Houston
Motorcycle Insurance

The Loss That Happens While the Bike Is Parked

Riders think about crashes, and in Houston the statistically expensive event is often water. This city floods, and it floods in ways that reach places nobody planned for: a garage that has never taken water, a covered parking level, an apartment lot, a driveway on a street that drains fine in ordinary rain. A motorcycle is low, light and full of electronics, and it does not take much standing water to write one off entirely — the engine, the wiring loom, the ECU and the instrumentation are all vulnerable at depths a car would shrug off. The coverage that answers is comprehensive, the same part of the policy that handles theft, fire and hail, and it is exactly the part that riders drop first when they are economizing. A liability-only rider in Houston has no protection at all against the single most characteristic loss in the region. The riding season compounds everything, because Houston’s is effectively year-round: more months on the road than a northern rider, on a road network of feeders, high-speed interchanges and heavy freight, in a metro where the share of drivers carrying little or no insurance is not reassuring. That last point is what makes uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage the other line worth arguing about.