Study of the risks and dangers of motorcycling
Motorcycle safety is the study of the risks and dangers of motorcycling, and the approaches to mitigate that risk, focusing on motorcycle design, road design and traffic rules, rider training, and the cultural attitudes of motorcyclists and other road users.
Riding motorcycles on public roads carries several times the risk of riding in cars, which themselves are more risky than public conveyances like buses and trains. The human factors of motorcycle crashes are roughly equal between rider behavior and the actions of drivers sharing the roads. Technological changes, especially in the latter half of the 20th century, have made significant improvements in motorcycle safety. Serious research into motorcycle safety began in the US with the Hurt Report in 1981, followed by major studies in Europe and others. The main result of this research has been a greater emphasis on rider training and stricter licensing requirements. The US military recognized the need for their own focused motorcycle rider education in response to significant off-duty injuries of military personnel.
Crash rates and risks.
Traveling on a motorcycle carries a much higher risk of death or injury than driving the same distance in a car. Motorcyclists face a higher risk of fatal or severe injuries due to limited physical protection for the rider and lower visibility on the road. In 2006 US motorcyclists had a risk of a fatal crash that was 35 times greater than that of passenger cars, based on 390 motorcyclist deaths per billion vehicle miles and 11.1 car fatalities for that distance. In 2016 this rate was 28 times that for automobiles.
When looking at "all" reported crashes regardless of injuries, the crash rate for motorcycles in the US in 2016 was 6.31 per million miles driven, significantly higher than the rate of 3.28 crashes per million miles driven for cars and similar vehicles. However the primary reason for the higher rates of injuries and fatalities among motorcyclists is that cars provide more effective crash protection. For automobiles, 31% of crashes result in injury but only 0.29% of accidents are fatal. For motorcycles 78.3% of reported crashes result in injury and 4.24% of crashes are fatal.
Statistics from other countries confirm the US data. The UK Department for Transport indicated that motorcycles have 16 times the rate of serious injuries, people either killed or injured, compared to cars. UK data for casualties, i.e. the total of all injuries and fatalities combined, showed 6,043 casualties per billion miles traveled on motorcycles in 2017, 25.4 times the rate of 238 per billion miles travelled for cars. In the UK in 2017 there were 116.9 motorcyclist fatalities per billion passenger miles, 61.5 times the rate of 1.9 fatalities per billion passenger miles for occupants of cars. UK data shows a wider disparity between cars and motorcycles than US data in part because it is based on fatalities per passenger mile while US data is based on fatalities per vehicle mile.
A national study by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATS) found that:
Bicyclists and pedestrians are also unprotected in collisions with cars on public roads. In 2017, there were also 5,604 bicyclist casualties per billion passenger miles or 23.5 times the rate for cars, compared with pedestrians having about 7.6 times as many casualties per distance traveled. However bicycles and pedestrians travel at much lower speeds so the risk they incur per hour of travel is only a fraction as great. In contrast, the rate of fatal accidents for buses is lower than for cars, about 0.83 times as many.
The article on Motorcycle fatality rate in U.S. by year indicates that the number of motorcycle fatalities in the US has remained about 5000 per year for most of the past decade. In 2006, 13.10 cars out of 100,000 ended up in fatal crashes, while the rate for motorcycles was 72.34 per 100,000 registered motorcycles.
In the European union (the 28 member states) there were 663 driver and passenger fatalities for mopeds and 3,644 driver and passenger fatalities for motorcycles, according to data available in May 2018, although in the UK and Ireland mopeds are counted as motorcycles. The PTW (including both moped and motorbikes) rate is 8.2 fatalities per million population in the EU in 2016.
In the EU in 2016, PTW fatalities represented 17% of traffic fatalities, with a range from 4% in Romania to 32% in Greece. More than 88% of those fatalities were males
In France motorcycle fatality rates by travelled distance are 2200% higher (that is 23 times higher) than for cars.
In the European union (the 28 member states) there were 3657 motorcycle rider and passenger fatalities in 2016, that is 14% of EU traffic fatalities, registered in the CARE database.
Research.
Two major scientific research studies into the causes of motorcycle accidents have been conducted in North America and Europe: the Hurt Report (1981) and the MAIDS report (1999-00).
Hurt Report.
A major work done on this subject in the United States is the Hurt Report, published in 1981 with data collected in Los Angeles and the surrounding rural areas. There have been longstanding calls for a new safety study in the US, and Congress has provided the seed money for such a project, but as yet the remainder of the funding has not all been pledged.
The Hurt Report concluded with a list of 55 findings, as well as several major recommendations for law enforcement and legislation. Among these, 75% of motorcycle accidents involved a collision with another vehicle, usually a car. In the MAIDS report, the figure is 60%.
Other notable findings in the Hurt report (quoted below) were:
MAIDS report.
The most recent large-scale study of motorcycle accidents is the MAIDS report carried out in five European countries in 1999 to 2000, using the rigorous OECD standards, including a statistically significant sample size of over 900 crash incidents and over 900 control cases.
The MAIDS report tends to support most of the Hurt Report findings, for example that "69% of the OV [other vehicle] drivers attempted no collision avoidance manoeuvre," suggesting they did not see the motorcycle. And further that, "the largest number of PTW [powered two-wheeler] accidents is due to a perception failure on the part of the OV driver or the PTW rider." And "The data indicates that in 68.7% of all cases, the helmet was capable of preventing or reducing the head injury sustained by the rider (i.e., 33.2% + 35.5%). In 3.6% of all cases, the helmet was found to have no effect upon head injury" and "There were no reported cases in which the helmet was identified as the contact code for a serious or maximum neck injury."
Olson Report.
A lesser-known study, known as the Olson Report after the lead investigator in a 1979 University of Michigan study, found that rider safety could be enhanced by wearing conspicuous clothing (especially yellow-green); using headlights in daytime, especially modulated headlights; and using running lights and wearing retro-reflective clothing at night.
Inconclusive findings on conspicuity.
A New Zealand study using data taken between 1993 and 1996 in the city of Auckland, a "predominantly urban area" (Wells "et al." ) supported the Hurt Report's call for increased rider conspicuity, claiming that riders wearing white or light colored helmets, fluorescent or reflective clothing or using daytime headlights were under-represented when compared to a group of motorcycle accident victims. The accident victims were those who were killed, admitted or treated at hospital "with an injury severity score ;5 within 24 hours of a motorcycle crash". Accidents that did not result in hospitalization or treatment for a critical injury, or a death, were not considered, nor was there any consideration of involvement of other road users, or culpability. The definition of reflective or fluorescent clothing was taken to include "clothing or other articles such as a jacket, vest, apron, sash, ankle or wrist band, or back pack including stripes, decals or strips". No assessment of the type (open or full-face) of helmet was undertaken. Most of the crashes took place in "urban speed limit zones (66%), during the day (64%) and in fine weather (72%)". No association was observed between risk of crash related injury and the frontal colour of the operator's clothing or motorcycle.
The MAIDS report did not publish information on helmet color or the prevalence of reflective or fluorescent clothing in either the accident or control groups, or the use of lights in the control group, and therefore drew no statistical conclusions on their effectiveness, neither confirming nor refuting the claims of the Wells report. In each MAIDS case, the clothing worn by the rider was photographed and evaluated.
MAIDS found that motorcycles painted white were actually over-represented in the accident sample compared to the exposure data. On clothing, MAIDS used a "purely subjective" determination of if and how the clothing worn probably affected conspicuity in the accident. The report concluded that "in 65.3% of all cases, the clothing made no contribution to the conspicuity of the rider or the PTW [powered two-wheeler, i.e. motorcycle]. There were very few cases found in which the bright clothing of the PTW rider enhanced the PTW's overall conspicuity (46 cases). There were more cases in which the use of dark clothing decreased the conspicuity of the rider and the PTW (120 cases)." MAIDs concluded that in one case dark clothing actually increased conspicuity but reported none where bright clothing decreased it.
Attitudes to risk.
Transportation historian Jeremy Packer has suggested four categories to describe the different approaches riders take to the risks of motorcycling. Packer's book, 'Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship' is published by Duke University Press.
Packer's first and fourth categories take opposite views of motorcycling, but share a fatalistic notion that to motorcycle is to tempt fate. The second and third categories differ in the degree of emphasis they place on measures to limit the risk of riding, but share the view that riders have some degree of control and are not victims of fate.
Packer is a Michel Foucault-inspired historian who sees the approach to motorcycle safety found in mainstream sport and touring motorcycling media, supported by the MSF, and generally consistent with the advice of transport agencies, such as the US National Agenda for Motorcycle Safety, as an ideology or "discourse", and places it as only one among multiple ideologies one may hold about motorcycling risk. While giving respect to the first two discourses, Packer himself is sympathetic to the third approach and disdainful of the fourth. Packer's analysis of the second category, "hyperreflective self-disciplinary", acknowledges that seriousness, sobriety, ongoing training, and wearing complete safety gear is not misguided, but also has concerns over its close alignment with the profit motives of the insurance industry, the motorcycle safety gear advertisers, and the public relations desires of motorcycle manufacturers, as well as governmental bureaucratic inertia and mission creep. He sees motorcyclists who make non-utilitarian choices balancing risk and reward as being as respectable as other categories.
BMW psychologist and researcher Bernt Spiegel has found that non-motorcyclists and novice motorcyclists usually share the fatalistic attitude described by Thompson, insofar as they think that high speed motorcycling is like a game of chicken or Russian roulette, where the rider tests his courage to see how close he can come to "the edge", or specifically the limit of traction while braking or cornering, without having any idea how close he is to exceeding that limit and crashing. In Thompson's words in "Hell's Angels" it is, "The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others — the living — are those who pushed their luck as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later."
Spiegel disagrees that only those who have "gone over", that is, crashed or died, know the location of the boundary line. He says that if motorcycle racers, or even non-professional advanced riders who ride modern sport bikes near their performance limits, were approaching the limits of traction blindly, they would be like a group of blind men wandering around the top of a building, and most of them would wander off the edge and fall. In fact, Spiegel says, crashes among skilled high speed riders are so infrequent