By Jason Tenenbaum
Every September the roads around Seneca, Cayuga and Keuka fill with riders doing the lake loops before the weather turns. Routes 14, 89 and 54A are as good as it gets in New York. They are also two-lane roads shared with wine-trail traffic, farm equipment, and drivers from out of state who have never met a deer at dusk. Crashes happen, and when they do, riders learn something about New York insurance that nobody told them at the dealership.
New York no-fault does not cover you on a motorcycle. Not as a rider, not as a passenger. I have practiced insurance and injury law in this state for more than twenty years, and I still watch people find this out in a hospital bed.
Why the law leaves riders out
New York’s no-fault system is built around the “motor vehicle,” and the statute deliberately excludes motorcycles from that term. Insurance Law section 5102(f) defines a motor vehicle and then says it “shall not include . . . a motorcycle.” Section 5103(a)(1) requires an auto policy to pay first-party benefits to “persons, other than occupants of another motor vehicle or a motorcycle.” The mandatory endorsement in every New York auto policy repeats it: the coverage does not apply “to a personal injury sustained by any person while occupying a motorcycle.”
It was not always this way. Before 1977, motorcyclists were treated like pedestrians and collected no-fault from whichever car hit them. The legislature amended the statute that year, and the memo that accompanied the amendment said the point was to stop treating motorcycle occupants as pedestrians who “enjoy the benefits of no-fault at no cost.” So the exclusion is not an accident of drafting. It is policy.
What that means in practice: the $50,000 in medical bills and lost wages that a car driver gets from their own policy after a crash, no matter who was at fault, does not exist for you. Your health insurance pays the hospital. Your motorcycle policy pays only if you bought medical payments coverage, which most riders have not. Your lost wages come from nowhere until the liability claim resolves.
The trade-off that helps you
There is a flip side that most riders also do not know. Because a motorcycle is not a “motor vehicle” under the statute, a rider is generally not a “covered person” either. New York’s serious-injury threshold, the rule that bars a lawsuit for pain and suffering unless you can prove a fracture, a permanent limitation, or one of the other listed categories, applies only to actions between covered persons. A rider suing the driver who pulled out in front of them usually does not have to clear it. Car occupants fight for months over whether a herniated disc is “significant.” Riders, as a rule, do not.
So the system takes away your first-party benefits and, in exchange, takes away a major defense. Whether that is a fair trade depends on how badly you were hurt and how good the other driver’s insurance is.
The question that actually gets litigated: when did you stop being a rider?
Because the exclusion is settled, the fights are at its edge. If you go down and are then hit by something else, were you still “occupying” the motorcycle?
The leading New York case came out of exactly the kind of road we ride here. In Boyson v Kwasowsky, decided by the Fourth Department in 2015, a husband and wife were on his motorcycle on Route 49 in the Town of Vienna, north of Oneida Lake. He pulled out to pass a recreational vehicle, saw a pickup coming the other way, veered and laid the bike down. Both riders came off. The motorcycle slid into the pickup, went airborne, and landed on his wife. She conceded she was a rider when she hit the pavement. She argued she was a pedestrian, lying in the road, when the bike came back down on her, and that the pickup’s policy therefore owed her no-fault benefits.
The court said no. Because the thing that hit her was the same motorcycle she had been riding, because it hit her immediately, and because the same pickup that caused the ejection was what launched the bike, it was one accident and she was “occupying” the motorcycle throughout. The court was careful, though, to distinguish out-of-state cases where a thrown rider was hit by a different vehicle in what amounted to a second accident. New York has not decided that scenario. A Finger Lakes rider who goes down on Route 14 and is then struck by the next car in line has a real argument that they were a pedestrian by then, and a real claim against that car’s policy.
I wrote up the full decision, the policy language it turned on, and what it leaves open in a guide on why New York no-fault leaves motorcycle riders out. The short version for anyone reading this from a hospital: the sequence of impacts is the whole case. Write down which vehicle hit you, how long after you went down, and where you were lying. Get the names of every witness who saw the order of events.
What to do before the season ends
Read your motorcycle policy’s declarations page. If it does not list medical payments coverage, call your agent and ask what it costs. In my experience it is cheap relative to a single emergency room visit.
Look at the uninsured and underinsured motorist limits on the same policy. On a road where the other driver may be a tourist with a minimum out-of-state policy, your own UM/SUM coverage is the most important document you own.
If you are hurt and there is any chance you were off the bike and on foot when a second impact happened, file a no-fault application with that vehicle’s carrier within 30 days anyway. The carrier can deny it and you can fight the denial, as Mrs. Boyson did. A missed 30-day deadline is much harder to fix.
And do not let anyone tell you that because no-fault does not cover you, you have no case. The liability claim against the driver who caused the crash is the case, and it is usually a stronger one than a car driver would have.
Jason Tenenbaum is the principal of the Law Office of Jason Tenenbaum, P.C. in Huntington Station, New York. He has handled New York no-fault and personal injury matters since 2002 and has written about the state’s insurance and appellate decisions since 2008.
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