It’s not exactly big news that baby boomers have decided not to ride off into their golden years playing Scrabble in the booth of some tacky Winnebago. Instead, they’re flocking to their local Harley dealers and saddling up some big-ass Hogs. The decision to trade the RV for a Harley, though, hasn’t come without a price. Boomers, with slower reflexes and quite a few more pounds than their younger counterparts, are slaughtering themselves on the nation’s highways in record numbers. The number of people killed on motorcycles who were 50 and older has quadrupled over the past decade.
Among those boomers with some experience crashing a motorcycle is our very own U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Mary Peters. While she ranks high on the list of “cabinet secretaries you’ve never heard of,” Peters put herself in a public service announcement last month to talk about how her safety gear saved her life when she wiped out on her huge bike in 2005. The PSA is part of her new motorcycle safety initiative aimed at goading boomers into better driving and encouraging Harley Davidson into giving its novice customers driving lessons before letting them zoom off the lot. What it doesn’t do, of course, is something really useful, like force boomer-heavy states like Texas and Florida to reinstate their mandatory helmet laws.
DOT’s own data show that after Florida repealed its mandatory helmet law in 2000, motorcycle fatalities went off the charts. Texas, which repealed its law back in 1997 under Gov. George W. Bush, had similar results. Apparently Peters, who has championed privatizing the nation’s highway system, doesn’t want to offend her fellow bikers with heavy-handed regulation, even if it might save some of their lives. But hey, she looks cool in those shades..
