As I drove from Newburgh to Walden along Route 52 just after dark on Thursday, August 3, 2023, it was my great misfortune to come up behind two darkly clad young men riding gasoline powered bikes with no reflectors or lights. I followed them from the area of Neversink Drive all the way to St. Andrews Road where they turned off from Route 52. The pair kept slowing down so one of them could do a wheelie that he maintained for 50 to 100 yards, and then they’d speed back to 40 or 45 miles per hour. They were very difficult to see, and some other drivers had trouble with that. I feared that when I had to slow down for a wheelie, somebody would pass me and crash into the unseen dark bikes.

I have seen quite a few motorized scooters and bikes racing around on the well lighted streets of Newburgh, but my Route 52 experience was my first encounter with dark stealth motorized bikes at night on a country highway.

If the two young men I followed in the dark on Route 52 continue to roar up and down country highways, I hope they put lights and reflectors on their bikes. Riding blind and unseen is terribly dangerous. No unthinking young person should die in a collision that could have been easily avoided.