The news so far; www.writetothem.com is a fantastic resource, and although they do warn you that missives sent through them might take a fortnight, it is going to be a while longer if the politicians you seek are on holiday. Doh.

Strangely, it was a representative of tory Nick Bourne who replied first (they need as much support as they can get);

"The Welsh Assembly Government has responsibility for maintaining and improving the trunk road network in Wales and for spending the proportion of the budget allocated to transport from the block grant received from Westminster.Details of current expenditure and programmes can be found by going to www.wales.gov.uk then clicking on the Welsh Assembly Government link. If you then click on Transport, this will provide links to the information you require Including the Wales Transport Strategy".

So, better than nothing, and a start, but not the answers that i had hoped for. Investigations will be resumed.

MEP Jonathan Davies, on the other hand, was at work and found time to respond to my email within 24 hours. Who says they do no work in Brussels...

"Thank you for your email regarding the Third European Directive on
Driver Licenses.

I am pleased to say that I, along with my colleagues in the British
Conservatives in the European Parliament wholeheartedly support your
position.

Our Conservative Transport spokesman, Mr Bradbourn has been working very
closely with the Motorcycle Association in amending the proposal to
reject the new provisions on gaining a motorcycle licence, such as
increased age limits and proposed changes to the test criteria on more
powerful bikes. We believe that the DVLA structure should remain in
place without overarching EU interference.

As you may know, the Third European Directive on Driver Licenses was
discussed at the December 2005 Transport council meeting in which no
agreement as reached. However, this does not mean that the threat of the
Directive has disappeared, and Mr Bradbourn will be submitting a
rejection notice to the entire proposal when it is referred back to
Parliament. Unfortunately Labour and Liberal Democrat MEPs are
supporting the Commission proposals.

Please do not hesitate to contact me on this or any other issue.

Jonathan Evans MEP (Wales)
Chairman of the Delegation for Relations with the U.S. "

I wrote back to him asking what could be done to forestall or oppose this legislation, also asking where I could find out more about the statistics compiled to support this directive.

With regard to the question of a German ban on motorcycles in certain areas, help was donated by Sloper of GBBikers.co.uk, who found some German motorcycle forums on which questions could be asked. The responses were, as expected, indicative of the use of supposition and dubious representation of the facts by the Police officer making the suggestion to ban biked from national parks;

" I don't think there is any parkland with a blanket ban for motorcycles while being open to cars. Besides, we don't have "national parks", at least nowhere near as many as the US of A. Those that we have, are generally open for MCs.

What we do have, are a few roads that are off-limits for MCs. Some were closed because local authorities considered the MC accident rate unacceptable. Some are closed on week-ends or at night to avoid excessive MC noise.

But in the end, MC bans are nothing I'd worry about when planning a MC trip through Germany. The percentage of closed roads is very, very low. Your chance of actually running into one of those is slim. In the unlikely case that you do come across one, you'll have to take a very small detour (usualy way less than 10 miles) and that's it.

Still worried? OK, here's two lists of MC bans in Germany:

http://www.jokko.de/html/deutsch/verkehrsinfos/strassensperrungen_fuer _motorraeder/strassensperrungen_fuer_motorraeder.php
http://www.bvdm.de/modules.php?name=Sperrungen "

" Of course, what Greg wrote ist perfectly right: Almost every public
road which is open for car use, may also be used with a motorbike.
There are only very few exceptions. Only if you ride a very small
motorcycle with 50cc engine, which runs slower than 60 kph, you may
not use Autobahns and other fast lanes."

"

There are some, very few roads in Germany, where motorcycle use is restricted on weekends, because these roads were crowded with motorbikes each weekend, and there were quite a few accidents due to that. But it does not really hit the point to say that motorcycles were banned in certain areas. We are talking about some single roads." It would be interesting to guage the public's response to shutting the Cat and Fiddle Pass on weekends, or stopping bikes from going to Snowdon in the summer. Even though car accidents vastly outweight bike accidents, and RAF jets cause significantly more noise when they (regularly) fly over all rural areas...