Photos for Headline Surfer® / DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Bike Week is coming to an end and so far attendance has been light and fatalities have been limited to one.
The "500,000 bikers" figure that the Daytona-area Chamber of Commerce and local media have used for years has been exaggerated for the better part of a decade now.
And this year, there hasn't even been half that number of visitors for the 10-day rally that ends Sunday.
And as a result, fatalities are down, too. The lone biker fatality occurred in Deltona, though because it occurred during Bike Week, it's considered part of the biker rally since it's in the same county.
A motorcyclist lost his life Monday afternoon in a collision with a school bus in Deltona. The cause of the crash is under investigation by the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office.
Here's a synopsis of what occurred resulting in the biker fatality as described to Headline Surfer® by Volusia County Sheriff's spokesman Gary Davidson: Deputies were dispatched to the intersection of DeBary Avenue and Deltona Boulevard after the Sheriff’s Office was notified about the crash at 3:39 p.m.
Both vehicles were on DeBary Avenue, the bus traveling east and the biker on Kawasaki motorcycle westbound.
The collision occurred as the bus was turning onto Deltona Boulevard. The motorcyclist, an adult man, was critically injured and wasn’t breathing at the scene. He was transported by ambulance as a trauma alert to Florida Hospital Fish Memorial in Orange City, where efforts to resuscitate him were unsuccessful.
The bus was carrying 17 students from University High School in Orange City. Although a couple of students complained of minor injury, none required medical treatment. The crash has resulted in the temporary shutdown of westbound traffic on DeBary Avenue.