The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3.6 aims to reduce fatal and serious injuries caused by road crashes by 50 percent by 2030. Crashes involving motorcyclists resulting in fatalities and life-long injuries continues to be a devastating reality for victims, their families, and communities.
Understanding and implementing a safe system approach for motorcyclists remains a challenge. This paper aims to reinvigorate discussion, prioritization, and action for motorcycle safety. It captures the latest progress in motorcycle and powered two-wheeler research and practice in the planning, building and maintenance of road infrastructure.

As the research and crash data both show, safe roadsides and surface friction remain the critical issues for reducing fatal and serious motorcycle crashes, and as such, these areas are the primary focus of this paper. Moving Towards a Systematic Approach for Motorcycle Safety is relevant to a broad range of stakeholders, road authorities and policy and decision makers, through to researchers and investors.

To summarize and build on the specific issues and measures discussed throughout the paper, the key recommendations for reducing motorcyclists’ FSIs and achieving the Sustainable Development Goal are as follows:

• Governments and road authorities must include motorcyclists as a road user group when planning, building, and maintaining road. Thus, motorcyclists need to be included in national laws and regulations.
• Update the Safe System with the inclusion of motorcyclists together with other vulnerable road users.
• Road authorities need to be using road risk assessment methodologies which consider motorcyclist safety, such as iRAP Star Ratings or similar.
• Specifications and standards for barriers and other motorcycle protection systems need to be developed and updated to extend the usage for a safer road environment.
• Data collection for motorcyclists’ needs to be improved and coordinated (road surface friction condition, effect of road restraint systems on motorcyclists’ safety, safe road design, general effect of road infrastructure furniture on motorcyclists’ safety (obstacles, visibility), effects of roadworks on motorcyclists’ safety, etcetera).
• Existing knowledge about safety measures which has proven to minimize injury risk for motorcyclists needs to be highlighted and spread as good examples to governments and road authorities.
• There are still motorcycle safety treatments and approaches that needs to be developed or where there is a need of more research, for example computer simulation with barrier crashes.
• The socio-economic cost for injuries and fatalities should be included when roads are planned and built as well as the Life Cycle Cost of different roadside measures, like choice of barrier, distance to obstacles, width of paved shoulder or forgiving roadsides.
• The measure method for friction, which is based on cars, needs to be developed to meet the needs of single-track vehicles with two wheels that uses the entire road.
• There is a need for policies at national and regional levels, e.g., that all new barriers are safe for motorcycles, that checklists are used to include the needs of motorcyclists when planning, constructing, and maintaining roads.
• Audits, warnings, and alerts are important measures to reduce the risk of crashes.
• More resources are made available to road engineers and designers which include best practice for motorcycle safety and/or update the Road Safety Toolkit with solutions presented in this document.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 2. MOTORCYCLE SAFETY IN FIGURES
CHAPTER 3. GLOBAL, REGIONAL AND NATIONAL GUIDELINES ON MOTORCYCLE SAFETY
CHAPTER 4. WHERE DO MOST INCIDENTS AND CRASHES OCCUR?
CHAPTER 5. ADDRESSING MOTORCYCLE SAFETY
CHAPTER 6. ROAD SURFACE FRICTION
CHAPTER 7. THE NEED FOR ROADSIDE SAFETY ZONES
CHAPTER 8. BARRIERS AND MOTORCYCLISTS
CHAPTER 9. GUIDANCE BEFORE CURVES
CHAPTER 10. RECOMMENDATIONS
APPENDIXES
REFERENCES
TERMINOLOGY AND ACRONYMS
WORKING GROUP INFORMATION

Download the report as a pdf file.