Word: riders
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...rider hops on his racing motorcycle and gets on Interstate 95 from Hollywood Boulevard, south of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., at 2 a.m. A mere six seconds later, he's already doing 95 m.p.h., headed for Miami. About 10 seconds after that he's at video-game velocity - 175 m.p.h., almost triple the speed limit - and the highway's dashed lane markers are blurred solid. He slows down occasionally to pop wheelies before resuming his screaming pace...
...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...
That extraordinary scene, captured last year by the rider's own helmet-mounted camera - the video was confiscated as evidence and made public by authorities - is even more extraordinary because it actually ended with an arrest. Usually, the police are no match for the racing bikes - known on the street as "crotch rockets...
...trend is also fueled - as the video confiscated by the highway patrol suggests - by an apparent competition among riders to post the wildest speed and stunt videos on YouTube. And if it involves successfully eluding the police, all the better. "The more cops that are on you, the better rider you have to be to get away," Segui says. "If you get caught, you're not a great rider." In the case of the arrest that Segui made, even getting thrown in jail didn't seem to matter to the 19-year-old rider, who did not have a driver...
...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...