Montana
04-26-2004, 12:38 PM
Alright, it's not a "ride" report, but it's a report on riding...
An AMA Vice-Chairman and BMW MOA member, Dal Smilie, is chairman of the Montana Motorcycle Safety Advisory Committee. In Montana motorcyclists introduced the legislation for the rider courses and we have (nearly) full control over the program, it's not part of the State's administrative services. In addition we are pioneers and activists in motorcycling issues.
We sent Dal to the Czech Republic for the recent FIM (Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme) conference. Here's his report.
********************************************
I was one of about 80 attendees at the FIM's fourth policy conference on motorcycle safety held April 16-18 in Prague, Czech Republic. There were many countries represented and the conference was co-hosted by FEMA, which is the European motorcyclist rights umbrella group. The manufacturers were represented well, Harley-Davidson had about seven attendees including Billy Davidson. Tim Buche from the MSF attended and presented. The meetings took place at the historic building owned by the Czech Automobile and Motorcycle Association (Autoklub of the Czech Republic) near the center of town. It was a convenient six-seven block walk from my hotel.
While the FIM has long (1904) been instrumental in organizing international motorcycle sport a special committee on mobility was formed some years ago. This, the CMT, addresses itself to motorcyclists' rights, safety, touring and leisure road riding. This conference was sponsored by the CMT.
The conference started out with presentations about the UN's recent decision to move road safety to the World Health Organization (WHO). They will treat road safety as a "disease" that can be combated in similar manners. An analogy can be drawn to the European Union's Road Safety Action Program whose goal is to halve road deaths by 2010. One of the means we heard about will be automatic enforcement where there are lots of cameras or other electronic means of limiting or reporting speed.
Switzerland had proposed an 80 kph limit for all motorcycles everywhere until they received huge petitions and a huge rally was held.
Since the UN has a worldwide mandate the safety problems of Asia, Africa and elsewhere are part of the considerations. Deaths in parts of Asia are reported as very high on motorcycles. Over 130 cities in China have restricted motorcycle use. Chinese cities are as large as some European countries. This is occurring even with China being the largest motorcycle producer in the world with over 12,000,000 units per year. Hanoi and other cities in Vietnam are also eliminating motorcycles. Bans are the types of proposals one can expect to be proposed by the WHO. While these concepts may seem foreign to US and Western European citizens, such policies can easily be adopted by governments once the UN has blessed it and it has been widely tried. One cannot argue with the premise that deaths will be reduced when the activity in question is banned.
The experience of some countries was that while motorcycling was getting safer, considering the amount of riders and the increasing miles ridden, still the tolerance of governments was decreasing for any injury. It was proposed by more than one that the motorcycling community will have to put its house in order if it has any hope of government not stepping in with policies injurious to motorcycling.
In the US we rely on a comprehensive study of motorcycle accidents done by Harry Hurt in California thirty years ago. We have all known that there needs to be another study to update that aging base line study.
In Europe they have just completed the Motorcycle Accidents In-Depth Study (MAIDS). This is truly an update of the Hurt study but there are special European factors that differ from the US.
For instance, the accidents in which alcohol is a factor is very small. That is because European enforcement of driving/riding after drinking has long been much stronger than here.
All of Western Europe requires mandatory safety helmets which we do not in many jurisdictions here. Consequently an updated US study is needed.
It was interesting to learn that far and away the most accidents happened in good weather, on good roads, on straight roads, at low speed and were single vehicle accidents. The US experience includes many left turning automobiles which did not seem to be a major factor in Europe. 87.5% of the accidents were due to human factors.
Several presenters discussed rider training. There is no Europe-wide safety training entity like the MSF here. There were increasing proposals for mandatory training. The effect of some of that was to create a bottleneck that would limit the ability of road users to be able to ride at all due to limited classes. Some training entities wanted this sort of rule for profit purposes only.
Honda did a nice presentation on linked braking systems and discussed a motorcycle safety training simulator they had created. Right now these cost about 100,000 Euro but Honda is trying to get the price down.
We saw demonstrations of safer clothing and even an air filled jacket. The air could be increased or decreased, it was more for insulating rather than impact safety. We did see an interesting presentation on upcoming electronic safety including heads-up displays in helmets.
Government actions in the UK in the '80s were aimed primarily at making motorcycling harder to do, to restrict it by limiting motorcycle use. Rather than following that path it was proposed that activists work with their governments to make sure motorcycling is fully integrated into all transportation policy. For instance, dedicated motorcycle parking, the use of HOV and bus lanes and exceptions from use charges such as that now found in central London. Those severe limits on use have increased motorcycling by about 20% in central London by the way!
One interesting idea they had tried as an experiment was to have "advanced" stop areas in front of where regular traffic stopped at lights. Motorcycles would move up to those areas and then be able to get right out of other traffic's way when lights changed. This was good for all forms of traffic movement.
We saw lots of infrastructure that was not designed for motorcycle safety and versions that were. We saw some amazing speed bumps from Holland that had steel bars that raised if you were going too fast, these were really dangerous for bikes. Rider groups had gotten them banned.
There was agreement that motorcycle safety was not on most governmental policy maker's minds as little as five years ago. Now it is. Policy makers will look for statistical "outliers" to increase safety. Unless the motorcycling community takes steps to work with government, to train itself and to educate the greater community we can expect restrictions on motorcycling.
These conferences are held every 2-4 years. This is the second I have attended. I think it is really useful to understand the global forces that will shape American policy and affect what products will be available to us. We all live in a very small interconnected world. While the road safety experiences of Europe and the US are far different from parts of Asia problems in Asia will affect us.
Dal Smilie, Chairman
Montana Motorcycle Safety Advisory Committee
www.dalsmilie.com
An AMA Vice-Chairman and BMW MOA member, Dal Smilie, is chairman of the Montana Motorcycle Safety Advisory Committee. In Montana motorcyclists introduced the legislation for the rider courses and we have (nearly) full control over the program, it's not part of the State's administrative services. In addition we are pioneers and activists in motorcycling issues.
We sent Dal to the Czech Republic for the recent FIM (Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme) conference. Here's his report.
********************************************
I was one of about 80 attendees at the FIM's fourth policy conference on motorcycle safety held April 16-18 in Prague, Czech Republic. There were many countries represented and the conference was co-hosted by FEMA, which is the European motorcyclist rights umbrella group. The manufacturers were represented well, Harley-Davidson had about seven attendees including Billy Davidson. Tim Buche from the MSF attended and presented. The meetings took place at the historic building owned by the Czech Automobile and Motorcycle Association (Autoklub of the Czech Republic) near the center of town. It was a convenient six-seven block walk from my hotel.
While the FIM has long (1904) been instrumental in organizing international motorcycle sport a special committee on mobility was formed some years ago. This, the CMT, addresses itself to motorcyclists' rights, safety, touring and leisure road riding. This conference was sponsored by the CMT.
The conference started out with presentations about the UN's recent decision to move road safety to the World Health Organization (WHO). They will treat road safety as a "disease" that can be combated in similar manners. An analogy can be drawn to the European Union's Road Safety Action Program whose goal is to halve road deaths by 2010. One of the means we heard about will be automatic enforcement where there are lots of cameras or other electronic means of limiting or reporting speed.
Switzerland had proposed an 80 kph limit for all motorcycles everywhere until they received huge petitions and a huge rally was held.
Since the UN has a worldwide mandate the safety problems of Asia, Africa and elsewhere are part of the considerations. Deaths in parts of Asia are reported as very high on motorcycles. Over 130 cities in China have restricted motorcycle use. Chinese cities are as large as some European countries. This is occurring even with China being the largest motorcycle producer in the world with over 12,000,000 units per year. Hanoi and other cities in Vietnam are also eliminating motorcycles. Bans are the types of proposals one can expect to be proposed by the WHO. While these concepts may seem foreign to US and Western European citizens, such policies can easily be adopted by governments once the UN has blessed it and it has been widely tried. One cannot argue with the premise that deaths will be reduced when the activity in question is banned.
The experience of some countries was that while motorcycling was getting safer, considering the amount of riders and the increasing miles ridden, still the tolerance of governments was decreasing for any injury. It was proposed by more than one that the motorcycling community will have to put its house in order if it has any hope of government not stepping in with policies injurious to motorcycling.
In the US we rely on a comprehensive study of motorcycle accidents done by Harry Hurt in California thirty years ago. We have all known that there needs to be another study to update that aging base line study.
In Europe they have just completed the Motorcycle Accidents In-Depth Study (MAIDS). This is truly an update of the Hurt study but there are special European factors that differ from the US.
For instance, the accidents in which alcohol is a factor is very small. That is because European enforcement of driving/riding after drinking has long been much stronger than here.
All of Western Europe requires mandatory safety helmets which we do not in many jurisdictions here. Consequently an updated US study is needed.
It was interesting to learn that far and away the most accidents happened in good weather, on good roads, on straight roads, at low speed and were single vehicle accidents. The US experience includes many left turning automobiles which did not seem to be a major factor in Europe. 87.5% of the accidents were due to human factors.
Several presenters discussed rider training. There is no Europe-wide safety training entity like the MSF here. There were increasing proposals for mandatory training. The effect of some of that was to create a bottleneck that would limit the ability of road users to be able to ride at all due to limited classes. Some training entities wanted this sort of rule for profit purposes only.
Honda did a nice presentation on linked braking systems and discussed a motorcycle safety training simulator they had created. Right now these cost about 100,000 Euro but Honda is trying to get the price down.
We saw demonstrations of safer clothing and even an air filled jacket. The air could be increased or decreased, it was more for insulating rather than impact safety. We did see an interesting presentation on upcoming electronic safety including heads-up displays in helmets.
Government actions in the UK in the '80s were aimed primarily at making motorcycling harder to do, to restrict it by limiting motorcycle use. Rather than following that path it was proposed that activists work with their governments to make sure motorcycling is fully integrated into all transportation policy. For instance, dedicated motorcycle parking, the use of HOV and bus lanes and exceptions from use charges such as that now found in central London. Those severe limits on use have increased motorcycling by about 20% in central London by the way!
One interesting idea they had tried as an experiment was to have "advanced" stop areas in front of where regular traffic stopped at lights. Motorcycles would move up to those areas and then be able to get right out of other traffic's way when lights changed. This was good for all forms of traffic movement.
We saw lots of infrastructure that was not designed for motorcycle safety and versions that were. We saw some amazing speed bumps from Holland that had steel bars that raised if you were going too fast, these were really dangerous for bikes. Rider groups had gotten them banned.
There was agreement that motorcycle safety was not on most governmental policy maker's minds as little as five years ago. Now it is. Policy makers will look for statistical "outliers" to increase safety. Unless the motorcycling community takes steps to work with government, to train itself and to educate the greater community we can expect restrictions on motorcycling.
These conferences are held every 2-4 years. This is the second I have attended. I think it is really useful to understand the global forces that will shape American policy and affect what products will be available to us. We all live in a very small interconnected world. While the road safety experiences of Europe and the US are far different from parts of Asia problems in Asia will affect us.
Dal Smilie, Chairman
Montana Motorcycle Safety Advisory Committee
www.dalsmilie.com