You’re heading south on Austin to take a left on 26th. You have a green light and proceed to make your 
turn. Suddenly and without notice an 18-wheeler comes flying through the intersection and you go down.
This is an all too often occurrence if you’re riding a motorcycle. What do you do? Well, we would respectfully argue that it’s important to get help. Our firm is located just north of the city so the home of Capone is close to the headquarters of your Cicero motorcycle accident lawyer. If you need help, contact our office for a free consultation.
What is a Safe Speed for a Motorcycle?
What is a safe speed for you to operate your motorcycle at? The fact is the answer changes depending on the number of risk factors a rider faces, including:
- What time of the day are you riding?
- Are you heading into the sun?
- What’s the weather?
- What’s the traction like?
- Where are you riding – Highway or side street?
- What type of bike are you on?
There is rarely one cause of an accident, there are usually a variety of causes. Your Cicero motorcycle accident attorney will sift through the facts of the accident and help you recover the most you can for the injuries you’ve suffered.
Is Lane Splitting Legal in Illinois?
Lane splitting is the practice of riding a bike between 2 vehicles theoretically to overtake them. It’s technically not legal in Illinois like it is in California. However, that does not mean that riders don’t do it. We’ve been on the roads ourselves countless times and seen it happen.
There’s good reason for it. It may actually be safer for riders to split lanes than sit in traffic on the freeway sucking up fumes from the car in front of it or risking getting rear ended by the car behind it.
Having said that, lane splitting is one of the things that gives riders a bad name. Normally, it’s because its done at a very high rate of speed. As mentioned above, how fast is safe varies by the situation. But if you’re doing 90 or 100 between cars, a witness to a potential vehicle accident is almost always going to blame the rider for the accident. And further, that individual who witnessed a rider driving like that will believe in his or her own mind that all riders ride like that, which of course is not true.
As such, if you’re going to speed or split lanes, just exercise as much caution as you possibly can and remember that riders are biased against already and anything done on the street will only add to that reputation.
Do I Have to Stop at a Red Light on a Motorcycle?
This is an issue that has always plagued riders. Because a motorcycle is low profile and doesn’t weigh nearly as much as a car, it often happens that a rider can be stuck waiting at a stoplight for an extended period of time because the bike did not trigger the light to change.
So back in 2012, the state of Illinois changed the law to allow motorcycles to proceed through a red light if the light fails to turn green in a reasonable amount of time. As of the time of writing this, the rule did not apply in the city of Chicago so beware if you’re within the city limits.
We’re So Close to Cicero We Can Smell Al’s From Here
If you need a Cicero motorcycle lawyer to represent you in Cook County or in any of these surrounding cities:
- Berwyn
- Riverside
- Oak Park
- Brookfield
- LaGrange
- Lyons
Cicero is a pretty large town of 80,000+ people. It has a famous history of course as the home of Al Capone, the old Hawthorne Race Course and the Wirtz company that owns that Blackhawks among other things. Cicero is also close to Midway Airport, just off the 290 and south of Oak Park, Illinois, a city that used to be a part of Cicero until it broke off on its own.
