THE LAST WORD

BY DAVID BOOTH

I have to apologize in advance for this column. For one thing, I am going to discuss the most gruesome subject in motorcycling: road fatalities. It ain’t pretty. It doesn’t make for good coffee table talk. And it sure doesn’t make you want to jump on your Akropovic’ed R1 and really give ‘er.

The second reason I need to apologize is that, while I have copious amounts of data for the United States — where bikers seem to be dropping like flies — and the European Union (where they take their biking seriously), there’s precious little available for Canada, which is why I’ll present more American data than Canadian. That said, our numbers do seem a lot closer to the Yanks than to our continental cousins, which, as you’ll read in a few paragraphs, is not a good thing.

And finally, but perhaps more onerously, I might have to plead mea culpa for my conclusion that, much more often than we think, we’re the authors of our own demise. If recent local police reports are correct — and yes, I too treat them as more anecdotal than rigorous data — car drivers are a lot less responsible for motorcycle fatalities than I thought. Now, with those atonements out of the way, I’ll get down to the bad news: