Over time, you generally hope to see a decline in motor vehicle accidents. Different factors play into it, such as advances in technology, new safety laws and general awareness of the risks on the road.
When you look at motorcycle injury statistics, though, you can see that this is not happening. The roads are not getting safer. Since looking at raw statistics can be misleading — for instance, if there are more injuries one year is it simply because there were more riders that year? — let’s sort them by the number of injuries per 100 million miles driven. When you do that, here are the statistics you get over the years:
- 2008: 461 injuries
- 2009: 430 injuries
- 2010: 443 injuries
- 2011: 439 injuries
- 2012: 434 injuries
- 2013: 434 injuries
- 2014: 459 injuries
- 2015: 451 injuries
- 2016: 511 injuries
- 2017: 440 injuries
As you can see, injuries are pretty stagnant over the years. Motorcycles are not getting any safer and riders face the same risks. In 2016, it even looked like things were getting much worse, though that was thankfully just a spike, and it came down the next year.
A lot of the problem is that a motorcycle is just an inherently dangerous vehicle. You do not have much protection while riding one, and it’s virtually impossible to change that. Cars have seen the addition of things like crumple zones and reinforced cages, but you can’t get those on a bike, so even the newest bikes on the market do come with risks.
If you get injured in an accident caused by another driver, you may be able to seek compensation for your costs.
