It's bad to see any motorcyclist go down in a crash. I wish Ben a speedy recovery; it sounds like he was pretty lucky it wasn't worse.
Without witnessing the crash, it's almost impossible to know how the events unfolded. It is sounding like the car driver may have run the light, which (if true) would put her at fault in the crash.
But, there's another thing that we, as motorcyclists, should be mentioning here. Approaching an intersection, make yourself as visible as possible to other drivers, and position yourself in the lane and line of traffic so that you can most effectively see what is going on in front of you (and the cars in front of you). I have no idea if this was a factor in this crash, but it's at least worth considering and mentioning. Unfortunately, there's not much that we can do to control the way other people drive their cars. I think sometimes motorcyclists are too quick to automatically place all of the blame on a car driver and forget about the responsibility that we have for ourselves. Just my $.02.
Will
