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It's Really Not Proper to Say This But...
I wrote a letter to the AMA a few years back when the fatalitiy rate started to skyrocket after years of steady decline. The gist of the letter was that the sudden increase correlated with the sudden popularity of sport bikes among urban youth. Of course the AMA never responded, they no doubt figured I was some sort of bigot.
But I live in a predominantly hispanic/black neighborhood, and it's pretty clear that an awful lot of those kids are buying screamy race bikes, and riding them awfully fast in places where people ought not to be going fast. The latest trend is to wear a full-face helmet half off, where it will do no good.
I could go into a bunch of psychological rambling about why urban minority kids are at unusually high risk, but let's just leave it with saying that any trend that injects a lot of young people into the riding population is going to raise accident and fataliity rates. For many years the riding population was aging (I helped!) and getting safer. Now it's not, and it's not.
Urban minority youth favor a certain style of bike, and that style of bike is seeing a lot higher proportion of accidents. But it is kind of dumb to blame the bikes.
-jimc
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