Motorcycle Accidents in Washington: The Lane, the Helmet Argument, and the Coverage Nobody Told You to Buy

A motorcycle is entitled to the whole lane, and that is a statute

Drivers treat a motorcycle as half a vehicle. The law does not. RCW 46.61.608(1) says all motorcycles are entitled to full use of a lane and that no motor vehicle shall be driven in such a manner as to deprive any motorcycle of the full use of a lane. The one exception written into the subsection is two motorcycles riding abreast in a single lane, which the statute permits and then caps at two by RCW 46.61.608(4).

That matters at the moment a driver drifts over to share your lane, squeezes past you at a merge, or crowds you to the fog line because you were only taking up a few feet of it. None of that is a courtesy question. It is a right of way the Legislature gave you in writing.

The passing rules carry the same judgment. RCW 46.61.110(1)(b) says that when the vehicle being overtaken is a motorcycle, a driver who fails to pass at a safe distance is assessed an additional fine on top of the base penalty, and that the fine may not be waived, reduced, or suspended unless the court finds the driver indigent. A traffic fine is not civil liability and no infraction decides your claim. What it tells you is how seriously the statute treats the risk a passing car creates for the person on the bike.

Is lane splitting legal in Washington?

No. RCW 46.61.608(3) says no person shall operate a motorcycle between lanes of traffic or between adjacent lines or rows of vehicles. RCW 46.61.608(2) separately forbids overtaking and passing in the same lane as the vehicle being overtaken, with a narrow carve-out for passing a pedestrian or a bicyclist at a safe distance of at least three feet. Subsection (5) exempts police officers on duty, and nobody else.

Riders ask this because they have been told that splitting between stopped cars is safer than sitting in the middle of them, and because it is lawful in other states. In Washington it is not, and a crash that happens while you are between two lines of cars is a harder case.

Harder is not hopeless, and the reason is worth understanding. RCW 5.40.050 provides that breaking a statute, ordinance, or administrative rule is not negligence per se but may be considered by the trier of fact as evidence of negligence. The section lists four exceptions that still are negligence per se, and the traffic one is driving under the influence. Lane splitting is not on that list. So the violation is evidence a jury weighs against everything else in the case, not an automatic verdict.

Do I lose my case if I was not wearing a helmet?

Washington requires one. RCW 46.37.530(1)(c) makes it unlawful to operate or ride on a motorcycle on a state highway, county road, or city street without a motorcycle helmet, with the neck or chin strap fastened securely while the motorcycle is in motion. RCW 46.37.530(3) defines the helmet by federal standard: a hard outer shell, padding, a retention system, and the manufacturer's certification under 49 C.F.R. 571.218 that it meets the United States Department of Transportation standard. A novelty shell is not a helmet under that definition.

Now the part the adjuster is counting on you not knowing. Washington's seat belt statute, RCW 46.61.688(6), says in so many words that failing to wear a safety belt does not constitute negligence and may not be admissible as evidence of negligence in any civil action. The helmet statute contains no provision like it. That silence is why the argument gets made, and it is why the answer is not a clean one in either direction.

What can be said accurately is this. Not wearing a helmet does not bar a claim, because Washington is a comparative fault state and fault reduces an award rather than ending it. Under RCW 5.40.050 a breach of the helmet statute would be evidence of negligence rather than negligence per se. And whether that evidence has anything to do with the injuries actually in dispute is a separate question, because a helmet has no bearing on a shattered femur. Expect the argument. Do not accept it as the end of the conversation, and do not let a recorded statement on day one be where it gets decided.

Being partly at fault does not end your claim

RCW 4.22.005 is the rule the whole system runs on: contributory fault chargeable to the claimant diminishes the award proportionately, but does not bar recovery. If a jury finds you twenty percent responsible, your award is reduced by twenty percent. It is not zero, and Washington has no threshold at which it becomes zero.

Fault is defined broadly by RCW 4.22.015, reaching negligent and reckless acts and omissions, unreasonable assumption of risk, and the unreasonable failure to avoid an injury or to mitigate damages. The same section says a comparison of fault considers both the nature of the conduct and the extent of its causal relation to the damages, which is the sentence that answers a defense built on speed or gear rather than on what caused the collision.

RCW 4.22.070 then has the jury assign a percentage to every entity that caused the damages, including you, and makes each defendant liable for its own share only. There is one exception that matters to riders: under RCW 4.22.070(1)(b), if the trier of fact finds the injured person was not at fault, the defendants are jointly and severally liable for the sum of their shares. That is why a case in which the rider bears no fault is in a different posture from the same injuries with a fault argument attached, and not only because of the percentage.

The coverage nobody told you to buy

This is the part of a motorcycle case that surprises people, and it is a single clause. RCW 48.22.030(2) requires every auto policy issued in Washington to carry underinsured motorist coverage, which is the coverage that pays when the at-fault driver has no insurance or not enough of it. Then it writes an exception into the middle of the sentence: except while operating or occupying a motorcycle or motor-driven cycle.

So the protection a car owner gets automatically unless they reject it in writing does not follow a rider onto the bike. The Legislature's answer was disclosure rather than coverage. RCW 48.22.030(9) requires an insurer that writes motorcycle insurance in this state to provide information to prospective insureds about the coverage, and RCW 48.22.030(10) requires it to give a named insured who bought motorcycle liability coverage an opportunity to reject underinsured coverage for that motorcycle in writing.

Personal injury protection runs the same way. RCW 48.22.085(1) requires PIP to be offered as an optional coverage on an automobile liability policy, and RCW 48.22.005(1) defines automobile as a passenger car under RCW 46.04.382. A motorcycle is not a passenger car. So do not assume the medical coverage that a car policy carries is sitting behind your bike.

The practical consequence is blunt. Washington's minimum liability limits are frequently not enough for a serious orthopedic injury, and when the driver who turned in front of you carries the minimum, underinsured motorist coverage on your own motorcycle policy is frequently the only money in the case. Pull the declarations page before you decide anything. If the coverage is there, there is somewhere else to look for payment. If you rejected it, you want to know that in week one rather than in month nine.

The car that never touched you

A great many motorcycle crashes involve no contact at all. A car crosses the line, you lay it down avoiding the car, the car keeps going, and there is no paint transfer and no plate number. Washington has a name for that vehicle and a route to coverage for it.

RCW 48.22.030(8) defines a phantom vehicle as a motor vehicle that causes bodily injury, death, or property damage to an insured without physical contact with the insured or the vehicle the insured was occupying, and then attaches two conditions. The facts of the accident must be corroborated by competent evidence other than the testimony of the insured or anyone else with an underinsured motorist claim from the same accident. And the accident must be reported to the appropriate law enforcement agency within seventy-two hours.

Seventy-two hours is a real deadline and it runs while you are in a hospital bed. If nobody files a report, the phantom vehicle claim is in trouble no matter how true the account is. The corroboration requirement is the other half of it, which is why the names of the people who stopped at the scene are worth more than almost anything else you can collect that day.

How long do I have to bring a motorcycle accident claim in Washington?

Three years. RCW 4.16.080(2) sets a three-year limit for any other injury to the person or rights of another, and a motorcycle injury claim runs under it from the date of the crash.

RCW 4.16.190 takes the time a claimant was under eighteen out of the limitation period, so a passenger who was a minor is on a different clock than the rider. That is a reason to check rather than a reason to wait.

If the other vehicle belonged to a city, a county, a transit agency, or the state, there is a separate claim you have to present before you can file suit at all, and the deadline for it is much shorter than three years. That one is covered in the article on claims against government entities.

Where this goes wrong

The recorded statement in the first week, taken while you are on pain medication, in which the questions are about speed, gear, and how long you have been riding rather than about the left turn.

Nobody reports the phantom vehicle inside seventy-two hours, and the only evidence that it existed is the rider's own account, which RCW 48.22.030(8)(a) says is not enough on its own.

The bike gets released to salvage before anyone photographs it or downloads anything from it. The motorcycle is evidence of the impact and of how the crash happened, and a tow yard will dispose of it on its own schedule.

No one ever looks at the rider's own declarations page, so a case settles against a minimum limits liability policy while underinsured motorist coverage sits unused on the motorcycle policy.

Gear gets thrown away. The helmet, the jacket, the boots and the abrasions on all three are the physical record of what the body absorbed, and they photograph in a way that a chart note does not.

Settling before the orthopedic picture is finished. Hardware gets removed, nonunions declare themselves, and the long-term cost of a crushed ankle is not knowable at eight weeks.

What a lawyer does here

Most of the useful work happens early. Getting the collision report and the names of the witnesses while they are still reachable. Putting a hold on the motorcycle before the yard crushes it. Reading every policy in reach, yours included, because the carve-out in RCW 48.22.030(2) means the answer to who pays is often found on your own declarations page rather than the other driver's. Keeping you off the phone with an adjuster whose first three questions are about your helmet. And making the liability case out of the physical evidence instead of out of a contest between two drivers' memories, because the version of events that gets written down in the first month tends to be the version everybody argues about for the next two years.

I handle motorcycle injury claims from my office in downtown Spokane, and I represent clients throughout Washington. I am admitted in Washington, WSBA #55307, and Oregon, OSB #242384.

If you were hurt on a bike, I offer a free consultation by appointment at my Spokane office, 601 W. 1st Ave., Suite 1400. Bring the collision report number, the declarations pages for every policy in the household, and photographs of the bike and your gear if you have them.

Disclaimer

This article is general information about Washington law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Law changes, and how it applies depends on facts specific to your situation. If you have a question about your own circumstances, speak with a lawyer.