As Wired Cola’s Director of Security, Erick, will attest, I am nearly innumerate.

As just about everybody who knows me will attest, I hardly ever ride a bicycle or motorcycle without a helmet. I have my reasons, but after reading the numbers in this article about motorcycle fatality rates in Florida, I’m beginning to wonder about how compelling the case for helmets is.

More importantly, I’m pretty sure the statistics presented in that article mean exactly the opposite of what the reporter thinks they mean.

Motorcycle fatalities involving riders without helmets have soared in the nearly six years since Gov. Jeb Bush repealed the state’s mandatory helmet law, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Okay, so Florida doesn’t have a mandatory helmet law any more, and now more of the dead bikers aren’t wearing helmets. I already have one question…

A Florida Today analysis of federal motorcycle crash statistics found “unhelmeted” deaths in Florida rose from 22 in 1998 and 1999, the years before the helmet law repeal, to 250 in 2004, the most recent year of available data.

Hey, that sounds pretty bad! So, like, these riders are probably dying because they’re not wearing helmets. I bet we could tell if you told us how this death rate compares to helmet-wearing rates in the state.

Total motorcycle deaths in the state have increased 67 percent, from 259 in 2000 to 432 in 2004, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics.

Wow, this is just worser and worser! So deaths have risen like crazy of late. So, the level of ridership has presumably been pretty constant over that time period, thus making these shocking numbers comparable to each other, right?

Records, though, also show motorcycle registrations have increased 87 percent in Florida since Bush signed the helmet law repeal on July 1, 2000.

Oh! So what you’re saying is that per-rider fatality rates have declined since the helmet law was repealed. You know, I would have thought that was the sort of counterfactual result that might have, oh, made this an interesting news item!

The rest of the article is unimportant filler.

I’d like to be clear about one thing which I have avoided saying so far: motorcycles are authentically hazardous to the health of their riders. There’s lots you can do to avoid becoming a statistic, but the numbers I have seen suggest that motorcycling is about ten times more risky (per capita) than being in a car. (Cycling seems to be closer to driving than motorcycling, risk-per-capita wise, but there are some ways of fudging the measurements to make it look nearly as safe as driving. If you include the net health benefits of riding a bicycle, you might come out ahead.)

Extra credit: construct a plausible hypothesis for the decline in per-rider fatalities in Florida. I can think of two, though I don’t have enough data to test either one.

So there you go. Isn’t innumeracy fun?