Barriers to change: designing safe roads for motorcyclists

This position paper is based on the work of the European Road Assessment Programme (EuroRAP) Motorcycle Safety Review Panel. Established in October 2007, the Panel
brought together leading European experts in the field of motorcycle safety and included representatives from motoring clubs, manufacturers, riders’ organisations, practitioners, transport specialists in research institutions and professional associations, and national and regional road authorities. Advice was also taken from experts in Asia, Australia, and the United States.

In this first phase of work, the Panel’s objectives were to review the evidence and research base on crash barriers and their impact on Powered Two-Wheeler (PTW) safety. The findings have been used to make recommendations on key actions to improve deficits in engineering standards and the knowledge base. They will also inform the development of the standardised RAP protocols used in programmes worldwide (iRAP, EuroRAP, AusRAP, usRAP, KiwiRAP) to assess risk by mode of road user.

The EuroRAP Motorcycle Safety Review Panel key recommendations:

• The quality of crash data and the research base surrounding how motorcyclists are killed and injured in crashes involving infrastructure needs to improve substantially;

• There is sufficient evidence to justify new and immediate interim guidance on crash barrier design to give road engineers clear guidance on where motorcycle-friendly systems should be incorporated at new sites, and to be able to review motorcyclist risk at existing sites. The Netherlands is commended for its ’decision tree’ approach;

• Where data permits, as in the UK and Spain, EuroRAP should map motorcycle risk across the road network separately from other traffic so as to highlight high-risk roads by mode of road user.