Research, analysis, and policy commentary on motorcycle safety legislation, training, helmet laws, and rider culture.
Transport for NSW has crash-tested seven motorcycle airbag vests. The chest results are encouraging, but the neck protection four of the vests advertise was never assessed, and the neck data the testers recorded hasn’t been published.
Six studies, and a note on widening these roundups to be as comprehensive as possible: US airbag-suit data linked to fewer racing injuries, a twenty-year Arkansas helmet-law-repeal study, hazard-perception training in Thailand, and Brazil’s mortality transition.
Illinois has just written a careful, tiered, age-graduated licensing framework for electric bicycles and scooters. It has never written one for motorcycles. What the 2024 federal crash data says about unlicensed riders, and why the argument against doing something about it has aged badly.
Congress has introduced a bill to strip Washington DC of its motorcycle helmet law, sponsored by legislators from Wisconsin and Montana who represent neither the District nor its riders. What the repeal evidence shows, and which safety measures attract organised opposition.
A quiet month for new peer-reviewed motorcycle safety research. One study this time: a survey of 2,910 active riders in Thailand testing how risky riding and protective habits each relate to crash involvement, and which of the two weighs more heavily.
An August 2026 survey of motorcycle safety legislation across New South Wales, Hawaii, Northern Ireland and Quebec — and an argument that the reforms which pass unopposed are precisely the ones that cost manufacturers nothing.
A quiet month for new peer-reviewed work. Two pieces worth reading, both on the human-factors and data side: MOTOR, a large multimodal dataset built around powered two-wheelers in dense traffic, and a laboratory study of situation awareness among Indonesian riders.
Four pieces for June 2026, two of them on AI-based rider assistance — a vision-language hazard-scoring system and an interpretable pipeline aimed at newly licensed riders — plus machine-learning work on injury severity on rural undivided roads and the passenger effect in single-vehicle crashes.
May 2026: motorcycle sales in the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union are contracting unevenly. Royal Enfield is the conspicuous exception. The deeper problem is cultural — an ageing rider base, a federation of demographically narrowing sub-tribes (Maffesoli’s neo-tribalism), and a regulatory environment in Europe that is tightening while the United States continues to do almost nothing.
A May 2026 survey of motorcycle safety legislation across British Columbia, the United Kingdom, India, and Australia — and an argument for why the United States remains the outlier by policy choice rather than by accident.
