The Hurt Report is a report that was conducted and issued by the University of Southern California and is officially titled Motorcycle Accident Cause Factors and Identification of Countermeasures. The report is several hundred pages long, and more than nine hundred motorcycle accidents were examined in this study, all in the Greater Los Angeles area, under the direction of Harry Hurt and with funding from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. As the study is so large and comprehensive, we’ll try to break it down for you.
More than fifty major findings were the result of this study, as Hurt examined every possible aspect of a motorcycle accident, and made some surprising determinations. First, let’s discuss the demographics of accidents. According to the study, craftsmen, laborers, and students were the most likely to get into a crash while professionals and sales persons were least likely. Most of the accident victims were between the ages of 16 and 24 and nearly all riders were either unlicensed, had a revoked license or did not have a specific motorcycle endorsement on their license.
The location of the crash was generally close to home and a significant number happened on short trips to the store or to run another errand. Also, many riders did not have eye protection which may have contributed to the crash, because their vision was less than perfect, and motorcycles that had windshields were underrepresented. As far as the specific locations of the accidents, intersections were where most of the incidents occurred and weather did not cause the accident in all but two percent of the total accident cases studied.
Getting trained and making sure you know what sort of safety procedures you should be following is vital because nearly all of the motorcycle accident victims in this study were without format training. In fact, 92% of the accident sufferers were taught by friends or family members or taught themselves to ride a bike. The average speed that bikes were going when they got into the collision was about thirty miles per hour. Motorcyclists who had gotten a lot of traffic tickets or had several previous accidents were most likely to get into an accident.
Now, let’s discuss the causes of the motorcycle accidents that were studied. In more than sixty percent of cases where more than one vehicle was involved, the crash was the fault of the automobile driver. The most common way for a collision to occur was a driver to take a left turn in front of a motorcycle that was going straight, causing the bike to run into the side of the car. In fact, motorists not realizing that there was a motorcycle present in traffic with them was by far the main cause of these accidents involving more than one vehicle. If this has happened to you, then you should contact a motorcycle accident attorney right away.
