Riding rough
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Had he not turned his head, he may have made it to the restaurant. Chrislee Hounshell was riding his motorcycle east on N.C. 62 in mid-April, his 20-year-old daughter on the back, when his eyes left the road to answer one of her questions about the passing scenery. Food awaited them at a Golden Corral restaurant in Alamance County. One second later, the 1998 Harley-Davidson 95th Anniversary Edition Heritage Springer ran off the road, putting it on course for a nearby guardrail. Hounshell faced a difficult choice: lay the bike down on its side at 45 mph or take flight. Down it went. “People go, ‘Are you going to get back on your motorcycle?’ Yes, I’m going to get back on,” said Hounshell, who broke ribs, bruised his heart and tore neck muscles in the crash. “It wasn’t the motorcycle’s fault … I was inattentive for one second.” Although the 52-year-old Greensboro resident and his daughter survived, not everyone is so lucky. After years of decline, motorcycles are staging a comeback on America’s highways. Only it isn’t younger riders and their sporty, high-pitched bikes spurring the growth — it’s an older, more mature cadre saddling larger Harleys and Hondas. Nowhere is the demographic shift more evident than in motorcycle accident reports. From the Outer Banks to the Blue Ridge Parkway, midlife riders find themselves wrecking at a growing rate, according to the UNC Highway Safety Research Center, which analyzed both federal and state crash data. Bolstering those numbers is survey data from the Motorcycle Industry Council. According to the group, the median age of motorcycle riders in 2003 was 41 — in 1985 the median age was 27.1. More : news-record.com |