As motorcyclists, the problem with young riders is something we are going to have to tackle ourselves. If we want anything to change.
I came across 5 young riders on a single day last week, probably all riding illegally. One had no headlight, 3 were wearing shorts and T-Shirts. Two had proper kit and were riding off-road bikes. Gave me a nod as they passed me on my E-MTB.
If I’d been on my KTM they may well have stopped for a chat.
I trained the Notts police off-road team many years ago, who were very successful in tackling the off-road riding problem. But that is not where the problems mainly are. It’s on road. Off road riding really is just a nuisance – mainly noise, and complaints from land owners. Tractors do far more damage.
So what can you do?
Firstly discourage your youngsters from riding a motorcycle if under 16 years, when they can do their CBT. An E-Cycle or E-MTB can be legally ridden from 14 years. Good chance to learn braking and handling skills – and the use of disc brakes and suspension movement.
They can race mini motos etc. and off-road, but it’s expensive. There are facilities in some areas where they can ride, but sadly they are rare. There is no national equivalent of ‘Young Drivers’. There should be.
Personally I’ve never had a problem talking to young riders. Never had any abuse.
Motorcyclists come from all walks of life, sharing a common interest. If you breakdown roadside the next biker along may well stop to help.
The Problem
In 2022, in the 14-16 young rider age group:-
115 KSIs in total
60 were underage
55 were riding 125cc machines illegally
In 2023, in the 17-20 year old group:-
36 young rider fatalities
50% higher than the 24 fatalities in 2019
Double the number from 2020, which at 18 fatalities, was probably affected by COVID 19.
The extent of the problem seems to be a well kept secret.
The Main Issues
Illegal E-Scooters.
Average rider age 16 years.
50 deaths all ages so far. >1,000 serious injuries.
Underage Riders
40% of fatalities. Many others probably had no licence. Proper training is vital.
Upgrading to a 125cc
The risk of upgrading from a 30 mph moped to a 125cc geared bike capable of 60 mph with no extra training.
No legal requirement for more training. The vast majority of KSI’s are on 125’s.
Emergency Braking.
The DVSA advice is wrong. Apply your rear brake immediately. Do not snatch the front brake lever, or stamp on the rear brake. Apply the brakes steadily. Practice.
Consider riding with two fingers on the front brake lever and clutch, and just squeeze both in an emergency. This should save you >1 sec and critically should reduce your impact speed by around 15 mph or maybe avoid an impact altogether. You’ll probably survive a 30 mph crash, but not at 40 mph.
A New Approach?
I started again, this time with pre-teen riders and Bikeability, who are supported by the Dft.
We already know that there is a serious problem with PTW braking, so I asked them how they teach braking to young cyclists.
Received an immediate response. Somebody cares.
They are taught to ride covering their brakes, how to brake progressively, and particularly to avoid snatching the front brake. Perfect.
So moving to a motorcycle, the skills are immediately transferable.
The question is then why are PTW riders not taught to cover their brakes, and why is PTW braking so poor?
Bikeability cover 44% of younger riders who should be more open to accepting advice before they become teenagers. Braking skills can be embedded more easily with younger riders creating ‘muscle memory’.
There is now also a ‘halfway house’ with E-Cycles from 14 years, which they also cover, many with disc brakes and front suspension, where they can experience weight transfer and the front suspension compressing when braking.
Motorcycles and cycles could be part of the National Curriculum, within Physics, centre of mass, friction, tipping, leaning, speed, gyroscopes, kinetic energy, braking distances etc. I think it helps when you have a practical example of the theory.
Regarding the essential difference between cycles and motorbikes, it is simply speed, and mastering throttle control which is straight forward.
What is vital to grasp, and to be taught, is that momentum obeys a ‘Square Law’. So it takes 16 x further to stop from a motorbike’s 60 mph as it does from a bicycle’s 15 mph.
The major danger is young riders jumping on motorcycles of 125cc and above, which can get to 60mph or more, without any training.
This report by National Highways was issued in May last year. I have recently been made aware of it via a RoADAR webinar. It’s quite brave considering how critical it is of providers.
‘In short, while there are numerous post-licence motorcycle interventions being offered in Great Britain, little has been evaluated and the evidence for what works and what does not is almost non-existent.‘
The findings were particularly damning regarding the level of public funding, and organisations profiting from ineffective training :-
Effectiveness of Post-Test Training Interventions
‘… there is little evidence for the effectiveness of any of them to improve safety outcomes’.
Our Response
A new Proposal for a focus on ‘Machine Control’ for Post-test and Advanced Training
The proposal is to focus on embedding the key skills of Emergency Braking and Cornering. What we regard as ‘best practice’ is outlined below.
I believe the official advice on emergency braking as contained in the DVSA’s ‘Riding’ and Police Roadcraft need to be reviewed too, and revised to provide the best advice to minimise braking distances.
Official advice as how to best corner safely also needs defining and publishing.
Then both emergency braking and cornering need to be taught more effectively Consideration should be given to include, in particular, emergency braking from higher speeds – 60 mph – within the licence test.
The effect of the training can be measured, in terms of braking distances and lean angles.
Riders should be able to stop from at least 60 mph within Highway Code braking distances, or less (20% less or 0.9g is achievable, compared to the standard 0.7g).
Riders should also be able to lean the machine at 35 degrees or more, which is the equivalent of the standard braking force of 0.7 g.
Both can be measured using datalogging or a simple phone app – which needs designing and implementing, although iAccel is already available on Iphones. The required sensors are already in most mobile phones.
Current ‘Advanced’ Training
‘Advanced’ riding needs to be radically rethought to make it effective. The suggestion is to continue to use Police Roadcraft as a basis, with appropriate changes to emergency braking (close the throttle first and keep the front brake applied as hard as possible until stopped).
The ‘downside’ of the involvement of police riders needs to be identified, openly discussed and tackled. This is encouraging riders to ignore the Highway Code ‘should nots’, and to make ‘good progress‘, taken from emergency response practices. Riders should never be in a hurry.
Riders should not be expected to take every opportunity to overtake or filter. They should not routinely filter right to the front of traffic queues and race away. Riders should stay out of all cross hatched areas unless this has clear safety benefits, and not overtake by riding straight ahead from RH turn lanes etc. etc.
Proposed Advanced training
This for a new focus on machine control, in addition to just Police Rider Roadcraft. The road positioning advice is good, but new planning advice is needed based on ‘invisibility’. There is also additional advice on ‘buffering’ in the New South Wales motorcycling manual, which is free to download.
1. Emergency braking
2. Cornering
3. Invisibilty.
The Report
Seems to focus on complex behavioural issues and misses the basic ‘nuts and bolts’ of the problem, and machine control.
To be fair to everyone involved, the problem is that our very poor crash reporting system focusses on blame and prosecutions, not root causes. This also needs urgently addressing to confirm assumed root causes.
The hidden problem with motorcycle riders, is that many can’t brake or take bends properly and confidently. This may be 80% of the problem, from a personal sample of 500 road riders and over 2,500 riders trained on-track. Very easy to confirm.
This is incredibly frustrating for me, having presented on Emergency Motorcycle Braking at the IJMS and the RSGB National Road Safety Conference last year, and recently tried again at the Motorcycle Conference this year to raise just Emergency Braking as an issue, with no response from anybody.
The report barely mentions ‘control’. It fails to evaluate any improvement in machine control or any motorcycle training in ‘other environments’ as proposed by the DVSA. 1,000’s of riders every year are trained on-track or off road by many providers, often the major manufacturers, which are likely to lead to positive outcomes in improved machine control, fewer crashes and better outcomes.
Emergency Braking
I now find that the suggested focus on emergency braking for motorcycles was already recommended in this report earlier last year, and has also apparently been completely ignored.
‘With the lack of clear evidence for post-licence motorcycle intervention content, it may be necessary to consider lessons learned from driver training. Historically, advanced driver training focused on teaching complex lower-order skills, such as advanced vehicle control in emergency situations like skidding or braking’.
One of my early trainees was Kashi who had a very bad crash through being unable to brake in time. So we used a local quarry access road. He literally couldn’t brake to save his life. It took 10 mins to nearly halve his braking distance from 60 mph.
I’ve found the same with many riders, and typically they can reduce their braking distances by at least 20% after training.
There is research that confirms riders inability to brake. 50% cannot even meet Highway Code braking distances. We recently confirmed this with advanced riders from our local IAM group (SAM). We’ve also had riders who never use their front brakes, which is like driving a car just using the handbrake.
Crash outcomes are obviously very sensitive to impact speeds, particularly for riders, who are usually thrown from their machines.
Cornering
This is largely ignored in the report, but the problems are included in a quoted paper.
Crundall, D., Stedmon, A. W., Crundall, E., & Saikayasit, R. (2014). The role of experience and advanced training on performance in a motorcycle simulator. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 73, 81-90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2014.08.009.
However, any police force will confirm this, as will Youtube.
The only problem is referring to ‘the racing line’ without really understanding what it is. It’s probably the largest available radius through any bend. It’s rarely used in racing, appears in the 1970’s Police Motorcycle Roadcraft, but has since been removed.
There are no proposed cornering lines in any official publication, just positions to get the best view in Roadcraft. So it cannot be a surprise that bends are a major cause of crashes.
Invisibility
Riders need to understand that other road users may not see them. The reasons are complex, and dependent on circumstance, but a rider must never assume that they have been seen.
Hazard awareness has been the long term focus, but we now need to train riders not only to recognise, but how to react to hazards.
This involves closing the throttle, covering the brakes, changes in speed and road position ready for evasive action, and light pressure on the rear brake to warn following vehicles.
What’s missing?
What is very obviously missing is any assessment of the ability of riders to control their machines. Bikes look simple, but are actually extraordinarily complex, difficult to understand, and to ride competently. There has been no attempt to evaluate what level of control is needed, or what the various groups of riders have. Or what ‘experience’ provides to riders, but finds that the level of ‘hazard awareness’ which is currently the main thrust of interventions, varies little from novices to advanced riders.
The Report
The report is a competent comprehensive professional review of all the various ‘legal’ road training initiatives from 20 providers. From Advanced Training from RoSPA, to Street Spirit (Essex). The unlicenced, unapproved post-test road training industry has understandably been missed out, but there is nothing to suggest that this would be any more effective, the methodologies being likely the same.
The ‘Executive Summary’ finds that none of these programmes, many publicly funded, have any measurable positive effect on casualty reduction
‘While there is some evidence of best practice from international literature, this work suggests that either the adaptation of existing resources, or new resources, need to start with a detailed mapping exercise to bring it in line with best practice in other areas of public health.’
The seriousness of the situation is made clear in the report:-
‘In 2022, the fatality rate per billion passenger miles for motorcyclists was 114 across Great Britain. In comparison, for car occupants it was 2, and for pedestrians and cyclists it was 27 and 23 respectively’.
The report mentions GDE from the 1990s, which is described as a ‘pivotal framework’.
The report then identified the one single intervention on ‘Basic Vehicle Control’, which was Motorcycle Cornering Advice from RoSPA. Only 4 out of 20 initiatives that had any self evaluation content regarding machine control.
Nothing at all on braking (or any more on cornering). I believe the problem is the lack of understanding of bike control by non-riders, who probably assume motorcycles are just like cars. You just stamp on the brakes if you need to stop, or turn the wheel to corner.
The report doesn’t identify properly what constitutes ‘Basic Vehicle Control’, which is it’s major flaw.
Hazard Awareness
‘Results found that while advanced riders performed better (i.e. reacted quicker at identifying hazards) than experienced riders, they were not significantly better than novice riders’.
‘The evidence for hazard perception training with motorcyclists is limited and paints an unclear picture. Logically hazard perception is a key skill that is likely related to crash risk, but the relationship with experience is not as consistent as with findings from the driving literature. It seems intuitive that some form of hazard awareness training should be beneficial for post-licence riders, whether they are novices, returning riders or simply experienced riders, but the best approach to this has not been demonstrated.’
There are two Road Safety Trust funded projects looking to address hazard awareness due later this year. But we suspect that the issue is rider control and the ability to react appropriately. The problem with standard hazard awareness tests, are that riders just have to push a button on a keyboard or screen.
Effectiveness of Post-Test Training Interventions
‘… there is little evidence for the effectiveness of any of them to improve safety outcomes’.
Four possible reasons are explored:
1. Poor evaluation and reporting.
2. Not all motorcyclists are the same.
3. Interventions are unrelated to crash outcomes.
4. Design of content and/or delivery is not effective.
This report identifies a TRL report undertaken for clients which was not published, presumably due to the findings:
“In 2019, TRL reviewed a set of four rider training courses (aimed at riders from novice through to experienced) and compared course content with main crash types. The (unpublished) report for the client noted inconsistencies in the ways in which the ridertraining courses introduced and covered these main crash types.”
British Superbike School 