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I've read statistics on the liklihood of a crash, and have come with a lot of information e.g., no licence and no MSF course makes it more likely, alcohol, new riders, weekend night riding, etc., all statistically more likely. But I can't find anything on bike TYPE. For instance, are cruisers statistacally more or less likely to crash then sport bikes. How about high displacement versus lower, or American versus European versus Japanese made bikes. Anyone out there familiar with these statistics? You'd think it exists. Just curious.

tbob wrote:I've read statistics on the liklihood of a crash, and have come with a lot of information e.g., no licence and no MSF course makes it more likely, alcohol, new riders, weekend night riding, etc., all statistically more likely. But I can't find anything on bike TYPE. For instance, are cruisers statistacally more or less likely to crash then sport bikes. How about high displacement versus lower, or American versus European versus Japanese made bikes. Anyone out there familiar with these statistics? You'd think it exists. Just curious.

I believe this data is out there, but you have to look in a different place than the NHTSA for it. The IIHS for this kind of data, but I'm not sure what is available. My research hasn't taken me very deeply in to this aspect yet.

RhadamYgg

I think the type of bike statistic would go along the lines of yellow or whatever colour cars crashing the least. Or antique cars crashing less. How many DeLorean DMC12's do you see crashing every year? Not very many because there are so few. And are you really safer in a DeLorean as opposed to a Cavalier?

It would have to do more with the amount of a given colour/make/type of bike on the road. That and just plain ol' chance.

Just focus on keep yourself OUT of the statistics list, and you should do alright

The data is here:
http://www.iihs.org/research/fatality_f ... ycles.html

Scroll down a bunch or search for the word cruiser.

Thanks,
RhadamYgg

tbob wrote:I've read statistics on the liklihood of a crash, and have come with a lot of information e.g., no licence and no MSF course makes it more likely, alcohol, new riders, weekend night riding, etc., all statistically more likely. But I can't find anything on bike TYPE. For instance, are cruisers statistacally more or less likely to crash then sport bikes. How about high displacement versus lower, or American versus European versus Japanese made bikes. Anyone out there familiar with these statistics? You'd think it exists. Just curious.

It has more to do with the type of rider than the type of bike.
New riders, non-licensed riders, and young riders are the most at risk. Practice before you hit the streets.

EDIT: And this is no way an endorsement for starting on a bigger bike. There are plenty of crash statistics for engine size range... and new rider + bigger engine = more death.

i read that more crashes involved sportbikes, but being that cruisers are so much more heavy, the injuries were worse.

and also, it didn't say if higher displacement = more crashing, but it did say that higher displacement = worse injuries...

Well, there are some interesting things that the IIHS information says - generalizes - unfortunately, unlike some data - they didn't break up the engine sizes to the smaller 1 - 500 grouping first.

1) Slightly more people died on Cruiser/Standard bikes than SuperSports
2) If you combine the Cruiser/Standard group and the SuperSports - you get 2931 out of 4386 fatalities - or 66% of all fatalities
3) The category (street motorcycles) with the least fatalities across all engine sizes was the sport/unclad sport @317
4) The 1000+cc supersports had a relatively low representation of fatalities.
5) A midsize 1000cc to 1400cc touring bike seems to be involved in a low number of accidents.

However, this data does not: correlate the number of registered bikes of each time to the number of fatalities. So, we don't know that say 80% of the bikes out there are cruiser/standards and that would explain why they are overrepresented in the data.

There are some other things we could say about this data, but without the correlation to number of each type of bike on the road, it is kind of iffy.

RhadamYgg