Got an email an hour ago from an old and dear friend back east. She'd seen what were apparently the most recently released traffic safety statistics from the DoT. She forwarded this line from the report:
"Motorcycle fatalities grew nearly 8 percent last year to 4,008, the first time it has topped more than 4,000 deaths since 1987. Motorcycle deaths have increased seven years in a row."
Then after an actually very nicely worded comment about my ancestry she finished by saying "so just be careful on that damned machine you ride so much."
Don't you just love it when the government goes out of it's way to both inform frighten and unnecessarily frighten the populous with incomplete data all at the same time? I'll gladly grant the numbers. The DoT actually does a pretty good job of tallying all forms of road kill. But the raw number by itself doesn't mean squat.
It could mean, for example, that on average we're all just getting older, more senile, our reaction times are slowing down and, basically, we're a greater hazard to ourselves than we ever used to be. But it could also mean that bike popularity in general is up so miles driven are up so, of course, deaths will be up. And it could also mean that advertising is beginning to work so a lot of new riders are on the street and they are killing themselves in greater numbers than the prior (older and more experienced) cohort used to do. Without giving the rest of the story the bare fact of "more deaths" is a chimera, meaningless as a basis for either comparison or analysis.
Ok, vent mode = off..............