Word: bikes
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Beyond the risk to the bikers, drivers sharing the road with the daredevils are also in peril, law-enforcement officials say. Drivers can change lanes having no idea that a racing bike is about to appear - and tragedy can easily strike. At first, the buzzing of an approaching high-speed motorcycle sounds like a gnat near your ear, then it suddenly becomes loud and threatening. Segui remembers a woman who heard that noise and jerked her steering wheel in the opposite direction, jumping a curb and crashing...
Lopez-Cantera believes the problem will continue until the racing-bike industry takes steps to limit who can buy the bikes. A recent effort to force buyers to have a license expressly for motorcycles before purchasing a racing bike, for example, was successfully stifled in large part by industry lobbyists. "I don't see where the industry can control the consumer," says Carrington Lloyd III, who owns Greater Yamaha in West Palm Beach and says he supports the law. "You can feed anybody as much knowledge as you want, but they're going to do what they want...
Lloyd still acknowledges the lure of the racing bike. And he says that if he sells 60 of the bikes in a month, he knows that 10 to 15 of those will be involved in a crash, with the owners coming in to his business for repairs - or worse, with new widows or other bereaved family members wanting to sell the ill-fated bikes for parts. "You're buying that bike for that reason - somebody's not coming in and buying a sports bike to go putt around town," he says. But if the bikers won't rein themselves...
...change this harmful mindset? The answer goes back to childhood. The expectation for girls in early youth is to behave in a way that minimizes risk; girls are not often praised for successfully navigating a bike down a mountain or jumping off a swing and landing on her feet. We must change the tacit expectations girls encounter in childhood, or our daughters will irrevocably internalize the risk-averse mentality that so many of us subconsciously face even today...
...full months, no matter how bad the back pain, how sickening the smell of raw meat or how crippling the fatigue. Thompson succeeds--mostly. He gets found out and fired from the chicken plant a week before his self-imposed deadline and hangs up his delivery bike after seven weeks of risking his life in New York City traffic. Therein lies perhaps the only blemish on the book's premise: Thompson has the luxury to quit...