Scooter Crash! POW!

Before I go into what happened, let me make this plea to anyone reading. Please, for the love of God, use your goddamn turn signal. Any time you're turning. Even if you think you don't need to, just do it.

Cool? Cool.

So yeah, like the title says, I got into a "minor" traffic accident today. But as a woman at work told me (and I agree) when you're riding a motorcycle there is no such thing as a "minor" accident. Pretty much every time you're in an accident it's going to suck a lot more for the motorcycle.

The roots of this accident go back several months. I think it was last spring, and I was driving on a residential street with driveways on each side of the road. I was stuck behind a person driving obscenely slowly. After a bit, the driver came to a complete stop in the middle of the street, and I figured they were pulling into a driveway.

My instinct was correct, and the driver turned to the left, so I started to pass on the right. However, before I got too far, he cranked the wheel to the right (I guess he wanted to take a straight shot down his driveway?) and nearly caused me to slam into his fender and fly over the hood of his car.

At no point did he use a turn signal to indicate what he was doing. I remember thinking at the time, "Huh, that was scary. I'm not sure how to avoid an accident like that, other than to just wait behind the car until they've pulled entirely off of the road."

Flash forward to yesterday.

I'm driving home from work. For some reason I was thinking about how I'd handle "getting into an accident" on my scooter...whether or not my safety gear would protect me adequately. It was another one of those stupid, morbid lines of thought that I have at inappropriate times like that.

I was heading north on Cahuenga boulevard, and I decided to hang a left onto Whitnall Highway, which is one of those rare "diagonal" streets that cut through the San Fernando valley (thanks to a run of high voltage power lines splitting the highway). Directly in front of me was a fairly newish red Honda Civic with a USC Film School bumper sticker, who had also just turned onto Whitnall.

I followed the Civic for a couple hundred feet before the driver suddenly slowed to a stop. Since the car had stopped into the middle of the street I figured the person was parallel parking, so I needed to get out from behind them so they could back into the spot. Underneath the power lines is the Whitnall Off-Leash Dog Park (you can see cars parked along the street in this image...but during the accident it was wall-to-wall with parked cars and the park was packed):

 

I proceeded to pass the car on the left, as there was no traffic coming in the opposite direction. However, just as my scooter reached the rear bumper of the Civic, the driver cranked the wheel and started to turn. Left. Directly in front of my accelerating scooter (presumably on to Hatteras).

Now, if the driver turns left at this point, one of four things could happen to me:

1. I could slam into the Civic's fender and do a header over the hood, damaging both vehicles pretty badly
2. The driver could just never see me and run me over, leading to a pretty embarrassing "motorcyclist under car wheel" situation
3. The car could clip my scooter as I drove past, potentially leading to a really embarrassing "motorcyclist vs. stationary object" situation
4. I could jam on the brakes and try to stop before the car made the turn

NOTE -- the option of swerving to avoid this collision was not available, since it could lead to a collision with parked cars, a curb, or just slightly delayed the inevitable collision with the red car. And anyway, it happened way too quickly and I was too close to the car to consider a "by the book" swerve action, in my opinion.

Anyhow, I chose option number four. I jammed my brakes, locked up my tires, laid down my scooter, and promptly came to a skidding halt on my right side, with my helmet banging lightly against her driver's side door.

So in the matter of a few seconds I went from happy-go-lucky scooter jockey to prone road rash victim. It was quite jarring (literally).

Turns out my assaulter was a skinny, early-20-something , bleached-blonde woman with multiple piercings, large fashionable sunglasses, and a big tattoo of what looked like a butterfly on her back. She got out of her car, very shaken, and started apologizing profusely in a surprisingly low-pitched quasi-stoner voice.

I did what I always do in awkward situations like this -- I started cracking jokes to ease the tension and told her not to worry about it.

If I hadn't locked up my brakes, I probably would have avoided the accident entirely...because I didn't actually make contact with her car (except for my helmet). She was definitely at fault on this one, but since I was passing her car on the left, from a liability point of view it would have been more of a hassle to file a claim, in my opinion. My move was completely legal, but borderline "aggressive." I would have had to convince her insurance company that she hadn't used her turn signal...which is hard to prove without a third-party witness...and the deductible probably wouldn't have covered the cost of the repairs...and my insurance would have just gone up anyway...et cetera.

So I decided to just chalk it up to bad luck and get going home. I examined the damage -- my scooter was slightly scraped up on one side. It had a busted right-hand mirror, a missing reflector, and the handlebars had shifted a few inches to the right. It didn't look too bad, and it started up just fine. As for me, I had a bruised and scraped up ankle (I'll spare you the gory pictures), a scraped elbow, and a sore neck. No serious problems structurally...it was the standard "bumps and bruises" accident result.

I tried to convince her that everything was fine, and she was good to leave...but she insisted that I "at least" get her phone number (DIGITS BABY!). Throughout she continued to apologize, telling me that if I "needed anything" to give her a call. If I wind up having to get my bike repaired I might try to get a hold of her...but who are we kidding? I probably won't do that.

So she drove off, and I limped home (literally).

As for those safety devices I was worrying about? Well, the gloves and helmet get an "A+"...no scrapes on my hands, and a totally intact brain case.

My "armored jacket" gets a "C-". My right shoulder escaped mostly unharmed (though slightly bruised), but the armored plate in my elbow did bupkis, as I've got a 1" diameter bloody scrape there that's going to be a bastard to heal.

My armored pants and boots get a "NA", because I don't own either of those things. The boots would have been nice, as it turns out, because my ankle got trapped under my scooter and scraped to hell...and that's my main source of "ouch" at the moment. I don't think I need the pants...because those look goofy, and the khakis I was wearing weren't even scuffed.

I guess I'll try to be a little more careful in the future, though I'm not really sure what I could/should have done differently in this situation. I think I was just unlucky...hopefully that won't happen again.