Upside down and backward

Wrong view of traffic safety 

Here's a party trick for you: ask the assembled multitudes what's the first thing that comes to mind about motorcycle rider safety.

Probably nine out of 10 of your closest friends are going with helmets. Trust me  — nine.

I'm hoping your answer was different, maybe something about speed, or visibility, whatever. Anything but helmets. 

When we start a conversation about motorcycle safety the way we usually do, by prioritizing helmets, we're looking at the problem upside down.

That's one of the two big issues about how traffic safety in general, and motorcycle safety particularly, bangs into all the time. Upside down thinking.

In other walks of life, say heavy industry, or firefighting, when we've realized that something we're dealing with is hazardous, could seriously hurt us, we start by looking at ways to eliminate or avoid it.

That's the first choice, the star on the top of the hazard management or harm prevention tree. Right side up: get rid of the problem, and it can't bite you.

From there, we work our way down the tree of options for dealing with hazards, from the most effective star at the top, to the least effective, which is personal protective gear. Helmets.

To begin with, I want us to think about safety for motorcyclists way further up the tree, up where we find ways to prevent crashes and to prevent the obvious major injuries that result.

After all, when you think about it, some helmets work to prevent brain injuries, but that's once the crash is happening. Not all helmets, not all crashes, not all brain injuries, just some of them.

And then there are all the other injuries. Crash prevention first and foremost  - now we're talkin'.

But get a proper helmet too, make no mistake.

I said two big issues. Now for the backward item. Motorcycle crashes are bad, bad things, with seriously harmful results for the riders. We all get this. But we also all get that there's really not that many of them, and they clearly happen because people riding motorcycles are doing something different, and obviously risky.

Anything on two wheels is always going to want to fall over and hurt someone at the first whisper of a chance, just like when we were nine years old riding Freddie's bike from next door. Him with the bandages on both knees.

There's the problem. We tend to think about motorcycle crashes as something different, something outside the main action of traffic safety, which is mostly about cars and trucks banging into each other and the odd pedestrian or cyclist.

Different. 

But the fact is motorcycle riders have crashes that are, for the most part, pretty much exactly like the ones car and truck drivers have.

There are some small exceptions, but whenever researchers have had the (unusual) sense to ask the right question about motorcycle crashes, that's the result they get. Same crash, different vehicle.

In fact, same time of day, same day of week, even the month, although December's usually unpopular for being "in the wind", so numbers are lower then.

But overall? Same.

We can, and we should, take from this set of facts that it's the seriousness of the outcome of those crashes that makes them different, not the crash, not the crash situation.

Riders are seriously injured or die in 80% of multi-vehicle crashes, where only 20% of other vehicle drivers are similarly harmed.

Instead of setting aside motorcycle crashes as just the sad result of obviously risky behaviour, though, we can see them as the beacon of truth that they are about traffic safety for all road users.

When a bike is hit head-on by another vehicle, that should tell us that the roadway is unsafe, not that motorcycling is unsafe.

When a rider gets it wrong and leaves the road on a curve, we should look again at that curve. The centre line's worn off, and the shoulder's covered with gravel for a reason that's all about the road and the speeds that are sanctioned there.

Learn from our pain, and fix the problem, instead of thinking about it backward, and blowing it off as "bad rider", as usual.

There you go  - we can get traffic safety right side up and forwards if we take motorcyclists, and rider crashes, as the clearest and too often tragic signal we have about what works, and what really doesn't, for all road users.

And we can get on with fixing the problems that are affecting all of us.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.