If you’re a motorcyclist, you know that having the right gear and equipment is important to your overall experience and safety — but have you considered adding a dash camera to your bike? Dash cameras and helmet cameras can become a critical source of evidence if you’re ever injured in a wreck with another vehicle.
Here’s why you should consider adding one of these tools to your equipment right away.
Motorcycle Accidents Are Still a Huge Problem
Despite attempts to educate drivers of regular vehicles about how to share the road with motorcyclists, accidents are still disturbingly common.
While figures reported in 2017 from the Governors Highway Safety Association indicated that fewer motorcyclists are dying in accidents (a decrease over the previous year by 5.6%), bikers are still involved in fatal accidents 28 times more often than drivers of other vehicles. Far more motorcyclists suffer injuries.
Fair Settlement Is Difficult for Motorcyclists
Often, the only real recourse for a motorcyclist who has been injured in an accident is to take the other driver to court in a personal injury lawsuit. If the biker has been killed, his or her family may need to pursue a wrongful death claim in court.
Why? Because insurance companies are quick to blame the motorcyclist for the accident. There’s a long history of anti-motorcycle bias in the media and in public perception. Motorcyclists are perceived as risk-takers, people who ride fast and live hard — so the natural tendency is to think that they’re responsible for their own accidents.
Police officers are sometimes affected by that bias and write up accident reports that reflect that bias. Juries, too, can be biased against bikers, and they may let that cloud their judgment in court.
One of the hardest jobs a motorcycle injury attorney has in court is finding ways to overcome that bias and show that the motorcyclist was not in the wrong. Sometimes that involves accident reconstruction, tracking down witnesses to make statements or testify in court, or finding footage of the accident from traffic cams.
Anything the rider can do to make it easier to prove that he or she didn’t cause the accident can make that task much easier — and help get a fair settlement.
Cameras Could Make the Difference in a Claim
About three-fourths of all motorcycle accidents involve another vehicle — most often, a passenger car.
The fact that drivers of passenger cars are often blind to the approach of a motorcycle is well-documented. Even when a passenger car glances around, the human brain fails to process some of the information that the driver sees in a process called saccadic masking. The brain selectively edits out smaller objects — like motorcycles.
A personal camera affixed to the front of your motorcycle or the top of your helmet can eventually be used in several ways. If you’re in a wreck, the evidence it provides may be enough to convince the insurance company of the other vehicle involved to settle your claim out of court. That can help avoid a long, exhausting legal battle.
If the insurance company insists on taking the case to trial, the footage from the camera may be able to overcome any anti-motorcycle bias shown in either the police report or held by a juror.
If you have been injured in a motorcycle accident, talk to a law firm that has years of experience aggressively pursuing fair compensation for our clients. Frenkel & Frenkel has over 25 years of experience aggressively representing our clients in all types of accidents, including motorcycle accidents. Experience matters when it comes representing victims of accidents, and we can help.
