re: People on motorcycles are so dumb

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They are doing that for a valid reason. Cars are fine sitting in a traffic jam idiling because they're liquid cooled. Most motorcycles are air cooled and if you sit and idle for too long you'll overheat your engine.

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Actually, the air cooled engines are engineered to take the heat. They don't make near the specific output as a liquid cooled bike, and they have fins on the engines to help transfer the heat to air. Add oil jets squirting the undersides of the pistons and other engineering devices like that to help get the heat out the engine, and you don't have a problem.

What it most effects is the high powered liquid cooled bikes, like a Hayabusa just for instance. The engines are large in displacement and making a lot of specific energy which generates a lot of heat, yet they have to be packaged within plastic body work, which holds in heat itself. It's hard to get enough surface area in a radiator in those bikes to dissipate all that heat they make when sitting still, especially in a hot environment. There are fixes for the problem, like adding an extra fan or using a 'water wetter' like Red Line, but when you've been stuck in 90+ deg heat Perkins or Essen and your bike is puking it's coolant all over your boots, you better get some air moving through the radiator's coils or you're looking at a real problem.

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And you're as stupid as he is if you think an air cooled engine won't overheat if you sit and idle too long

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I currently own both air and liquid cooled motorcycles, and I'd much rather ride the old KZ750 in town than the 'Busa.

I have idled hundreds if not thousands of air cooled motorcycles for long periods of time in August in Louisiana and have never had the first problem.