I Live For Danger
Chris Loew
Issue date: 12/9/09 Section: GearHead
If you had to choose to be safe or be in danger, anyone with a positive outlook on life would like to be safe and with good reason. There are no worries and the very word according to The American Heritage Dictionary defines safe to be "free from danger or injury, un-hurt." But what is it that drives us to danger to look for excitement?
Roller coasters travel faster than the highway speed limit, there is no limit to how much alcohol can be consumed, and most dangerous of all we can run with scissors.
These are but a few things that are inherently dangerous and yet we can do all of these things so long as it is a controlled environment and still gain excitement from them. However, for those of you afraid of heights under the age of 21 and not in the ownership of any scissors, excitement in the form of danger needs to be found elsewhere, lets say the automobile. But what I find to be even more fun than an automobile is a superbike. However, ask anyone if they know someone who rides and it has yet to fail, someone mentioning a person they knew who died in a horrible motorcycle accident. So, is it this extra danger what makes motorcycles more exciting that a car ride, lets see.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported just over 40,000 deaths caused from automobile accidents for 2007. However, in 2007 NHTSA reported just under 5000 motorcycle related deaths. So for every motorcyclist that died that year, a van full of eight people also died. This goes against motorcycles being more dangerous.
However, I know that I am but a select few who own a motorcycle, while I know all of us reading own an automobile. So, there are an estimated 250 million automobiles in the US while there are only four million motorcycles. Simply put, on the road there are roughly 60 cars to one motorcycle. But if you take the percent of accidents per vehicle type, you have a 1/6250 chance of death in an automobile while motorcyclists have a 1/800 chance of death. While very crude and unofficial in deciding which is more dangerous, motorcycles are almost eight times more likely to die in an accident than an automobile according to my calculations.
Roller coasters travel faster than the highway speed limit, there is no limit to how much alcohol can be consumed, and most dangerous of all we can run with scissors.
These are but a few things that are inherently dangerous and yet we can do all of these things so long as it is a controlled environment and still gain excitement from them. However, for those of you afraid of heights under the age of 21 and not in the ownership of any scissors, excitement in the form of danger needs to be found elsewhere, lets say the automobile. But what I find to be even more fun than an automobile is a superbike. However, ask anyone if they know someone who rides and it has yet to fail, someone mentioning a person they knew who died in a horrible motorcycle accident. So, is it this extra danger what makes motorcycles more exciting that a car ride, lets see.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported just over 40,000 deaths caused from automobile accidents for 2007. However, in 2007 NHTSA reported just under 5000 motorcycle related deaths. So for every motorcyclist that died that year, a van full of eight people also died. This goes against motorcycles being more dangerous.
However, I know that I am but a select few who own a motorcycle, while I know all of us reading own an automobile. So, there are an estimated 250 million automobiles in the US while there are only four million motorcycles. Simply put, on the road there are roughly 60 cars to one motorcycle. But if you take the percent of accidents per vehicle type, you have a 1/6250 chance of death in an automobile while motorcyclists have a 1/800 chance of death. While very crude and unofficial in deciding which is more dangerous, motorcycles are almost eight times more likely to die in an accident than an automobile according to my calculations.
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