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...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 responded with a tough new anti-speeding law - and law-enforcement officials say crotch rockets are a prime contributor. They worry the problem will get worse in the bad economy, since motorcycles (which most riders buy new but end up tinkering with to generate more power) are a lot cheaper than cars. (See pictures of the evolution...
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...
...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 It doesn't help that Florida repealed a mandatory helmet law for motorcyclists a decade ago.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...
...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 limits...
...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...