Motorcycle Accident Lawyer in Jackson, TN

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, just under 4,500 motorcyclists are killed every year in accidents, and an additional 90,000 are injured. By miles driven, motorcycles are far more dangerous than cars. A motorcyclist is 40 times more likely than a driver to be killed in a collision, and nine times more likely to be injured.

To be sure, some motorcyclists behave carelessly or ride faster than road and weather conditions allow, but most motorcyclists are responsible riders. In fact, a car’s driver is more likely than a motorcyclist to be at fault in a collision between a motorcycle and a car.

There are two main reasons for this. First, most drivers do not have a lot of experience with motorcycles and know nothing about how they stop, turn, etc. Drivers are used to sharing the road with other cars, but they are less familiar with how to safely share the road with motorcycles. Drivers may get the impression that motorcyclists are riding unpredictably, but it may be the mere presence of a motorcycle that the driver failed to predict.

The second reason for collisions between cars and motorcycles is that motorcycles are comparatively small. It’s easy for a motorcyclist to hide in a driver’s blind spot where a car could not fit. Because drivers are primarily used to scanning the road for other cars, they may fail to see motorcycles altogether.

There are steps you can take to decrease your chances of being hit by an inattentive driver. For one, you can make yourself more visible by wearing brightly colored or reflective clothing and using your headlight day and night. While helmets do not make crashes less likely, they make them a lot less dangerous. Studies show that wearing a motorcycle helmet lowers the risk of fatal injuries by almost 30 percent and lowers the chance of brain injury by almost 70 percent.