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| Excerpt from: Happenings
| | | November 10, 2008 | | Scooters Compared to Motorcycles for Safety | Ouch!! Motorcycle and scooter injuries and deaths continue to climb. I am getting more and more calls form seriously injured scooter riders, in addition to the motorcycle accidents that continue to occur.
Recent statistics are reflecting that while 46% of the accidents are single vehicle accidents, 54% (substantially more) of the accidents involve two vehicles.
The cause of most of these? You guessed it. Car cuts off motorcycle. Car cuts off scooter. Car makes left in front of motorcycle. Car makes left in front of scooter. Car changes lane into motorcycle. Car changes lane into scooter. On and on it goes.
Scooters will fall over when they hit holes in the road that a motorcycle, with a larger wheel, will go over. Scooters will lose control on holes that a motorcycle's suspension will handle. Scooters can't always accelerate out of the way of a car or truck, where a motorcycle has a better chance of doing so. The exhaust noise of a motorcycle is potentially something that can alert an otherwise oblivious driver to the presence of a motorcycle.
Motorcycles go faster, and encourage faster speeds, which results in single vehicle accidents when taking a curve too fast.
In any case, the statistics keep getting worse, as more riders get hit by more cars and trucks. Little or nothing is being done to make drivers more aware of motorcycles and scooters. You have to hope that the increase in riders will make this more common, and that alone may help car and truck drivers to be more aware. As they begin to expect a scooter or motorcycle to be there, they may be more aware of riders on the road.
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