askapro Making riding safety cool By Lee Parks #162125
Q: My friends and I occasionally argue about how dangerous motor- cycles actually are. As an experienced motorcyclist, I feel safer on my bike
with its excellent maneuverability than I do in my car. Can you shed any light on who is right?
A: When it comes to motorcycle
danger, the numbers tell us some of the story, and the rest of the picture must be drawn with some deductive reasoning. According to NHTSA, “motorcycles comprise only 3 percent of registered vehicles and less than 1 percent of vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Despite their limited pres- ence, motorcycles currently account for nearly 15 percent of all motor vehi- cle fatalities. This percentage has grown in recent years. Motorcyclist fatalities rose between 1975 and 1980, and then declined steadily to a low of 2,116 in 1997. Fatalities began to rise in 1998 and increased by 151 percent (2,116–5,312) through 2008. Since then (2009–2014), the average annual number of motorcyclist fatalities has been 4,644. During the 1997–2014 timeframe, motorcyclists’ share of total motor vehicle deaths rose from 5 percent to 14 percent.” As far as fatali- ties go, this makes motorcycle riding 27 times more dangerous than driv- ing a car per mile ridden! One of the things I do to help better
manage the danger of riding is volun- teer as a Consulting Motorcycle Expert to the National Motorcycle Institute (NMI). NMI is a nonprofit think-tank, research organization and safety advocacy group. Its mission is
106 BMW OWNERS NEWS August 2016
to reduce the fatality rate and the morbidity (disabling injury) rate for motorcyclists. To help better understand the “Societal Dan- ger” that motorcycling represents, NMI has put together its DangerOmeter. (http://
www.motorcycleinstitute.org/docs/data/ dangerometer/dangerometer-by-rank.pdf) The NMI DangerOmeter is a weighted
fatality rate that allows us to rank the states. We use All Fatalities per Population to model Societal Danger. The DangerOmeter rank is set by using the current four year (2011–2014) averages of the All-Fatalities Motorcycle per Population (AFMC/Pop) rate and weights these with the All-Fatali- ties Passenger Vehicle per Population (AFPV/Pop) current averages. The results are then sorted from low to high and the state is assigned its number, from 1 to 50. To try to understand the relative danger
of motorcycling as well as why some states are more dangerous than others requires analyzing lots of data and making some informed hypotheses that can be tested. As a start, we can all agree that the more riders in the population, the more fatalities we can expect. Even if the percentages of fatalities goes down, the raw numbers may still go up. In Figure 1, you can see the new motor- cycle sales in the U.S. as reported by
WebBikeWorld.com. You will notice the “boom years” of 2004–2005 when nearly 1.1 million motorcycles were reported sold in the U.S. This had a lot to do with the hous- ing bubble when many Americans (includ- ing yours truly) used the rising equity of their homes as their bank. This allowed folks to take cash out and buy things like motorcycles. When the housing bubble burst, there
was a similar crash in new bike sales, exactly as one would expect. Figure 2 shows the total of what NHTSA calls “Motorcycle Driver Fatalities” from 1991–2014. Motor- cycle “Drivers” is NHTSA-speak for the person operating the vehicle, and does not include deaths to passengers, pedestrians, bicyclists, car drivers, etc. The reason I think this is a good way to look at danger is because limiting the fatalities to “drivers” allows us to look at the success rate of licensing programs from state to state. Licensing programs include rider training (the major contributor to new licensed rid- ers by way of a “license waiver” offered for successful completion of a riding course). They also include DMV testing and to a somewhat lesser extent, contributions by law enforcement and the judicial branch of government.
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