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Liability in a Bike Accident...
A motorcycle or bike accident is immediately at a disadvantage in an insurance claim. The insurance company will have the same attitude many other people have when it comes to this type of transportation... motorcyclists are considered reckless and bicyclists are considered careless.
So your bike accident claim is an uphill battle. Fortunately, there are ways you can quickly turn that around.
First of all, the rules of the road apply to bike accidents the same as they do to four-wheeled motor vehicle accidents. This is especially true for motorbikes.
Bicycles are different because when the cyclist can’t keep up with traffic, they have to keep to the right side of the road. If the road has a special bike lane, then the cyclist must stay in that lane.
In a motorcycle accident, one thing the rider should do is present their own good and safe driving record to the insurance company. If they can find witnesses that can back up their safe record, that will also help.
If applicable, they can stress that they've been riding a long time, and that they ride often. The idea is to take away the chance for the insurance company to present the rider as reckless. Aside from that, they'll have to be much more diligent to present a clear and effective argument against the other driver.
A case of liability that's unique to motorcycle and bike accidents is something called lane splitting. Normally this happens when there's slow moving traffic and the cyclist decides to ride between two slower moving cars.
In this situation the cyclist is likely to be found at fault. Few states have laws against this action, but most all of them consider it an illegal maneuver. The cyclist can argue that the driver who struck them was partially at fault, but it's rare that the other driver is shown as completely at fault.
The flip side of this scenario is when a bicyclist is staying to the right of the road per the law. They'll face obstacles, like parked cars, that force them to move to the left into the traffic lane, and that is allowed.
When the driver behind the cyclist doesn’t allow the cyclist to safely make this maneuver a bike accident is likely to happen. If this occurs, the driver is the one being negligent, just like in a rear end collision. This comes back to the idea that the cyclist has just as much right to the road as the driver of the car.
In the next section we'll look at specific rights a cyclist has, and how this can effect an insurance claim.
Still have questions about applying liability to a bike accident? Click Here.
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