It takes both skill and dedication to lawfully ride a motorcycle. Special licensing is required, and riders need to have the skill to feel confident when they go out on the road. Unfortunately, no matter how careful and skilled a motorcycle rider may be, they are always at risk of encountering someone else who isn’t as safe on the road as they are.
People in bigger vehicles cause quite a few motorcycle collisions, often through careless driving habits. Obviously, drivers who do blatantly unsafe things, like texting at the wheel or driving after drinking, can cause collisions through their carelessness. However, a large portion of motorcycle collisions are the result of a very specific kind of driver carelessness. The following is, unfortunately, the main reason that careless drivers cause crashes with motorcycles.
They don’t watch for motorcycles in traffic
After a collision with a motorcycle, the person in the larger vehicle will often claim that they didn’t see the motorcycle or that it came out of nowhere. Although it may have seemed that way to the motorist, the chances are good that the motorcycle was perfectly visible and that they may have even looked right at it.
The human brain can only process so much visual information at once, and driving tends to push it to its limit. The brain must sort the incoming visual information and can only focus on what seems most important. Those driving typically worry about safety, so their brain will focus on big vehicles and other obvious risk factors near them in traffic.
Motorcycles are smaller, and therefore the brain recognizes that they are less of a risk than vehicles the same size or larger than the one a motorist operates. A driver can look directly at a motorcycle and never realize that it is there because their brain doesn’t treat it as a safety concern. All it takes to overcome this cognitive limitation is intentionally looking for motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians and other smaller objects in traffic before turning, merging or proceeding through an intersection.
When motorists won’t expend that extra energy on monitoring their surroundings carefully, the result for other people can be tragic and/or incredibly expensive. Understanding how careless drivers often cause crashes with motorcycle riders may help people avoid collisions or find the motivation to pursue compensation after one occurs.
