LITMIR.BIZ

      It’s interesting that the latest NHTSA numbers show that single-vehicle crashes are hovering around 45 percent of fatal crashes, with multiple-vehicle crashes at around 55 percent—exactly what the Road Rider survey indicated.

      The Road Rider accident survey brought something else to my attention. We asked for both reported and unreported incidents. Apparently, a lot of motorcycle crashes don’t get reported. Let’s say you slide out on loose gravel and smash your bike into the ditch. If no one calls the police and you are still mobile enough to ride, would you call the authorities and demand to fill out an accident report? Personally, I wouldn’t want to initiate any reports that might come to the attention of my insurance company. I suspect that lots of crashed bikes get hauled home in a trailer as clandestinely as possible. When we included both reported and unreported accidents from the Road Rider survey, the numbers came out quite differently from the Hurt Report. Single-vehicle accidents accounted for 86 percent of the total.

      Note that the Road Rider survey showed a much higher percentage of single-vehicle crashes caused by surface hazards, animal strikes, and cornering errors than the Hurt Report indicated. That would make sense because outside of cities we would expect a higher percentage of those types of crashes. While the Road Rider survey wasn’t one of those huge, government-funded, university research projects, I think it hints that motorcyclists nationwide face a somewhat different mix of hazards than the Hurt Report showed. Let’s also note that these days the NHTSA focuses more on fatal crashes, although a rider can be seriously injured in a crash that isn’t fatal. That’s why in Proficient Motorcycling I get a lot deeper into hazards such as edge traps and wild animals than the typical rider training courses include.