Motorcycle crashes are much more likely to cause severe injuries, fatalities and extensive medical costs than car accidents, a Canadian study suggested.
While plenty of previous research has documented the potential for motorcycle collisions to lead to far more extensive injuries than car crashes, a current study by the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) offers fresh evidence of the financial toll.
Researchers examined data on 26,831 patients injured in motorcycle crashes and 281,826 hurt in car accidents. Overall, the injury rate for motorcycle crashes was three times the injury rate for car crashes, the study found.
Severe injuries were 10 times more likely with motorcycle crashes.
Motorcycle crashes, meanwhile, cost about twice as much as car accidents to treat over the first two years after the collisions. The average cost of motorcycle crashes was about US$4,569 compared with about US$2,349 for car accidents.
“We have shown that (accidents involving) motorcycles are considerably more dangerous and costly than (those involving) cars, and it is likely that will always be the case,” said the lead study author of Sunnybrook Hospital and the University of Toronto Dr Daniel Pincus.
“The study matters because, despite considerable improvements in motor vehicle safety over the last 20 years, mortality and morbidity attributed to motorcycle trauma has remained stable or increased,” Pincus said by email. “Estimating the medical costs of care for motorcycle crashes may provide an additional incentive to improve safety.”
The annual injury rate for motorcycles was 2,194 people out of every 100,000 registered owners, compared with 718 people out of every 100,000 registered car owners, the study found.
With costs roughly doubled and injury rates roughly three times higher with motorcycles than with cars, researchers estimated that the total health costs of injuries was about six times higher for motorcycle owners than for car owners.
The study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how motorcycle crashes might cause worse injuries or higher medical costs than car crashes.
Researchers also lacked data on costs covered by private health insurance or indirect costs such as lost wages or reduced productivity incurred by individual patients.
“Even so, the findings add to the evidence linking motorcycle crashes to a higher risk of injuries,” said Dr Lois Lee, an emergency medicine physician at Boston Children’s Hospital and researcher at Harvard Medical School who wasn’t involved in the study.
“Because motorcyclists are much more exposed on the road, there’s a much higher risk that crashes will result in injuries to the thorax, abdominal area, head and extremities,” Lee said adding, “Helmets help prevent head injuries but don’t protect the rest of the body.”
“Motorcyclists should understand the increased dangers associated with riding a motorcycle and that the risk of serious injury and medical costs are significantly increased compared with riding inside an automobile involved in a motor vehicle crash,” Lee said by email. “To try to mitigate head injuries, motorcyclists should wear a helmet and follow the posted speed limit.”
This study is alarming with regards to Pakistan given that the motorcycle riders here are usually reckless and do not abide by the traffic rules, breaking signals, driving off-road, etc. The motorcycle users outnumber the cars on the road, which means that a larger portion of the population is at risk. Furthermore, a lot of the motorcycle users belong to the lower and middle classes and hence cannot afford medical costs; and lack of healthcare facilities exposes them to even more loss.
