Are we looking at the right things?
I would like to see reports correlate 1) participation in a motorcycle safety program (or lack thereof) with 2) accident/fatality data. Unfortunately, the following is taken directly from the NHTSA website...
"Link among rider education, licensing, and crash data: Seven States (Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Maryland, New Mexico, New York, and Oregon) could link both their licensing data and their rider education data to crash statistics for their State. The only other State that could link any information to crash data was California, which could connect only licensing data with crash statistics."
Enough already! We all already know... if you hit your head hard enough, you die. Me thinks it would be more important to AVOID hitting one's head in the first place.
And for all those stats weenies, the NHTSA data indicates that helmets would only prevent deaths thirty-six percent of the time, in persons killed in accidents (who were not wearing a helmet during the accident).