If you watch the video in the last article about the BSA 500

 He was starting the motorcycle with the left leg. I was trained to start motorcycles with my right leg which is different so I was interested to see someone starting a bike with their left leg because most right handed people are also right legged for starting motorcycles in the past so I got used to always starting a motorcycle with my right leg.

When I started riding motorcycles of all kinds starting with a 2 1/2 horsepower mini-bike around 1960 that was a hand pull starter like a lot of lawnmower engines even though it( the mini-bike) could do about 30 mph on a straightaway with a centrifugal clutch.

So, I started kick starting on the next thing I rode which was a Vespa owned by my father's friend. However, since I didn't know much about motorcycles or scooters except to stay alive on one, I burned out the clutch on the vespa because I needed to know more as a 12 year old. Then I often rented motorcycles because liability laws were very lax then even at 16 or 17 years old and no one wore helmets then at all in the late 1960s. However, even though it wasn't required in the 1970s I always wore a helmet because of a few near death experiences I had had on motorcycles and also I had seen a lot of dead people in motorcycle accidents and realized I needed to wear a helmet if I was going to ride at all.

Then over time people had sometimes both a kick starter and an electric starter on some bikes. But, the most recent bike I bought in 2009 was a KLR 650 dualsport which has only an electric starter which really surprised me it didn't also have a kick starter anymore.

It's true you really have to know what you are doing to use a kick starter at all because my old BSA 500 would often backfire and throw me over the handlebars if I wasn't ready for that. So, kick starters are a lot like hand cranks on Model T Fords (the ford ones often broke people's arms if the car backfired). Likewise, there are injuries often with kick starters on motorcycles too when the bike backfires and throws you over the handlebars.