has a name in the curriculum: binary inputs . Abrupt clutch release. Grabby braking. On-or-off throttle. The machine lurches, the bike jerks forward or dives nose-down, and the rider corrects with another sudden input that makes it worse. The curriculum names the pattern rather than the rider, which is exactly the point. Binary inputs are not a character flaw — they are a learnable habit that can be unlearned. And fixing them transforms riding from a constant fight with the bike into smooth command. What binary inputs look like The clutch comes out in one motion instead of progressively, and the bike either bogs or lunges. Or the lever is released smoothly but the throttle snaps open at the same moment, producing a wheelie threat or a front-end hop. At a stop, the brake lever gets grabbed instead of squeezed — the suspension dives, the bike pitches, and in the final foot the bike wobbles because the geometry has been upset. The rear...
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When Backing Out of a Parking Spot Can Cost You Your Rear Brake

KTM North America issued a stop-ride safety recall on August 20, 2026 affecting 21,040 dual-sport motorcycles in the United States (CPSC recall 26-710, https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2026/KTM-North-America-Recalls-Off-Road-Motorcycles-Due-to-Risk-of-Serious-Injury-or-Death-from-Crash-Hazard ): 2022–2024 Husqvarna FE 501S, 2022–2024 Husqvarna FE 350S, 2024 GasGas ES 500, 2024 GasGas ES 350, and additional models from 2021–2024. The rear brake caliper primary pin casting area can crack or break during backward rolling — the exact maneuver you use every time you back out of a parking space or reposition the bike in your garage. Here is what fails. The caliper bracket that holds the rear brake caliper to the swingarm is too narrow on the affected models: 6.5mm instead of the 10.5mm width KTM implemented on 2025 and later bikes. When you roll the bike backward with the rear brake applied — which is how most riders control a backing maneuver — that narrow bracket flexes. Over time, the casting...
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The Parking Lot Is Harder Than the Highway

Seventy miles per hour on I-25 with traffic moving smoothly around you feels manageable. Three miles per hour in a crowded parking lot, threading between reversing SUVs and pedestrians pushing shopping carts, with six inches of clearance on either side, feels like chaos. The speed that should be easier — the one where consequences are softest and time feels slowest — is the one that exposes every gap in low-speed control. That is not a personal failing. The parking lot is objectively harder than the highway. It asks for precision the highway never does, and most riders never train for it deliberately because parking lots are treated as the place riding hasn't started yet. The Mañana Moto curriculum trains them as a real environment — pedestrians, reversing vehicles, tight stalls, sudden stops — because three mph with no margin is its own kind of difficult. What Makes Low-Speed Riding Hard At highway speed, the bike is gyroscopically stable. The spinning wheels and forward momentum ...
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October's Surface - Reading the Post-Monsoon Road

The monsoon season is over. The afternoon thunderstorm window that ran from late June through September 30 is closed for the year, but what monsoon left behind stays on the road for weeks. October's surface is post-storm debris layered over four months of sediment transport, and it reads differently than the surface you were riding in June. What Changes During monsoon, afternoon storms drop water faster than the roadway drains it. Water moves across pavement, carrying sand, gravel, and organic material from the shoulders and the surrounding terrain. When it drains or evaporates, that material stays where the water deposited it - typically at pavement edges, in low spots, and at the inside radius of curves. Four months of that accumulation is now baked onto the road. Without the daily flushing action of afternoon rain, it compounds. Dust settles on top of it. Morning dew or an overnight sprinkle puts a moisture layer underneath without washing anything away. A surface that looked cl...
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