Every month I post links to the most recent research into motorcycle safety — crash data, protective equipment, rider training, road design, all of it.
Just for clarity, the way I compile these lists has changed. From this month I’m widening the sources from which these roundups are drawn. Until now I have mostly followed a set of journals; alongside those, from now on I will be widening my searches to include the main research indexes directly, among them OpenAlex, Crossref, Europe PMC and arXiv, together with the bodies that publish outside them: in the UK the DfT, TRL and PACTS; in Europe ETSC, ACEM, SWOV and BASt; in the US the NHTSA, IIHS and GHSA; and the biomechanics conferences, IRCOBI and ESV. A good deal of the most useful work on rider safety takes place outside the journal literature, or can just take a while to reach a journal: I’ve noticed recently that research into casualty statistics, helmet and clothing testing, crash investigation and exposure surveys all fall into that category, and I want my posts to be as comprehensive as possible.
So: here’s what caught my eye this month.
Airbag suits and injuries in US professional racing
When MotoAmerica extended its airbag-suit requirement from the top classes to every racing class in 2025, adoption rose and injuries fell. Across 498 crashes in 2024 and 379 in 2025, airbag-suit use went from 60% to 67%; despite a higher share of high-risk crashes in 2025 (26% versus 18%), crashes causing injury dropped from 16% to 8%, and those needing ambulance transport from 9% to 5%. The authors treat the finding as descriptive rather than causal.
https://doi.org/10.1136/ip-2026-046291
Helmet-law repeal in Arkansas, twenty years on
A trauma-registry study at Arkansas’s only adult level I trauma centre tracked motorcycle admissions across three windows between 2004 and 2023, after the state repealed its universal helmet law in 1997. Annual admissions nearly tripled, 64–72% of riders were unhelmeted, and helmet use was independently associated with lower odds of severe head injury (odds ratio 0.48).
Readers that are familiar with my opinions on mandatory helmet laws and graduated licensing will not be surprised to learn that a deeper evaluation of this research will be the subject in a future post.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2026.07.054
What predicts helmet use among young riders
A survey of 628 licensed riders aged 18–24 in Greater Jakarta tested helmet use in scenarios designed to encourage or discourage it. In the discouraging conditions, the strongest predictors of wearing a helmet were the descriptive norm (riders’ sense of what others do), prior habit, perceived susceptibility to injury, intention and gender.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iatssr.2026.09.001
Hazard-perception training in Thailand
In-depth crash investigations in Thailand have repeatedly pointed to perceptual failure, the rider not reading a developing hazard in time, as a contributor to motorcycle crashes. This study tests how hazard-perception training relates to crash risk and to riders’ ability to anticipate hazards.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2026.108771
Brazil’s motorcycle mortality transition
Using national mortality records from 2004 to 2024, the time-series traces how Brazil moved from pedestrian-dominated to motorcycle-dominated road deaths as motorcycle use expanded, with marked differences between regions.
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40621-026-00709-x
Reading time pressure to flag collision risk
An edge-AI model reads vehicle and sensor data to infer when a powered-two-wheeler rider is under time pressure, riding faster and braking harder, and flags the collision risk that comes with it. It is built to run on cheap hardware on the bike (about 1.15 million parameters) and reported 94.97% accuracy on a simulator dataset of 129,000 labelled windows from 51 riders. It is a preprint, not yet peer-reviewed, and its results come from a simulator rather than the road. As someone deeply embedded in research practice that relies on AI models, I’m fascinated by this study and what the implications might be for the insurance market.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17823
That’s it for this month. If you’ve come across safety research I’ve missed, feel free to email me.
Ride safe.