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[Richard230]

You may recall that the U.S. government gave Virginia Tech a multi-million dollar grant (which was supplemented by another grant from the Motorcycle Safety Foundation - who appears to be taking credit for the entire study). Apparently the grant money has run out so VT has completed and published their study and Revzilla has analyzed the study in a blog about it here:
http://www.revzilla.com/common-trea...ed-about-how-and-why-we-crash-our-motorcycles

Personally, I am not overly impressed. To me it doesn't seem very extensive or thorough. The general recommendation appears to be for riders to pay more attention to what they are doing and to look further down the road so as to be able to see potential accident situations. This would indicate to me the need for better rider training (than we get in the U.S., at least), but those results are not going to make the government traffic safety agencies very happy as they are looking for new rules and laws to create, along with imposing new safety equipment and technology. Better training doesn't seem to be on their radar much, in my view. It will be interesting to see what is made of this study by the various parties involved in motorcycle safety.

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

I think this is the link you meant?
http://www.revzilla.com/common-tread/what-virginia-tech-learned-about-how-and-why-we-crash-our-motorcycles

[Richard230]

I think this is the link you meant?
http://www.revzilla.com/common-tread/what-virginia-tech-learned-about-how-and-why-we-crash-our-motorcycles

That's it.  I guess something slipped when I cut-and-pasted.   

[MrDude_1]

I could have saved them millions and told them that.
Theres a reason that almost all motorcycle accidents are riders that have no formal training...

[Richard230]

I could have saved them millions and told them that.
Theres a reason that almost all motorcycle accidents are riders that have no formal training...

It seems to me that most expensive government-funded studies end up telling you what you already know.   

[Shadow]

Obviously these riders did not get the memo about life-saving loud pipes and accessory train horns to stop accidents from happening everytime danger dares to approach them.

[JustinZeroMoto]

Did anyone read the entire study? Were the crashes from bikes with ABS?

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

Did anyone read the entire study? Were the crashes from bikes with ABS?

I've scanned it.

The word "brake" is only mentioned once, so if you're looking to claim something about ABS, you're barking up the wrong tree.

It's literally about risk factors which lists some facets:

• Surroundings/locality
• Intersections
• Rider Behavior
• Maneuver
• Lane Sharing
• Group Riding
• Lane Splitting
• Weather
• Surface Type/Condition
• Road curvature
• Road grade
• Impairment (rider distractions)
• Passengers
• Lighting
• Lane Position

Crossing the lane line in a curve stands out.


Getting rear-ended or sideswiped stand out, with an oncoming car turning across your lane in a third position.


There are a lot of complicating factors which are hard to summarize right now. It's interesting.

[Richard230]

It sounds to me like the NHTSA is going to have a real tough time using that study to develop new motorcycle safety regulations.  I bet they wish they had spent that money on something else. 

[JustinZeroMoto]

Did anyone read the entire study? Were the crashes from bikes with ABS?

I've scanned it.

The word "brake" is only mentioned once, so if you're looking to claim something about ABS, you're barking up the wrong tree.

I didn't realize ABS is such a sensitive topic! 

It would be real interesting to see the "strain gauge feedback from brake levers" to get a better understanding of what the riders were doing during the events, well it would be cool to see all of their data.

[Richard230]

Did anyone read the entire study? Were the crashes from bikes with ABS?

I've scanned it.

The word "brake" is only mentioned once, so if you're looking to claim something about ABS, you're barking up the wrong tree.

I didn't realize ABS is such a sensitive topic! 

It would be real interesting to see the "strain gauge feedback from brake levers" to get a better understanding of what the riders were doing during the events, well it would be cool to see all of their data.

To do that would have required at least another $5 million grant and I guess it just wasn't in the budget.     I suspect that when the money ran out, so did the interest in the safety study by VT. 

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

I didn't realize ABS is such a sensitive topic! 

It would be real interesting to see the "strain gauge feedback from brake levers" to get a better understanding of what the riders were doing during the events, well it would be cool to see all of their data.

My bullshit detector went off. Coming to a mention of a study and inserting a topic without context makes me expect some crazy obsession with demonizing the industry about some projected nonsense.

I agree it would be very helpful to see some form of the data. I spend a lot of time with data professionally and often find that they've missed something because they've used awkward tools or such. The graphics in the report hint to me that the likelihood of missing some important insights is very high.

My reasoning goes like this: if the charts are sparse and uninformative, it's usually the case that the preparer had inadequate tools to make them, so each one was felt too much effort. There's tooling (like Tableau that I worked on for years) that lets you iterate through dimensional combinations extremely quickly so you can sift through many possible highlights to examine. Without good tooling, you stop at the first few nuggets of significance because of the labor cost.

Of course, the data collection could have just been so constrained that they couldn't do much better. But it'd be better to understand that.

[Richard230]

I would be interested to know what the qualifications of the study researchers were and how many of them had motorcycle riding experience and for how long?     I got the feeling that this was a NHTSA-funded research project that would be performed by doctoral candidates (who likely had very limited experience with motorcycles or riding).

My son-in-law's physics doctoral program was funded by NASA. He and a group of students spent 4 years developing a rocket probe to investigate the high-energy plasma created during the Aurora Borealis.  The rocket went up, the rocket came down.  The information was transmitted to the students and they were never able to make any sense out of it.  But they got their Doctorates in Physics and then most went on to work in other fields - such as building boats and virtual worlds.