A Safe Systems Approach to Motorcycle Safety

This study seeks to examine motorcycle safety from a Safe Systems perspective, paying specific attention to how “upstream” planning and policy decisions influence safety outcomes. In so doing, it fills a major gap in both our broader understanding of motorcycle safety, but also a major gap in the specific suite of research undertaken by CSCRS. A major finding from R3: Implementing Safe Systems, is that the meaningful development of a Safe Systems approach to road safety needs to identify the manner in which the designers of the transportation system are responsible for the creation of latent errors, which are errors that occur when the design of the built environment results in otherwise preventable patterns of behavior that result in traffic-related injuries and deaths. The application of Safe Systems concepts into the arena of motorcycle safety fills a major gap in both the broader CSCRS research program, as well as the professional understanding of motorcycle safety more broadly. This effort will be the first to examine motorcycles from the four dimensions that comprise Safe Systems, providing a synthetic review that interprets the existing literature in light of Safe Systems principles, and applying them to an empirical examination of the incidence of motorcycle crashes to the South Florida Metropolitan Area. The results of this effort are not only relevant to transportation professionals throughout the United States, but fill a major gap in the global application of Safe Systems as well, particularly in developing countries where motorcycles are the dominant mode of motorized transportation. Given the comprehensive nature of this study, which combines a novel application of the existing literature with an analysis of crash incidence in three states, the results promise to serve as a defining work on a critical dimension of safety.

• Record URL:
  https://www.roadsafety.unc.edu/research/projects/2021r40/
• Supplemental Notes:
  • CSCRS2021R40

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $104164
• Contract Numbers:

  69A3551747113

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

  University Transportation Centers Program
  Department of Transportation
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Managing Organizations:

  Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety

  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  Chapel Hill, NC  United States  27514
• Project Managers:

  Sandt, Laura

• Performing Organizations:

  Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton

  Boca Raton, FL  United States  33431

  University of Tennessee, Knoxville

  Knoxville, TN  United States 
• Principal Investigators:

  Dumbaugh, Eric

  Khattak, Asad

• Start Date: 20210501
• Expected Completion Date: 20220801
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers Program

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Built environment; City planning; Crash causes; Highway safety; Metropolitan areas; Motorcycle crashes; Motorcycles; Policy; Safety programs
• Geographic Terms: South Florida
• Subject Areas: Design; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Policy; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01771375
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety
• Contract Numbers: 69A3551747113
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: May 7 2021 10:54AM