Word: floridas
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...miles away, down the road, a Florida Highway Patrol trooper sees him from an overpass and gives chase. Once the rider glimpses the trooper, he maxes out at a stupefying 186 m.p.h., before exiting I-95, taking a spill and getting caught. "Do you need fire-rescue before you go to jail?" Trooper Y. Segui asks him. "No, no I'm fine," the rider says. (See pictures of the world's most expensive motorcycles...
...rules-averse Florida didn't already have some of the nation's most dangerous drivers - more pedestrians are killed there each year than in any other state - now it's dealing with the rising popularity of Mad Max-like high-speed motorcycles. The rogue bikes are a particular bane in South Florida, where the weather is warm year-round and many of the roads are so flat and straightaway that they can easily be turned into a racetrack. Florida motorcycle crashes have been up in recent years - from 8,990 in 2006 to 9,618 in 2008, when state legislators...
...accidents because helmets, shoes and body parts are thrown everywhere, he said. "I've never seen a crash at speeds higher than 100 that people have walked away from," he said. "I don't even like talking about it. It is graphic, graphic, graphic." It doesn't help that Florida repealed a mandatory helmet law for motorcyclists a decade ago. There were more than 500 Florida motorcyclist deaths in 2008 - compared with 22 in 1999, the year before the law was shelved. (See pictures of the world's most expensive motorcycles...
...years ago the Florida legislature imposed a $1,000 fine for anyone caught driving 50 m.p.h. or more above the speed limit. The second violation results in a $2,500 penalty, with the driver's or rider's license revoked for a year; a third means $5,000 and loss of the license for 10 years. State representative Carlos Lopez-Cantera, a Miami Republican who sponsored the bill, can't say yet whether the measure has worked. But he concedes that for many crotch-rocket riders, "there's no law that's going to stop them from lavishly exceeding speed...
Highway troopers can only do so much, since chasing crotch rockets on busy roads and highways is often not an option. "The supervisor has to weigh every possible liability that he can before he allows that to continue on," says Florida Highway Patrol spokesman Lieutenant Tim Frith of Palm Beach County. He says the common speed of racing bikes there is 120 to 130 m.p.h. Lieutenant Alex Annunziato of the highway patrol in Miami says they have busted repeat violators by flying helicopters and tracking the bikes until they stop. "The problem is that takes a lot of resources...