When Porsche Taylor bought her first motorcycle, she had never taken a lesson. She didn't have her motorcycle license, and the helmet she wore was one size too big. But her cousin was into bikes and she started to see the appeal of driving them herself. "I rode with him on the back, but I didn't really enjoy being a passenger," Taylor says. "I enjoyed riding." One corporate bonus and a Craigslist purchase later, Taylor's cousin showed her how to do a few figure eights in a parking lot on her new bike. In that moment, she became a motorcyclist. "Once I started, I never looked back."
Taylor, who is now the founder of Black Girls Ride, an online motorcycle magazine and community launched in 2011, says her story is like that of so many women motorcycle riders—of which there are a growing number. Women make up 20 percent of motorcyclists, a figure that has doubled in the past decade alone, according to a study by the Motorcycle Industry Council. That number is even larger in some communities of color. Forty one percent of Latinx motorcyclists are women, and 53 percent of Black motorcyclists are women, according to a 2018 MRI-Simmons survey. It's hard to pinpoint why, exactly, the number of female motorcyclists is growing, though Taylor believes it's the intersection of a latent interest, meeting a growing sense of inclusivity in the motorcycling world (no doubt, forged by communities like hers).
Read full story at: CNTraveler.com (https://www.cntraveler.com/story/why-these-women-are-crossing-the-country-by-motorcycle)