Blustery wind, bouts of torrential rain, thunder and a lightning show didn’t keep women from showing up for the Toronto Rally for the Ride Home for the 2010 International Female Ride Day tonight.

The rally was organized and hosted by International Female Ride Day founder, Vicki Gray, aka Motoress, at the Keating Channel Pub on Villiers St. in Toronto. A former racer, instructor, coach, and writer, the Ontario native was sponsored by the likes of World Championship team Ten Kate Honda and Ducati during her racing years.

Gray’s now teaching at Canadian National Superbike Champion Michel Mercier’s FAST Riding School in Shannonville and has been tirelessly promoting the sport to women, working with local dealers to host women’s bike nights and other events.

Since inaugurating International Female Ride Day in 2007, Gray has been encouraging women to ride their motorcycles to work on this day. Here in Toronto, the skies have poured on us three out of those four years but women keep showing up on two wheels.

I’ve braved the rain on my bike every year until this one, when I (and a few others) wussed out and caged it to the celebration of the day.

But Vicki rode in, as did many other women, including one who rode all the way from Hamilton Ontario, which is almost an hour and a half away.

In previous years, women met in front of Princes Gates downtown before work, which made it difficult for some people to make it.

Because the celebration was after work today instead, this year probably would have been a huge gathering, had it not been for the weather.

Before drawing tickets for prizes being raffled off, Gray read us messages from women around the world who are now using this day every year to promote solidarity among other women who ride.

When I bought my first bike (a 1977 Honda CB125) in Montreal in 1979, I knew only one other woman in the city who rode: the wife of a British bike repair shop who happily rode a Triumph around town.

People kept telling me about another woman, who was (they said at the time) in her fifties and had been riding most of her life, but I never met her and always wondered if she was an urban legend.

So it’s been pretty amazing to witness the number of women who have joined the sport in recent years.

A women’s rider social group that started off with 20 members on GTAMotorcycle.com, Toronto’s largest chat board for motorcyclists, at the end of the last riding season grew to 80 strong over the winter.

We may still be only 13 percent of riders on two wheels, but we’re making inroads and are forming a community both locally in the GTA and online. I’ve been invited to join no fewer than 20 Facebook groups of women riders in the last year alone.

And I’ve met a growing number of women tearing up the track in the last few years, one of whom has started racing and another who’s gotten good enough we’re encouraging her to race. I used to celebrate the racing achievements of women I’ve never met and may never get to meet. Now I’m celebrating the racing achievements of women I run across in my own community.

Ride on, sisters!

Think you can safely drive and talk on your cell phone at the same time? Then you probably can’t. A new study shows that ‘Supertaskers’ who can drive and talk on phone are rare – only 2.5% of population can do it. Even more interesting, the people who *think* they can do it safely are usually the very ones who can’t, the study says:

This supports the results of the Driving Distraction experiment that RoadAwareness.ca organized in January. Click here to read an article I wrote about that for Yahoo! Canada.

This poor blog has been neglected over the last year. Not because I’ve lost interest in the sport (far from it) but because I’ve been getting somewhat involved in covering our four-wheeled cousins. I spent nine months editing the Autos Channel at Yahoo! Canada, and was fascinated by the many ways the two interests intersect. Particularly when it comes to trying to predict and understand driver behaviour.

The latter, in particular, has become a keen area of study for me. After being hit twice two years ago, I was stunned at the attitudes of both motorists who hit me. The first, a man in a Pathfinder who sideswiped me in bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic, got out and carefully examined the side of his van before yelling at me (while I was still lying in the road) for not getting out of his way. He had, after all, signalled. Even in my stunned state (came perilously close to fracturing my pelvis that time- the hip pads in my gear saved me), I almost laughed at his sense of entitledness. And wondered where it came from. The driver in the car behind me, who was alert enough not to run me over, stopped his car and made sure I was OK before starting to direct traffic around us until the EMTs could arrive.

The second time, a woman zoomed out of a parking lot in downtown Toronto to dart across three lanes to cut me off. She took off without stopping. Miraculously, the fellow in the pickup truck behind me not only didn’t run over me when I went down, but chased after her and stopped her at the next red light to tell her she had to come back and give her insurance information. He said she told him “No I don’t,” before taking off again. He wrote down her plate number, came back to give it to me (along with his cell number) and asked if I wanted him to wait for police with me. I thought I was fine, so just thanked him (profusely!) and sent my white knight on his way. Found out later I’d broken a rib and a thumb.

Both times perfect strangers in cars behind me came to my rescue. And both times the person who’d hit me could have cared less that he or she (no gender divide, here) had almost ended another human being’s life. I will be writing more about that, and the possible underlying causes, later. Will also be writing about Ontario’s peculiar justice system, which seems to depend on insurance companies to penalize people for dangerous driving.

The penalties certainly aren’t a deterrent. The man in the Pathfinder was fined $200 for an illegal lane change. The woman who hit me and ran was fined $500 for leaving the scene of an accident.

Think about that. $200 and $500. And compare it to fines for speeding that endanger other drivers but don’t directly impact them.

Clearly, I have thoughts on that subject.

Stay tuned!