How are you gentlemen?

[.RJ]

I just added fault because I was sure people would give me a hard time for 9 car accidents in 13 years of driving.

That is a lot for someone who wont even go inside the beltway

[Apoc]

Tell me about it.

In actuality, all 9 were in a span of 8 years (18-26). Now you know why I love my insurance company.

[Evan]

Age: 28

Car Miles Driven: ~120k

Car Accidents: 3. 2 when I was a teenager. 1 when I introduced my wrx to a tirewall. (does that count?)

Car Injuries: 1. in the passenger seat

[Feersty]

Mine is coming. Got some calculating to do. I have only started caring about mileage since this year.

[.paul]

Paul, I think you can cut your bike accident count down. We're not counting on track stuff.

well then only one accident for the bike

[Dave]

Age: 25
Miles Driven: 120,000
Accidents: 6
Injuries: 1 from being rearended by a drunken asshole

Wow, my accident history looks really bad until you break it down. I nailed a deer once, I tapped a girl pulling into our high school parking lot, and I rammed my best friend as we were leaving Blockbuster one night in high school. Two of the other three were retards hitting me. Of all of them only 2 ever needed to be reported to insurance.

Is everybody only recording accidents and injuries when they were the driver?

[Sijray21]

i still remember the time some guy backed into the front of your 240sx while Lindsay was still in the car in front Scotty and our apartment!! Although that wouldn't count in this scenario since it was parked :wink:

[Steve85]

Age: 35

Car Miles: ~270K

Accidents: 2

Injuries: 0 (bumper kisses at stop signs)

Bike miles: hmm 5280ft/mile, made it 3 feet so ~.0000568miles

Accident: 1

Injury: do we count ego?

[Andy]

Is everybody only recording accidents and injuries when they were the driver?

I think so. Isn't this a poll about driver competence?

[Dave]

i still remember the time some guy backed into the front of your 240sx while Lindsay was still in the car in front Scotty and our apartment!! Although that wouldn't count in this scenario since it was parked :wink:

That stupid tramp never gave me a dime either, or Lindsey for that matter. She ended up being the last straw for me. From then on, if somebody hits me at all, the cops are coming to make a report unless it's the equivalent of a door ding.

[John]

From then on, if somebody hits me at all, the cops are coming to make a report unless it's the equivalent of a door ding.

Police aren't required to write a report if they deem the damage is under a certain threshold and/or nobody is injured. It all comes down to the discretion of the office, with 95% of the time will result in no report. Funny how your taxpayer dollars work, huh, especially when you count how many police on the side of the road "serving" the public.

[Ginger]

I would think that their discretion is more dependent on clear evidence of a broken traffic law. I don't know this for sure, of course. I wasn't injured in my motorcycle accident, although the lady was obviously very at fault, and a ticket was issued to her. I've regularly heard of tickets being issued to single-vehicle accidents, as well. If two parties have conflicting stories and no witnesses, though, what's an officer going to do, hold Kangaroo Court on the shoulder?

*edit* John, are you seriously awake and posting at 5am?

[Maengelito]

From then on, if somebody hits me at all, the cops are coming to make a report unless it's the equivalent of a door ding.

Police aren't required to write a report if they deem the damage is under a certain threshold and/or nobody is injured. It all comes down to the discretion of the office, with 95% of the time will result in no report. Funny how your taxpayer dollars work, huh, especially when you count how many police on the side of the road "serving" the public.

in va, that threshold is $1k. that doesnt mean he cant look at the evidence and assess who is at fault. a few months back, i was parked in downtown cville and when i came back to my car, there was a huge scratch and fresh red paint flakes all over my rear bumper. i looked at the red truck behind me which had a nice scratch on its bumper at the same height so i went to call the police. the officer looked at the damage and said it was definitely the other guy's fault. the officer specifically told me that if his insurance company was giving me a hard time or anything that he would testify on my behalf in small claims court.

[Dave]

Also keep in mind that $1000 is very easy to achieve. Hell, a simple scratch will often be a $500-$1000 repair just to have it repaited and blended into the surrounding panels.

The girl that hit the 240 had driven around it (mind you the car was running with and we all know it was loud even before we put the turndown on it), realized there weren't any spots up head, threw it in reverse and ran full tilt into the 240, which resulted in my car rolling back nearly a car length even with the e-brake engaged. In my opinion, it is always worth it to call the cops, if nothing else because then there is a report if you need to pursue it. I know I wish I had...

[BLINGMW]

Is everybody only recording accidents and injuries when they were the driver?

Apparently Evan no comprendo, because yes, that's the idea. And on-track accidents, again, not interested!

[John]

Let me cite a few experiences for you. I was on I-495 and a lady merged into me crushing in my door. We pulled over, she was apologetic, officer arrived and asked if we exchanged our info. We acknowledged and said "have a nice day." I asked for a police report for the insurance company, and he told me that the damage didn't meet the threshold. I mentioned to him that the damage was over $3K, and replied with "discretionary reasoning" and walked off. Thankfully the lady who hit me was honest to her insurance company.

Fast forward to this year, I get t-boned in the Lotus. Officer arrives at scene and says "Yep, she was at fault. Even if you were going 100mph through that intersection, she was at fault." I asked for the police report to file to the insurance company citing his assessment, and low and behold, they aren't required to write a report if nobody is injured. Sadly enough, if I had lied and complained about neck pain, the liability process would have been 100x easier than the hell I had to go through over the next 3 weeks.

Not trying to turn this into a cop-bashing thread, but it really saddens me to see how the police spend more time harassing the average joe on the road rather than serving the public. Virginia is probably the worst at it - take for instance my visits to Norfolk. Area is pretty run down with some serious crime problems. Instead, the police are all over the interstate (on average I saw 12-20 people pulled over every commute on 6 miles of interstate I drove, which caused awful traffic - please note that people already drive pretty slow there as is). I would much rather see my taxpayer dollars go towards the police spending more time in the community, serving the people, assisting as necessary - end result would be narrowing the rift between "us" and "them."

[GQROB]

Age:36

Car Miles Driven: 320000

Car Accidents: 2

Car Injuries: 0

Bike Miles Riden: 10000

Bike Accidents: 1

Bike Injuries: 1

[Mike]

Mine is coming. Got some calculating to do. I have only started caring about mileage since this year.

<--- waiting patiently.

[ViPER1313]

Split cop discussion to here.

[BLINGMW]

Chan you are an ISAT nerd at heart.

eh, maybe not, I didn't bother making any graphs. :wink:

In fact, I was pretty lazy. Spending a few hours on it, I wasn't able to find any good data split out by age group, and NHTSA (where I found most of the data) mostly focuses on injuries and fatalities. So this is only compared to national averages of all drivers.

of the 27 people who responded:

Avg age is 26. Until we're 34, auto accidents will continue to be our leading cause of death. Whoohoo!

Starting with automobiles---
We've driven an average of 189,666 miles each for a total of 5.12 million miles. I suppose that's reasonable, if as a group we've been driving for ~10 years.

We're somewhat in line with the 2006 national average for injuries. We have 0.12/100k miles, the national average is 0.09. I'd say that's probably good considering our age group. The bad news is, using either 0.12 or 0.09, we'll likely ALL be injured at some point in our lives while driving!

Accident #'s aren't so great. There are usually around 4.2 million accidents reported each year, but the NHTSA states ~10mil more go unreported. So I did the best I could and got a national average of 0.42/100k miles. We're more than 3x times higher than that at 1.37. 2.6 accidents for each of us already. I suppose this is due to age, but it could also be that we're considering any accident, while the "unreported" estimate added to the reported # may not be very accurate.

Bikes!
23,323 miles each for a total of 326,520 miles.

I was surprised to see that with not nearly as much data, we're again in line with the 2006 national average for injuries. We're at 0.92/100k miles, the national average is 0.81. Not great though, looks like we're potentially less safe than the average joe on a bike. And I saw quoted a few places that you're 8 times more likely to be injured on a bike than a car. Sadly (but in a warm and fuzzy data-validating way), per mile, our bike injuries are almost exactly 8x our car injuries.

I failed to find/fabricate a national average for non-injury motorcycle accidents. But our average is 6.43/100k miles! We're already at 1.5 accidents each.

Your happy thought for the night? The rising national average of motorcycle fatalities is now at .0425/100k miles. ~30x greater than cars/trucks. Before our club reaches, collectively, 10x the bike mileage we're racked up, one of us will be dead. :|

That's all?

Yes!

most of my data came from documents you can find here: <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/CMSWeb/listpublications.aspx?Id=A&ShowBy=DocType">http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/CMSWeb/lis ... By=DocType</a><!-- m -->