There’s a moment every rider knows about even if they’ve never lived through it: the split second when a car starts cutting across your lane and you have to decide, instantly, whether you’re going to lay the bike down or take the hit. It’s not a decision anyone wants to make on a Monday evening commute, but that’s exactly the spot a motorcyclist found himself in this week near Spencerville, Indiana.
According to a release from the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office, the rider was heading north on State Road 1 when a car traveling the opposite direction began making a left turn onto Pearl Street, right into his path. With nowhere to go and no time to think it over, the motorcyclist swerved hard, lost control, and went down. He walked away with abrasions to his right arm, which, all things considered, is about as good an outcome as you can hope for when two vehicles nearly occupy the same patch of asphalt at the same time.
The driver of the car told police he simply didn’t see the motorcycle. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the explanation investigators hear after this type of crash more often than any other. It’s not usually a case of someone trying to beat the bike through the intersection. It’s a case of a driver’s eyes sweeping right past a motorcycle as if it weren’t there at all.
This particular crash didn’t end in tragedy, and that’s worth pausing on, because plenty like it don’t. The left-turn scenario has earned a reputation among riders for a reason, and it’s one of those situations where understanding why it keeps happening might be just as useful as the news story itself.
A Crash Pattern Riders Know All Too Well
This wasn’t some freak occurrence. Crashes where a car turns left directly into an oncoming motorcycle’s path, sometimes called “left turn across path” crashes by researchers, are consistently identified as the most common way cars and motorcycles collide.
It happens when a driver turns left in front of an oncoming motorcyclist, and without enough time to stop, the rider ends up colliding with the side of the car. Studies on the subject put the share of fatal motorcycle crashes tied to left turns somewhere in the 40 percent range, depending on whose numbers you’re looking at, which is a sizable chunk for one single maneuver to be responsible for.
Why Drivers Say They “Just Didn’t See It”
It would be easy to assume drivers are lying when they say this, but the research suggests otherwise. Researchers point to something called inattentional blindness, where a driver’s brain essentially shifts into autopilot and stops actively looking for things like motorcycles, bicycles, or pedestrians. Add to that the simple fact that a motorcycle presents a much smaller visual profile than a car or truck, and drivers frequently end up misjudging how fast an approaching bike is actually moving, since smaller vehicles tend to appear slower than they really are.
It’s not malice. It’s biology working against bikers, which doesn’t make it any less dangerous.
The Lopsided Geometry of a Left Turn
There’s also a simple physics problem at play here. A driver making a right turn never has to cross oncoming traffic, but a left turn requires threading a gap in traffic while also watching for vehicles coming from the opposite direction, all in a few seconds.
That geometry alone makes left turns far riskier than right turns at the same intersection, and it’s a big part of why this crash type shows up again and again in the data, year after year, regardless of the state or the road.
A Reminder Worth Repeating
Nobody walks away from a story like this thinking motorcyclists need to be reminded to watch for cars, riders already know that better than anyone. But it’s a fair nudge for the rest of us behind the wheel to take that extra half-second glance before committing to a left turn, especially at dusk or in a rural stretch where a single headlight can be easy to miss.
The rider in Spencerville is dealing with some road rash this week instead of something far worse, and that’s a small bit of good news worth holding onto.