Progressive Study of Motorcycle Crashes

One thing to note right away is this only seems to include states Progressive offers insurance in.



They don't sell insurance here in Massachusetts and Massachusetts appears to be missing from the figures.



I'm not sure where else they don't sell insurance but I believe MA is not the only state Progressive won't sell in.



(Has to do with insurance laws regarding pricing, not riders being extra stupid/dangerous)

You don't have to be a rocket science to analyze the data on thefts and come to the only possible conclusion: there are per capita more retired dentists living in the Honolulu metro area than any other major metropolitan area, especially retired orthodontists. Their contribution to the high rates is two-fold: First, many have inhaled too much nitrous oxide over their careers and can no longer remember to even remove the keys from their bikes, let alone lock them, resulting in easy pickins' for thieves. Second, those retired dentists without brain damage are well aware of this first group and have formed a nefarious gang of bike thieves called the Dental Mongols, who wait each weekend to attend the barbecues of the impaired dentists, pretending to be their friends, all the while planning for large trucks they have hired, to haul away the many unlocked bikes in the front driveway, while everyone else is inhaling leftover nitrous in the backyard. They then ship the bikes to Macau where they are stripped, refinished and sold as Korean bikes. You can never trust a dentist.

This is data is completely useless. They don't tell you how the "likelihood of a crash" is defined. Is this number of crashes per number of insured motorcycles? Number of crashes per number of riders? Number of crashes per mile ridden? I have a feeling it's the first one, which isn't very meaningful at all. The last definition is the one that's most useful, but I doubt that Progressive has mileage data.



Also, they don't say anything about the severity of the crashes. Sure, New York has a high likelihood of a crash, but fender-benders in slow-moving city street traffic are much less dangerous than fatal highway or suburban intersection crashes that you might see elsewhere in the country.



It's pretty sad that an insurance company, which lives and dies by actuarial analysis did such a *****-poor job of analyzing and presenting statistical data...