Motorcycles: Death Trends in the U.S., 1999-2024
It's a risky proposition, with or without a helmet
Last month, my church advertised the following in our bulletin:
My passing thought: “They definitely need the blessing”…
I thought I had done a post on motorcycle risk, but evidently not.
Every so often, I refer to the risk, as here in summer 2022:
Which reminds me, I need to pull info on motorcycle deaths, here in August 2022, because I’ve been seeing an uptick in stories on those… but that may just be because it’s summer, and it’s that time of year for motorcycle deaths (the “season” being Memorial Day to Labor Day).
Or here, from last summer:
But in other cases, people may have known about the bad weather and risked it anyway, discounting the danger. Just as some people think the risk of not wearing helmets on motorcycles is just fine….
(…or riding on a motorcycle at all….)
While there are many more car- and truck-related deaths in the U.S. compared to motorcycle deaths, given how many more people drive cars and trucks (especially the number of miles driven in cars and trucks), the relative risk of riding on motorcycles is far worse. I will get to that by the end of this post.
It has been a beautiful June day here in New York, and while I was out with one of my kids, I watched several bikers weave in-and-out of traffic… and I shook my head (and said an Ave Maria, because, again, all these guys needed it… and yes, it was all men doing this. Mainly younger men, because “men of a certain age” don’t get to that “certain age” via doing a bunch of dumbass things.)
To be sure, we need organ donors, but….
Motorcycle Accident Categories
To get Motorcycle Accident deaths, I selected on ICD-10 codes, V20-V29 (which snaps up some real doozies).
The general aggregation is described: Motorcycle rider injured in transport accident
It excludes trikes (and I saw a guy riding low in a nice trike, which I wouldn’t mind cruising in), but it includes:
electric bicycle
e-bike
e-bicycle
moped
motorcycle with sidecar
motorized bicycle
motor scooter
There was a notorious accident between a regular bicycle and an electric scooter recently, with a fairly high-powered motor, in NYC on a bridge on a dedicated bike path:
29 May 2026, ABC7: 2 men dead after colliding on bike path of Queensboro Bridge
Two people died in a collision on the bike path of the Queensboro Bridge on Thursday.
It happened around 8:30 a.m. during the morning commute.
One of the victims, a 39-year-old Francis Del Valle of New Jersey, was riding a stand-up motorized scooter and the other victim, 35-year-old Dmytro Stechenko of Queens, was on a bike.
They were heading in opposite directions when they collided.….
The bridge is one of the city’s busiest when it comes to pedestrians and cyclists. In May of 2025, former Mayor Eric Adams, along with the DOT, separated the groups.
Since then, only bikes are allowed in the north outer roadway and pedestrians use the south outer roadway. Still, the lanes are only about 11 feet wide.
While there is a 15 mph speed limit for stand-up e-scooters and e-bikes in New York City, it is also illegal to operate a stand-up e-scooter that can go faster than 20 mph anywhere in the state.
Authorities say the stand-up e-scooter involved in the collision was capable of going over 50 miles per hour in a matter of seconds, and should have never been on the road to begin with.
So it sounds like the scooter was illegal.
In any case, the death of Francis Del Valle, the electric scooter rider, would have been coded as:
V21 Motorcycle rider injured in collision with pedal cycle
(the code for the pedal cycle rider would be something else)
Here are all the codes:
Motorcycle rider injured in collision with pedestrian or animal
Motorcycle rider injured in collision with pedal cycle
Motorcycle rider injured in collision with two- or three-wheeled motor vehicle
Motorcycle rider injured in collision with car, pick-up truck or van
Motorcycle rider injured in collision with heavy transport vehicle or bus
Motorcycle rider injured in collision with railway train or railway vehicle
Motorcycle rider injured in collision with other nonmotor vehicle
Motorcycle rider injured in collision with fixed or stationary object
Let me give this to you as a row chart:
Yes, it’s annoying to run into that “unspecified” code, but that’s generally a popular one for all sorts of things. When you come across a biker who obviously collided with another vehicle, but that other vehicle is no longer around…. V29.
Colliding with the more common vehicles (cars, light trucks, vans) makes a lot of sense.
Smashing into a building or a tree… yep.
But what about a “noncollision accident”? Yes, that’s one I’ve seen reports of, and that’s unpleasant — that’s the “thrown from the bike” or “hit a pothole and the bike flipped”. The person’s body collided with something, but that was the ultimate cause of death, usually. The motorcycle got the person up to speed and, Newton’s first law and all of that.
That’s the big problem with motorcycles after all. You don’t have a big metal cage (or even a carbon fiber shell) around you that you can strap yourself to. The bike can be halted or diverted by a pothole… and the human body continues with its inertia until it hits something.
At quite high speeds.
Motorcycle Accident Age-Adjusted Death Rates, by Sex, U.S. 1999-2024
This is definitely a sex-differentiated death trend:
I’m not going to plot it, but the male-to-female ratios for these death rates are 8 and above, in general. Up to above 10 times… and this is hardly surprising.
Motorcycle riding is not exactly popular among women. I’ve tried to find good statistics, but all the links are old — the most recent one I could find that looked decent is from 2018:
December 2018, Cruiser: Nearly One In Five Motorcycle Owners Is Female
Do you feel like you’re seeing more women riding motorcycles these days? Well, you’re not imagining things—a national survey just released by the Motorcycle Industry Council confirms that nearly one in five motorcycle owners is now female, a big jump compared to the makeup 10 years ago, when one in 10 owners was a woman. What’s more, the data suggests that women could soon make up one quarter of owners, a number that would mark a major shift in a powersports segment long dominated by males, according to that same survey.
In some cases, they’re already there. Among all age groups, women now make up 19 percent of motorcycle owners, but if you break it down by generation, the younger Gen Y group showed a whopping 26 percent of owners are women. For Gen X motorcycle owners, it’s 22 percent.
Proper Risk Metric for Motorcycle Fatalities?
As a life actuary, I’m generally looking at death rates on an annual basis, but this is not really the appropriate exposure metric when it comes to motor vehicle accidents. If I compared motorcycle accident deaths vs. all other motor vehicle accident deaths, the result looks like this:
This is not a fair comparison of riskiness — far more people are driving cars, trucks, vans, etc. than are riding motorcycles.
Motorcycle Riding Riskiness: Fairly High
To compare like-to-like, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration uses Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) per year as the exposure basis (and to make the numbers tenable, it’s millions of VMT per year as the standard unit.)
The most recent study from the NHTSA is from last July: 2023 Motorcycles Traffic Safety Facts
Some key findings I’ve selected from the report: [I focus on fatalities, not injuries]
In 2023 there were 6,335 motorcyclists killed, 15 percent of all traffic fatalities.
….
Per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in 2023, the fatality rate for motorcyclists (31.39) was almost 28 times the passenger car occupant fatality rate (1.13).
Thirty-four percent of motorcycle riders in fatal crashes in 2023 had no valid motorcycle licenses.
In 2023 motorcycle riders in fatal crashes had higher percentages of alcohol impairment than drivers of any other motor vehicle type (26% for motorcycles, 24% for passenger cars, 20% for light trucks, and 4% for large trucks).
Forty-one percent of motorcycle riders who died in single-vehicle crashes in 2023 were alcohol-impaired.
…
In States without universal helmet laws, based on known helmet use, 51 percent of motorcyclists killed in 2023 were not wearing helmets, as compared to 10 percent in States with universal helmet laws.
I threw in the helmet laws item, though I’m not going to even address that element of riskiness here.
I will note this item in the report, because this is important:
Important Change for Motorized Bicycles: Prior to 2022, motorized bicycles were collected as motor vehicles and classified as motorcycles in FARS and CRSS, and their operators and passengers were captured as motorists. Beginning in 2022, FARS and CRSS are no longer collecting motorized bicycles as motor vehicles. Consequently, operators and passengers of motorized bicycles will be captured as pedalcyclists when involved in a motor vehicle traffic crash. Any traffic crash involving only motorized bicycle(s) will no longer be captured in FARS or CRSS. In 2021, there were 43 traffic fatalities on motorized bicycles reported to FARS, accounting for 0.7 percent of all motorcyclist fatalities.
This may indicate a difference between the death certificate data and the FARS/CRSS data.
This report did not indicate sex of those killed, alas.
But note the items in comparing those dying in motorcycle riding in 2023:
A high percentage were unlicensed
A very high percentage of single-vehicle crashes were alcohol-impaired
A high percentage of any crashes were also alcohol-impaired (notice that it was also fairly high for cars)
Basically, lots of risky behavior going on.
There’s a table on speeding with the fatalities:
Note that speeding is involved less than half the time, except for the youngest riders.
Also, look at the locations and conditions of the fatal crashes — generally good weather, not the interstate, but main roads in urban areas, usually in daylight hours. Essentially, the conditions under which one wants to ride a motorcycle and where one would want to ride (interstates would not be pleasant - you want to be riding where there is something interesting to look at, with interesting roads, not straightaways, etc.)
Setting the alcohol issue aside for a moment, even if the motorcyclist themselves is behaving perfectly on the roads, there is the issue of other drivers and the condition of the roads.
In short, even if motorcyclists do everything correctly, they are vulnerable to hitting potholes and other drivers dinging them in a way that those in cars and trucks are not.
Thus the disparity in risk, per millions of VMT — about 28 times riskier in 2023.
If I go back to the pre-pandemic year of 2019, before people got wackier on the roads, this report about motorcycle safety from the NHTSA gives us this key finding:
Per vehicle miles traveled in 2019, motorcyclist fatalities occurred nearly 29 times more frequently than passenger car occupant fatalities in traffic crashes.
Indeed, the ratio of motorcycle fatalities to passenger car fatalities used to be much worse — 30 times and higher per VMT. (digging through prior years)
Some of the improvement comes from the spread of helmet laws (and some comes from worsening car crash fatalities, whups), but some just comes from the aging of the U.S. population.
Yes, there are older guys on their cushy cruisers, and they still get in accidents (as my father-in-law … while in HIS EIGHTIES… got banged up on his motorcycle. Though he’s still alive and watching sumo, and texting me about it.) But they’re less apt to do it than the younger men.
Is It Worth It?
Summertime is a great time to go cruising on motorcycles, among other things (jet skiing, swimming, hiking, etc.)
All of these activities have risk.
What finally inspired me to do this post, after years of saying I would do this, is this particular brou-ha-ha in my town:
2 Jun 2026, Daily Voice: North Salem SRO Arrested For DWI After Fatal NY Motorcycle Crash That Killed Brother
I live in North Salem, and there was a mighty kerfuffle about the SRO being employed at the local school (we have only two — an elementary school and a combined middle/high school) after hearing about the DWI.
The situation is a bit of a mess: 3 Jun 2026, North Salem News, PBA disputes Warren County account involving North Salem SRO after fatal crash
To keep it “safe”, here is a link to the Warren County sheriff’s office press release: 31 May 2026
Overview:
On Sunday May 31st 2026, at approximately 01:35 am The Warren County Sheriff’s Office responded to State Route 9, in the area of The Nordick Inn in the Town of Lake George for a report of a serious personal injury motorcycle accident.
The Warren County Sheriff’s Office as well as Lake George EMS and the Lake George Fire Department responded to the scene and rendered aid to the operator of the motorcycle, 31 year old Brian P. Kilduff of Brewster, NY. Kilduff had suffered severe injuries as a result of the crash and was pronounced deceased on the scene.
The deceased’s brother, 33 year old Michael Kilduff of Pawling NY was riding his motorcycle in the same group as the victim and was determined to be operating while intoxicated. Kilduff refused a chemical test and was processed and released to return to the Lake George Town Court at a later date.
Disputes are going on in local, private chats, etc., and I am staying out of those.
So yes, regular riding motorcycles, even doing everything right is risky. But I understand that everything in life is risky, and making that decision to take on that risk may be worth it.
However.
Don’t drink alcohol and ride motorcycles, y’all.
That’s definitely not worth it.
