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A SAFETY REPORT FROM MAG
Full Report is available Here pdf
Reworking Road Casualty Statistics in Great Britain by the Motorcycle Action Group UK
On March 9th 2005 the AA Trust’s press release on the latest Eurorap report (www.eurorap.org) carried the following text “A ‘mini massacre’ of motorcyclists on some rural main roads continues to undermine significant safety improvements. The impact of motorcycling is such that the most high-risk road listed – the A537, Buxton-Macclesfield – would be among Britain’s safer roads if there were no motorcycle accidents. On page six of the Eurorap report the AA Trust indicates that “On 19 per cent of the 850 road sections studied, at least a third of all fatal and serious collisions involved motorcyclists.
This figure shows that the problem is widespread. It critically highlights the fact that stopping wilfully dangerous biking behaviour on just a few higher-risk roads will not significantly reduce motorcyclist casualties”. However, the AA Trust Eurorap analysed 850 selected roads out of a total of 392,321 roads in Great Britain. Furthermore, 19% of 850 roads is only 0.04% or 161 of all roads and the statement that “at least one third of all fatal and serious collisions involved motorcycles (on these 161 roads)”, is highly contentious apart from being seriously subject to sample error. In the first instance, there is no breakdown of fatalities or serious injuries and secondly there is no explanation relating to the types of collisions.
For example, were these collisions with other vehicles or collisions with trees or road furniture?
In other words, this statement is misleading and what it seems to imply is that the motorcyclist is to blame for causing a third of collisions in this country. The report “The Accident Risk of Motorcyclists” published by the TRL in August 2004 states
”The data analysis showed that trends in casualties can be broadly explained in terms of changes in numbers and sizes of motorcycles and the mileage they cover. The KSI casualty rate per 100m vehicle kms has been fairly stable over the past ten years, with a tendency to decline in the most recent years, but is still 30 times higher than that for car occupants”.
The use of KSI (Killed and Seriously Injured) figures is also highly contentious. The reason for this can be identified in the Department for Transport’s Road Casualties 2003 report. It is important to consider the comments made in the preface of the DfT report on road casualties:
“…. readers should note that while very few, if any, fatal accidents do not become known to the police, there is evidence that an appreciable proportion of non-fatal injury accidents are not reported to the police and thus are not included in this publication. In addition research has shown that up to a fifth of casualties reported to the police are not included in the statistical return”.
However, irrespective of the previous statement it is also common knowledge amongst traffic police that it is ultimately the tick in the accident report box that counts and nothing else and that is down to the officers’ perception as to the seriousness of the accident.
In response to the issue of PTW accident statistics, one needs to consider that safety reports are ultimately both a reflection of research and opinion, in the sense that these data have been socially constructed and are therefore in part, a reflection of the person or people involved in their construction.
In other words existing data are as much social construction as they are records or measures that the researcher wishes to know about. Thus the researcher needs to consider the purpose for which the existing data were originally intended:
- Were they generated for research purposes, or for some other purpose?
- If they were generated for research purposes, how close a match is there with the researcher’s own agenda?
- If the data were not generated for research purposes, were they generated as an incidental by-product of some administrative process, or were they constructed as a source of information aimed at a specific audience? (Pole and Lampard 20021)
Elaine Hardy
National Research Officer MAG UK
research@mag-uk.org
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