Tim Luckhurst: The eurocrats should get on their bikes

Xenophobic motorcyclists exist, but they are usually folks who have not yet taken their bikes across the channel. Outings on French roads create a favourable impression. Discovering that the Spanish approve of bikes and Italians adore them can melt the most visceral Europhobia. Sadly the European Commission seems determined to eradicate positive sentiments with its snappily titled Third Driving Licence Directive.

When the man considered the founder of the European community, Jean Monnet, warned "Europe has never existed... One must genuinely create [it]," he did not mean it like this. Monnet was an economist. His project was designed to create prosperity for all. There is no evidence that motorcycle manufacturers were excluded. But this directive will exclude them. It has the capacity to slash the European market for bikes by 50 per cent within 12 months of its proposed implementation in 2011. Unamended it will change motorcycling from a cheap, environmentally friendly means of transport to an expensive hobby, and make it less safe as well.

The silliest proposal is that the minimum age for riding bikes larger than 125cc should be raised from 17 to 19. This seems designed to increase student debt and persecute low earners while increasing pollution. Tens of thousands of young Europeans commute on bikes. For any who need to travel more than a few miles a new generation of quick middleweight scooters has made life better. The directive condemns them to rattling along in the gutter on flimsy machinery.

It seems inconceivable that any of the Eurocrats responsible has ever ridden a small motorcycle. If they had they would know how alarmingly vulnerable their riders are. Experienced motorcyclists avoid danger by accelerating into gaps, but too little power makes that impossible. The number of French, Spanish and Italian 16-year-olds injured in moped accidents proves it. These young riders need more power, not less: restricting them to gutless machinery has already proved a grave mistake. I would not contemplate commuting into London, Paris, or Rome on anything smaller than a 250. It is preposterous to insist that my children should.

The delusion that less power means more safety stems from applying a four-wheeled mentality to two-wheelers without pausing to think. The same thoughtlessness is even more vivid in the suggestion that direct access to large, powerful motorcycles should be restricted to people aged above 24 (the current age is 21). The European Commission may be full of superhumans whose reaction speeds improve as they get older, but the simple truth is that fast, sports motorcycles belong in young hands. Paramedics too often unzip blood-soaked leathers to discover a 50-year-old's beer belly within.

Beyond these proposals to keep motorcycles away from people who cannot afford cars and enjoy the freedom of two wheels, the directive is bluntly repressive. It wants new riders to take a series of tests, two years apart, as they progress between bikes of different engine sizes. Compulsory training will be imposed between tests.

Treating car drivers this badly would arouse fury. Manufacturers would be incensed at the threat to their markets. National governments would condemn the proposals as anathema to growth. But British ministers have not squeaked. They should veto the directive because, even if the freedom and environmental virtue of motorcycling means nothing, its economic value should. The future of mass car manufacturing may be Chinese and Korean but Aprilia, BMW, Ducati, Moto Guzzi, MZ, Peugeot, Piaggio and Vespa are not. Triumph, which employs more than 1,000 workers in Leicestershire, is the last remaining UK-owned volume producer of motor vehicles. That should count in Downing Street.

motoring@independent.co.uk