When you go out for a ride on your bike, you always have to be acutely aware of the vehicles around you. No matter how experienced you are as a bicyclist, you could wind up seriously injured because a driver didn’t pay attention to their surroundings.
The cyclist is usually the one who suffers property damage and injury in a crash between a bike and a motor vehicle. In many cases, the person in the car will be the one at fault for the crash, because inattention while driving is a major contributing cause for cyclist collisions.
Typically, a driver who hurts you or trashes your bike will reimburse you through their insurance. When they don’t have insurance, you may have very few protections. How likely is it for a driver without insurance to hit you on the California roads?
California ranks 12th in the country for uninsured drivers
California is a big state with a massive population, but researchers don’t factor in population when creating statistics for state-to-state comparison. The researchers at the Insurance Information Institute don’t report the total number of uninsured drivers but rather the percentage of registered vehicles that have lapsed insurance policies.
According to their most recent analysis of data, California is 12th in the nation for uninsured drivers. Approximately 15.2% of all cars on the road don’t have an active policy.
A crash caused by a vehicle will likely wreck your bike, which may be worth thousands of dollars with all of the upgrades you’ve made to it. Additionally, you could easily have tens of thousands of dollars in medical costs and lost wages during your recovery.
When another driver doesn’t have insurance, you have very few options for compensation. Unless you have insurance of your own that might apply, you may have to file a civil lawsuit against a driver so irresponsible that they not only caused the crash but didn’t have insurance.
