Latest motorcycle safety study reports released

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http://www.examiner.com/motorcycles-in-national/latest-motorcycle-safety-stu
Latest motorcycle safety study reports released

Ken Bingenheimer, Motorcycles Examiner November 15, 2011

.Headlight configurations that make motorcycles more noticeable, why drivers fail to give way to motorcycles at T-intersections, and how mirror use influences car-motorcycle conflicts are among the topics researched and reported on in the just-out January issue of Accident Analysis & Prevention (AA&P), a journal primarily focused on causes and impacts of transportation accidents.
The January issue of AA&P is a themed issue titled "Safety and Mobility of Vulnerable Road Usears (sic): Pedestrians, Bicyclists, and Motorcyclists" and consists of a selection of papers presented at an international conference organized by Israel's National Road Safety Authority.
In a report entitled "Recognisability of different configurations of front lights on motorcycles," the researchers say that "Results of a laboratory experiment have shown that motorcycles with a T-shaped light configuration are more quickly identified, particularly when the motorcycles are in visual competition with other motorised road users."
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In "Why do car drivers fail to give way to motorcycles at t-junctions?," researchers studied differences between novice drivers, experienced drivers, and "dual drivers," i.e., drivers who also ride motorcycles. They found that dual drivers were better at recognizing motorcycles than either of the other two groups. While the results are inconclusive, the researchers state that "We argue that this is potential evidence for an oculomotor basis for Look But Fail To See errors."
The report "Attention and search conspicuity of motorcycles as a function of their visual context" says that multi-colored, reflective, and white rider outfits consistently made the riders more noticeable than a black outfit.
Cars changing lanes without recognizing that a motorcycle is in that lane is a common experience for motorcyclists, and that topic is addressed in "Attending overtaking cars and motorcycles through the mirrors before changing lanes." Not surprisingly, the researchers found that "Risky manoeuvres were less likely to occur in those cases where more time was spent gazing at the mirrors."
Other reports in this issue address other motorcycle-related issues. Access to the reports themselves is on a for-pay basis, but abstracts of the reports are available to all on the journal's website. ........
 http://www.journals.elsevier.com/accident-analysis-and-prevention/#description

http://www.scopus.com/record/display.url?eid=2-s2.0-38149090972&origin=inward&txGid=SQo0wRAUMe5dPpQPPKNJB-j%3a2
Highway accident severities and the mixed logit model: An exploratory empirical analysis
Milton, J.C.a , Shankar, V.N.b , Mannering, F.L.c
a Washington State Department of Transportation, Urban Corridors, PO Box 47330, Olympia, WA 98504, United States b Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, 226C Sackett Building, University Park, PA 16802, United States c School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, 550 Stadium Mall Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2051, United States

Many transportation agencies use accident frequencies, and statistical models of accidents frequencies, as a basis for prioritizing highway safety improvements. However, the use of accident severities in safety programming has been often been limited to the locational assessment of accident fatalities, with little or no emphasis being placed on the full severity distribution of accidents (property damage only, possible injury, injury)-which is needed to fully assess the benefits of competing safety-improvement projects. In this paper we demonstrate a modeling approach that can be used to better understand the injury-severity distributions of accidents on highway segments, and the effect that traffic, highway and weather characteristics have on these distributions. The approach we use allows for the possibility that estimated model parameters can vary randomly across roadway segments to account for unobserved effects potentially relating to roadway characteristics, environmental factors, and driver behavior. Using highway-injury data from Washington State, a mixed (random parameters) logit model is estimated. Estimation findings indicate that volume-related variables such as average daily traffic per lane, average daily truck traffic, truck percentage, interchanges per mile and weather effects such as snowfall are best modeled as random-parameters-while roadway characteristics such as the number of horizontal curves, number of grade breaks per mile and pavement friction are best modeled as fixed parameters. Our results show that the mixed logit model has considerable promise as a methodological tool in highway safety programming. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.