Supporters of the idea seemed to consist for the most part of folks that either sold (loud) aftermarket pipes, or folks who road bikes with loud(er) aftermarket pipes. Yet these same folks could not provide any hard facts to back up their claim, the best they could come up with were rather vague statements about how if they make lots of noise "(car drivers) are sure as heck gonna hear me!" or claims that loud pipes give the other motorists ample warning of the approaching biker as they cruise up from behind. These statements seem to presuppose several assumptions that; 1) the other driver is not only going to hear the biker, but take the time to identify their actual location, 2) drivers in general rely on sound as much as vision to locate and avoid obstacles (in this case the motorcyclist), 3) the other driver gives enough of a damn about motorcyclists in the first place to do (1) and (2) above, and 4) that sounds emanating from a motorcycle's exhaust travel equally in all directions from the source. These seem, to me, to be a rather risky set of suppositions with little, if any, basis in fact. It is well documented that vision plays a much bigger role in operator safety than sound. Think about the last time you heard a siren, were you able to identify the location of the approaching vehicle by the sound alone or did you not in fact have to wait to make visual contact with it before you could precisely identify its location relative to you? Do proponents of loud pipes really believe that other motorists are going to concentrate on locating the approaching motorcycle and keep it in view till it is well past them and out of harms way? Where is the evidence to support such a claim?
An article in the Concord Monitor (Sunday, October, 2002, by Sarah M. Earle) quotes one mechanic at a local Concord bike shop as stating that the other driver cut off 80% of his customers who had been involved in an accident. Sounds reasonable and that is indeed what the Hurt report found in it's study. Unfortunately he then goes on to state that this justifies his customers modifying their exhaust (to something louder) to ensure that they will be noticed in the future. He further states that changing out the exhaust is done purely for safety reasons. I'm sorry, but I just don't believe that, nor do I really believe he does either. That sounds too much like an attempt to justify something that's done for entirely different reasons, i.e. they just like the louder sound.
On the other hand The American Motorcyclist Association, The Hurt Report, and many riders and bikers themselves seemed to be of the opposite opinion. The AMA has gone so far as to make a policy statement on the issue which reads " The [AMA] believes that few other factors contribute more to misunderstanding and prejudice against the motorcycling community than excessively noisy motorcycles". They then go on to say, "Shifting blame and failing to adopt responsible policies on a voluntary basis can only result in greater prejudice and discrimination against motorcycling. The consequences of continuing to ignore this issue will likely result in excessively rigorous state and federal standards, ……[and] abusive enforcement of current laws and other solutions undesirable to riders and the motorcycle industry"
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