Sunday morning, 2 a.m., coming out of Miami on I-95, tempting fate at 85 mph. And zip. A sports bike rockets past my Maxima like I was Uncle Marlon negotiating the church driveway in his 1979 Oldsmobile.
Zip. Zip. Two more bikes give chase, weaving through traffic as if automobiles were stationary obstacles on the road to perdition.
It's like dodging bullets. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety calls them supersports -- lightweight suicide machines that go from 0 to 60 in less than three seconds, can do 180 mph and take out your car as a bonus. In January, a 22-year-old man in Palm Harbor on his 370-pound Kawasaki Ninja crashed into a 6,000-pound Chevy Suburban with such terrific force that it flipped the SUV. Both drivers died.
Two weeks ago, a nice couple from Singer Island were driving through Broward on I-95 when a cluster of speeding supersports closed way too fast. Two bikes slammed into their car. Another crashed nearby. One bike rider was killed. A second was critically injured. The couple in the crumpled car survived.
TROOPERS TAUNTED
Trooper Rafael Lola, who has patrolled South Florida's highways for 22 years, says the proliferation of aerodynamic Japanese-made ninja bikes known as crotch rockets ''that can go 150 to 180 mph right out of the box,'' have altered the very roadway culture.
Most patrol cars, he said, can't match such speeds. Bikers know it. ''They taunt troopers,'' Lola said. ''They'll pull next to patrol cars and flip the bird.'' And off they zoom. Except Lola cruises the highways in an unmarked high performance Mercury. With a stealth strategy. He follows them until they pull over. If they live.
Motorcycle fatalities have more than doubled over the last decade, to 516 in 2006.
Lola says no small part of the increase can be attributed to the growing popularity of Japanese supersports -- the bikes that pass us on the interstate at such frightful speeds.
The Insurance Institute said that in 2005, supersports (a category dominated by Kawasaki, Suzuki and Yamaha) in the U.S. accounted for just 9 percent of the registered motorcycles, but 28 percent of the fatalities.
BIKE LOBBY GOES NUTS
These aren't the lumbering Harley-Davidson cruisers, piloted by fat gray-haired lawyers and doctors chasing their youthful fantasies. (Though, God knows, since Florida repealed its helmet law in 2002, the old guys are also killing themselves, or sustaining brain damage, at an alarming rate. A 2004 study in the American Journal of Public Health charted a 48 percent increase in the state's biker death rate, at least half that attributed to repeal.)
After witnessing manic high-speed hijinks, including ninja bikers doing wheelies through a Florida's Turnpike toll lane, state Rep. Carlos Lopez-Cantera of Miami introduced a bill in January that would have led, after a third pop for reckless antics or over-the-top speeds, to bike confiscation -- the one penalty, he calculated, bound to impress a young crotch rocketeer.
But the biker lobby went berserk. And biker bloggers went after Lopez-Cantera. ''One guy threatened to kill me and eat me,'' he said Monday.
Lopez-Cantera finally surrendered to Tallahassee's peculiar political reality. The biker lobby, after all, convinced legislators in 2000 that riders were safer without helmets.
Instead of confiscation, the third rap (if the governor signs the bill) now comes with a $5,000 fine.
If they can catch 'em. If they live.
