Now sure if this has been posted yet, but here is an interesting article.
2theadvocate.com | News | Study: Sport bikes dangerous — Baton Rouge, LA
2theadvocate.com | News | Study: Sport bikes dangerous — Baton Rouge, LA
Study: Sport bikes dangerous
Speed, lack of training prove deadly for some riders
By JARED JANES, Advocate staff writer
Published: Jul 8, 2008
Stephanie Futrell called her mother a few hours before midnight June 23 to tell her she would be home within an hour. Then she told her friends she was taking a short ride on the back of the sport bike.
“She was going to go up the road and come right back,” her mother, Cheryl Futrell, said. “She never made it back.”
Futrell, 19, died at a hospital June 25 from injuries she suffered two days earlier when the driver of the motorcycle she was a passenger on ran off the road near Port Vincent, ejecting Futrell and the 24-year-old driver, who were both wearing helmets.
Louisiana State Police booked the driver, Daniel Varnado, at the end of June on counts of careless operation and manslaughter, but both of Futrell’s parents said they do not blame him for the wreck.
What they question is whether the type of motorcycle Futrell was on and Varnado’s relative lack of experience on it might have played a role in the crash, said her father, Aubrey Futrell.
The sport bikes were linked in a national study to a disproportionate number of fatalities relative to the number of the sport bikes on the road. But motorcycle advocates say that a lack of proper training is a leading cause of fatalities on sport bikes.
Futrell said Varnado had the Suzuki GSX-R750 — a high performance racing bike that can reach speeds of up to 170 mph — for a short time before he took Stephanie Futrell for a ride along a stretch of La. 16.
A week earlier when Stephanie Futrell visited her father at his home in Jackson, Miss., for Father’s Day, Aubrey Futrell, a certified motorcycle safety instructor, took Stephanie Futrell for a ride on his touring motorcycle, he said. When his daughter expressed interest in buying a sport bike, he told her that was the only kind of motorcycle she could not have.
“Kids don’t understand how dangerous and unforgiving these (sport) bikes are,” he said. “It’s not a safe bike in my opinion to be on.”
Sport bikes are motorcycles built for racing but allowed on public streets. A popular choice for younger motorcycle riders because of their cheap price relative to their high performance, sport bikes usually produce more horsepower per pound than other motorcycles.
Since state and local agencies do not keep statistics on the number of registrations or fatalities by type of motorcycle, it’s impossible to tell what the fatality rate is in Louisiana for sport bikes, Louisiana State Police spokesman Trooper Johnnie Brown said.
Anecdotal evidence provided by troopers on the highways suggests there are more sport bikes on roadways than before, Brown said, but the same could be said for most motorcycles.
A rising number of motorcycle license registrations have become the norm nationwide with a 51 percent increase in registrations from 2000 to 2005, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. That coincides with an increase in the number of motorcycle fatalities.
In Louisiana, motorcycle license endorsements have increased 5 percent since the beginning of the year to 126,466, according to the state Office of Motor Vehicles. Also, from 1999 to 2007, motorcycle fatalities across Louisiana more than doubled from 41 to 88.
While those numbers are for all motorcycles, the authors of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study suggest that sport bikes and their more powerful sibling supersport bikes result in more fatalities than other types of bikes.
Supersport bikes made up less than 10 percent of registered motorcycles across the country in 2005 but accounted for more than 25 percent of the deaths, according to the study. The fatality rate of 22.5 deaths per 10,000 registered motorcycles for supersport bikes was almost four times higher than the rate of cruisers, the most common motorcycle seen on U.S. highways.
Motorcycles classified by the Insurance Institute as sport bikes had a much lower fatality rate of 10.7 deaths per 10,000 registered bikes, but the sport bike fatality rate was still higher than the other classifications of motorcycles.
The higher fatality rates for sport bikes may have less to do with their performance capabilities and more to do with the type of people who often ride them, said Warren Broussard, the president of the Motorcycle Awareness Campaign, a Louisiana group dedicated to improving motorcycle safety.
Broussard, who does not ride sport bikes, said responsible motorcyclists call those types of riders squids, which is derived from the words “squirrelly” and “kid.” They ride without proper safety equipment — perhaps in flip-flops and shorts — while performing at-risk behavior like speeding, weaving through traffic and popping wheelies.
In the study, the most common factors cited for fatal crashes on supersports bikes and sport bikes were driver error and speed. Speed was cited in 57 percent of fatal crashes on supersports bikes and 46 percent of fatalities on sport bikes. In contrast, speed was cited in 27 percent of fatal crashes on cruiser motorcycles and 22 percent of fatal crashes on touring motorcycles.
But Doug Coles, a member of the Louisiana Sportbike Association who has ridden the bikes for 30 years, said banning the bikes or limiting their speed — as the authors of the study suggest doing to reduce the risk of fatalities — is akin to doing the same for high performance automobiles, such as Porsches or Ferraris.
The best way to prevent deaths on sport bikes without punishing responsible riders is by requiring a three-day course before they can get a motorcycle endorsement, he said. Most often, Coles said, bikers have little training on motorcycles and are usually self-taught.
After ensuring all riders have training on the bikes at tracks where they can learn the intricacies of their bikes, he said, riders — not laws — must create a culture change that limits dangerous behavior.
The bikes may invite dangerous behavior, Coles said, but it’s the drivers who ultimately take the risks.
“It’s going to take a culture change; it’s going to take a mindset change,” he said. “And it’s going to take the motorcycle community to step up and make that happen.”
