Totally wrong place to put this, but found it interesting in Easterbrook's TMQB;
Sportsbikes: Colorful, trendy, deadly
Three prominent NFL players -- Kellen Winslow, Ben Roethlisberger and LaVar Arrington -- have been severely injured in recent motorcycles crashes. Is there some kind of peculiar motorcycle misuse happening in professional sports? No. What's going on is that NFL players are mirroring the social trend as a whole: which is that cars and trucks are causing steadily less harm, while motorcycles grow steadily more dangerous.
Check Table 3 of this report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, giving statistics for 2005, the most recent year for which stats are available. Fatal highway accidents are measured per 100 million vehicle miles traveled -- this takes into account ever-increasing driving distances and vehicle use. Measured per million miles traveled, the fatality rate for passenger cars has been declining for three decades on an almost annual basis, from 3.68 in 1975 to 1.55 in 2005, the 2005 number being the lowest fatality rate ever. The light truck (pickups and SUVs) fatality rate has declined steadily, from 4.23 in 1975 to 2.01 in 2005. In a trip using a car, SUV or pickup truck, your odds of dying today are less than half what they were in 1975. Now look at the motorcycle numbers. After declining till the early 1990s, the motorcycle fatality rate has begun to skyrocket -- from 21.43 in 1997 to 43.22 in 2005. Today a motorcycle rider is twice as likely to die in an accident as a decade ago.
What has happened? Over recent decades cars, SUVs and pickups have added airbags, ABS and impact-management engineering, making them safer; while the craze for colorful but overpowered sportsbikes has arrived, making motorcycles more dangerous. Today's sportsbikes not only have a higher horsepower-to-weight ratio than cars, they have more horsepower per weight than airplanes! The sportsbike Roethlisberger nearly died on last year weighed 478 pounds and possessed a 160-horsepower engine -- five times the horsepower-to-weight ratio of a Cessna 172. The ZX-14 sportsbike Arrington nearly died on this year weighed 474 pounds and possessed an even more powerful 187-horsepower engine -- six times the horsepower-to-weight ratio of the Cessna.
Kawasaki lists every technical detail of the ZX-14 except the horsepower -- which is the number sportsbike lovers are most interested in, but which if published would make the company seem socially irresponsible. And while horsepower keeps rising in sportsbikes, bike racing and X-Game-style events have popularized one-wheel riding and other risky maneuvers that increase road deaths. If the fatality rate of cars had doubled in just 10 years, this would be a national outrage. How come no one seems to care or even notice that motorcycle fatality rates have doubled in a decade? Some 4,655 Americans died in motorcycle crashes in 2005, yet the mainstream media say little, and Congress has taken no action to impose horsepower limits or safety standards on sportsbikes.
Yes, people who get on ridiculously overpowered bikes know they are taking a risk -- but this doesn't make their action purely a private decision, as bike proponents like to say. Someone who is seriously injured in a motorcycle crash might cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in treatment costs to taxpayers, or raise the premiums paid by others in his insurance group; someone who dies in a sportsbike crash has not just committed a private blunder, but initiated a lifetime of sorrow for friends and loved ones.
Perhaps a person who has passed a rigorous motorcycle safety course taught by a certified instructor should be allowed to operate a powerful sportsbike on public roads. But a standard motorcycle operator's license -- and LaVar Arrington did not even have one of those -- is hardly sufficient for operating a device with six times the power-to-weight ratio of an airplane.
Just think about the big number, the fatality rate. Right now for motorcycles the fatality rate is 43.22, compared to 1.55 for cars -- which means you are 28 times more likely to die riding a sportsbike than sitting inside a car. If nothing else, NFL and other professional sports contracts should ban professional athletes from riding sportsbikes: Both to protect the clubs' investments in players, and to prevent athletes from making sportsbikes seem cool when the reality is they are deadly.
While we're at it, pro sports contracts should also forbid athletes from driving overpowered exotic sports cars. The Lamborghini Murcielago that Bears linebacker Lance Briggs allegedly spun out on the Edens Expressway in Chicago last week has a preposterous 632-horsepower engine, and we've seen the evidence that Briggs was unable to control that much power. But he survived because he was in a car, not on a bike: the car had safety systems, including automated rollover bars that extended around Briggs when the car's computer detected impending loss of control. Owing to their much lower weights, the sportsbikes Winslow, Roethlisberger and Arrington wiped out on possessed roughly double the power-to-weight ratios of the Lamborghini -- yet offered their riders little protection.
