More From The 2018 MOST Crash Report
Guess what? You are the biggest factor in whether you come home from your ride safely.
I’ve been looking at the crash statistics in the 2018 report from the Colorado Motorcycle Operator Safety Program (MOST). Previous posts are here and here.
The next table in the MOST report on 2018 motorcycle crashes focuses on the “First Harmful Event (FHE)” which I take to be the nature of the crash, more or less, after whatever actions occurred that led to the crash. Number one on the list, by a lot, was overturning. In a car, overturning would be big deal; on a bike, it has to be pretty much standard. This happened to 377 riders, 26.8% of all riders and 40.3% of MOST-trained riders.
Here’s what may be a surprising number two: front to rear collision (201 total). I’d have to wonder who was in back and who was in front. I’ve know more than one rider who got rear-ended but I don’t know anyone who hit the vehicle in front of them. We stop quicker. But this shows us that you do need to be alert to the guys behind you as well as those in front or on the side.
All the rest were collisions of various sorts: with curb, with wild animals, with guardrail, etc.
Then we get to the top human contributing factors with at-fault riders. This has got to be key, right?
The top factor was driver (rider) inexperience: 247 total (17.5%) and 24 MOST-trained (31.2%).
Again, that looks ugly for the idea of rider training unless the bulk of these are riders who crashed and then went for training. As MOST coordinator Chris Corbo said, we don’t know this time around whether the crashes were before or after the training. We would hope they were primarily before. That data will be tracked the next time around.
Number two on this list was aggressive driving (162). That should give you some idea of what not to do.
Number three was DUI, DWAI, DUID (110). I don’t think we need to say anything more here.
Number four is interesting: driver unfamiliar with area (95). I wonder if that means they did something such as a lane change that someone who knew the intersection (for example) would not have done, or if they were meandering trying to figure out where to turn.
These tables only include the top 10 but in this case by the time you get to number nine there are only two instances so number 10 is “Other.” There were 181 of those, which says there are a whole heck of a lot of things that can lead to a crash.
More to follow.
Biker Quote for Today
Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know. — William Saroyan
Tags: Colorado motorcycle crashes 2018, motorcycle crash statistics
