Tag: behaviour

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15. Getting it wrong is easy, learning from a mistake seems a lot harder

Motorcycle crashes aren’t random. They follow patterns that haven’t changed for decades, yet many riders continue to repeat the same mistakes and the persistent human factors behind motorcycle crashes are overconfidence, poor anticipation, and failure to learn. Modern studies in accident analysis still emphasise that cognitive biases, overconfidence, and misjudgment are major contributors to crashes. Encouraging riders to ask “what could go wrong” and analyse their own role in crashes is a principle that should underpin all modern advanced rider training.

Getting it wrong is easy, learning from a mistake seems a lot harder

However good we are, we all make mistakes. Provided we survive them, then do we learn from them? It’s a good question and insurance industry statistics suggest that most riders don’t. Riders who have had an accident in the previous three years are three times more likely than average to have another accident in the following year – insurance companies do not load the premiums of riders who crash for no reason! And here’s something else to think about. We don’t have to learn from our own experience, we can look at where other riders crash, and historically we still have the same accident types as motorcyclists have always had. Here are the Big Three. Collisions at junctions. Crashes on corners. Overtaking accidents. Look at statistics from the 1950s and 2010s and you’ll find nothing has changed. What does that tell you? It should suggest we don’t learn well from experience – either our own, or someone else’s.

Have you had a ‘moment’ recently?

Have a think. Ask yourself some questions.

Did you see it coming, and if you did were you able to react in time and take avoiding action? If you couldn’t take evasive action, why not?

If you didn’t see it coming, what were you looking at? Did you fail to spot the clues to what was about to happen or did you fail to anticipate the likely sequence of events and consequences of what you were seeing?

We should know by now that the most common motorcycle crash is a collision between a bike and a car. But have a think on this. If the driver failed to spot the bike, the car was almost always where the rider could see it. Riders usually report that “the driver didn’t see me” and not that “I didn’t see the car”. In fact, they often say something along the lines of “the driver was looking right at me”. So the rider saw the vehicle they were about to collide with, no problem.

So what was going on in the rider’s head at that moment? Do they simply glance at the car, then leave it to the driver to sort it all out? That certainly seems to be the case in most car : bike collisions.

Here’s another example. A typical overtaking and filtering crash occurs when the driver turns right across the bike’s path. The rider’s cop-out is usually that “the driver should have checked his mirror properly” or “the driver didn’t signal before turning”. But think about it. If a car COULD turn right, why is the rider overtaking? Did the rider fail to spot the junction or driveway? Or did the rider simply assume that the driver wouldn’t turn?

If we haven’t anticipated a dangerous situation, then it’s our mistake as much as anyone else’s. And many bike crashes are down to the rider alone. Most cornering crashes and many overtakes that go wrong result from really poor decisions by the rider and the rider alone. Even when legally it’s the fault of another road user that we found ourselves in a difficult or dangerous situation, we should be looking for ways not to get into that situation in the first place. There’s no benefit to blaming the other road user from the stretcher.

If we don’t ride in a state of mind where we are looking for things to go wrong, then we WILL be caught out by unexpected – and very much routine – crashes. If we habitually say “it was the other guy’s fault” or “there was nothing I could do”, then we are fooling ourselves and will learn nothing. We need to assess our riding critically. Yet many riders find it almost impossible to admit to making a mistake. “The corner’s surface was rubbish”, or “the driver coming the other way was speeding”.

As I mentioned right at the beginning, we have the same crashes as we always have always had. Why haven’t we learned?

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13. Practice doesn’t just makes PERMANENT… it keeps POLISHED too

The very first version of this article, written over fifteen years ago fell into a common trap. I talked about how practice makes perfect. But I quickly learned – thanks to a horse riding instructor who was took training courses with both Survival Skills Advanced Rider Training and another former trainer who remains a buddy of mine – that’s not actually how it works. Repeating a skill actually fixes it in place – it makes it PERMANENT. For that reason it’s vital to learn the RIGHT techniques before we start practicing. We need to practice the perfect! It highlights a slightly different angle of rider development—skill retention, mental mapping, and context-dependent performance—rather than purely skill acquisition or risk awareness. But even after that my ideas developed. It’s perfectly possible to LOSE skills if we don’t keep them POLISHED. Riding skills should not be ‘just learned’, they shouldn’t eve be ‘maintained’. They should be honed and worked up to even higher levels.

Practice doesn’t just makes PERMANENT… it keeps POLISHED too

It all started when I was watching an online debate about the technique of ‘offsiding’, which is where riders cross the centre line onto the other lane to get a better view ahead:

“It helped me get over my reticence for going over the white line onto the wrong side of the road approaching corners for more visibility…. The thing I noticed in France was that I could easily move to the left for a right hand corner, because then I was on the ‘correct’ side of the road for home, therefore it didn’t feel as awkward. I think it’s just a mental barrier I have to overcome.”

I’m not going into the offsiding technique here – that’s another debate altogether – but it got me thinking.

I’d noticed that when I was abroad, although I was comfortable sitting near the centre line on a right-hander (ie, the reverse of what we’d do in the UK), I really wasn’t nearly so happy lining the bike up with the righthand edge of the lane near the grass for a left-hander. In the UK, I can place the bike precisely along the grass verge, but in France I was giving myself a good metre of leeway. I felt very uncomfortable pushing myself any closer, and if I tried I began to fixate on the edge of the road to the exclusion of taking advantage of the view ahead – it was definitely a mental thing.

Holding our position accurately within the lane is largely subconscious and relies on peripheral vision – or it should, if our our attention is up away and some distance ahead. But to achieve that precise positioning, we need a ‘mental map’ of the lane so our peripheral vision has something to refer to.

Riding all the time in the UK, constant practice generates a clear mental map of how my position should appear in peripheral vision. So when positioning left-of-centre to see around a right-hand bend, I ‘knew’ where I was in the lane, which allowed me to get on with looking further ahead.

But once I switched sides of the road in France, the mental map was clearly missing. As soon as I lined up right-of-centre near the verge, I began worrying subconsciously about the position of the bike.

As soon as I realised this, I began working on moving position bit-by-bit, rather than trying to take up the mirror image position. It took a bit of effort, but I was soon overcoming this mental block.

Now, here’s the reference to ‘practice keeps polished’. If I don’t ride abroad for a while, the problem comes back. But if I ride abroad regularly, it goes away quickly. If I take a break from riding abroad – as I did some years back – then it takes much longer for the issue to vanish again.

An excellent demonstration that we need to constantly work on riding skills to keep them polished and in tip-top condition. So…

…when was the last time you performed an emergency stop?

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12. Training for skills, pushing the envelope and margins for error, and over-confidence

The core principles discussed — balancing skills training with risk awareness, avoiding overconfidence, and recognising the limitations of both human ability and bike dynamics — remain absolutely relevant today. In fact, they’re arguably even more pertinent given the continued growth of powerful motorcycles, rider-assist technologies, and the wider availability of advanced track or skills training, which can unintentionally reinforce overconfidence. The key to reducing risk is not just honing our skills—it is understanding hazards, managing risk, and maintaining a margin for error. This article explores why true ‘better’ riding is as much about mindset and awareness as it is about technique.

Training for skills, pushing the envelope and margins for error, and over-confidence

Fundamentally, training in hazard awareness, risk assessment and risk management is the essential counterweight to balance training in riding skills. If we don’t get the balance right – or ignore the risk aspect altogether – then it’s easy to become overly confident, particularly as most of us (at least, right up to our first big crash) have false sense of indestructibility. Skills training, particularly when combined with inexperience, can lead to levels of confidence which take us into situations we cannot handle. It’s vital to recognise that this is a real issue. We should see training as a way to INCREASE our margins for error, and not an excuse to push our skills to the limit.

Let’s explain what I mean by asking a question. Why do we take training? The usual answers will be “to be a better or safer rider” or “to gain confidence”.

Let’s look at the ‘safer rider’ idea first. As I’ve said many times, there is no such thing as ‘safety’ on a motorcycle, and anyone who tells us that training makes us ‘safe’ riders is kidding us and themselves. Instead of safety, we need to think in terms of risk. In very simple terms, risk is:

the chance of something going wrong MULTIPLIED BY the impact on us when it goes wrong

So we really need a good grasp of what can go wrong!

That means understanding WHAT creates a threat to our health; that is, a ‘hazard’, WHERE we’ll find those hazards, and WHY the hazard creates a risk. Once we know that, we can assess the risk, and have a better understand how to manage that risk. It may sound the same but it creates a very different mindset when we start looking at riding in terms of “what can go wrong” rather than “what I’m doing makes me safe”.

And what about the concept of becoming a ‘better’ rider. What does ‘better’ actually mean?

For many training courses, it means that the trainee goes away with better ‘skills’. Skills tend to focus is on vehicle manoeuvring. This might be improved braking technique, better use of the throttle, the ability to swerve around an obstacle or techniques designed to improve cornering. This is particularly evident in track-based training and I often hear it suggested that new or less-confident riders to take a track-training day “to get used to handling the bike at higher speeds / greater lean angles / under harder braking”.

So the question we have to ask ourselves is “what does the trainee come away with?”

The answer is that whilst the trainee may have improved what were previously disfunctional skills, there is a risk they’ll come away from the session being able to use – and FEELING CONFIDENT TO USE – those higher speeds, greater lean angles and harder braking out on the road. It should be fairly obvious that there are potential problems here:

IMPROVING our own level of skill does NOT change bike dynamics. For example, our skill level does not change the level of grip between tyres and road. We may be more capable of braking harder or leaning more, but it also pushes us closer to the edge of the envelope.

EXPLOITING improved skills to ride faster, at greater lean angles or to brake harder DOES significantly changes bike dynamics. For example, we should know that if we double our speed, we QUADRUPLE our stopping distance. So even if we increase our speed by 25%, we increase our braking distance by more than might be obvious. More speed also increases the radius of a turn which means to get round a particular corner requires more lean angle, which makes it harder to brake or change direction, or even to respond to a slippery surface.

There’s a secondary effect. If we’re taught skills that allow us to perform more complex manoeuvres, then because they are more complex they nearly always have a higher risk of going wrong. For example, learning slow handling skills encourages riders try U-turns in confined areas where there’s a greater risk the manoeuvre will go wrong.

And finally, there’s no guarantee that we’ll use any of these added skills in an emergency. That’s something Keith Code noted years ago in his ‘Twist of the Wrist’ books. He realised that even highly-trained riders revert to instinct and panic because their training leads them to expect things to go right. When they go wrong, SURPRISE! kicks in, and they suffer from what he called ‘survival reactions’ – typically, panic reactions, freezing and target fixation.

So what I’m getting at is that there’s another kind of ‘better’ and that’s an improved understanding of what can go wrong, a heightened awareness of risk, and an ability to make better decisions when confronted with a threat.

Here is a very simple example. What’s the most common crash involving a rider in an urban area? You probably guessed, it’s the ‘Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You’ SMIDSY collision.

So first of all we need an understanding that driver can fail to see a motorcycle even when it seems to the rider that the bike is perfectly visible. (If you want to find out more about that, check out my work on the Science Of Being Seen or SOBS for short at http://scienceofbeingseen.wordpress.com.) ONLY when we have THAT understanding, do we have an awareness that there is a genuine risk that we may not be seen.

Then when we have achieved that, we can put BOTH parts – better skills and better awareness of what goes wrong – together. Stategies can be put in place to manage the risk, including our skills-based training – slowing down, changing position to improve lines of sight, sounding the horn, being prepared to take evasive action by emergency braking and / or swerving.

So here’s the Survival Skills approach to advanced motorcycle training. Rather than push closer to the ‘edge of the envelope’, let’s increase our ‘margin for error’. Instead of using our ability to brake harder to carry more speed, let’s use our awareness of the risks of riding to exploit those skills to stop in shorter distances in emergencies. Instead of using our ability to lean over further to increase our cornering speed, let’s understand what can go wrong in a corner to hold it at the same angle in case the corner tightens – so we have ‘BANK in the BANK’, to quote one of the Nosurprise.org ‘Rhyming Reminders’. Instead of trying to perform a U-turn in a confined space, understand that making life complex increases the risks of things going wrong, so look for somewhere easier or perform a three-point turn instead.

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09. The Salami Principle and Practice Makes Permanent – the key to learning new skills

Reviewing this article in the context of what I know now about skill acquisition indicates that I could have added some useful nuance to these ideas. We now know that practice is most effective when it is accompanied by clear, specific feedback, so that errors are identified early rather than being unknowingly embedded. It is also more robust when practice is varied and contextual, with changes in speed, environment or constraints, because this improves transfer to real-world riding rather than competence in a single exercise. Mental rehearsal and visualisation have been shown to reinforce physical practice, particularly where time, space or confidence are limited. Just as importantly, riders benefit from deliberate self-reflection — asking what has improved, what still feels weak, and why — rather than assuming progress is automatic. Finally, long-term improvement depends less on knowing what to practise than on sustaining the motivation to practise, which is best supported by small, achievable goals and visible progress rather than endless repetition of the same exercise.

But essentially, the underlying problem it addresses has not changed; skills do not “stick” simply because we attended a course. Subsequent research into motor learning, habit formation, and behaviour change has largely reinforced these ideas rather than replaced them. Terms such as chunking, spaced repetition, and deliberate practice are now commonplace, but the principles remain the same.

The Salami Principle and Practice Makes Permanent – the key to learning new skills

Each of my courses ends with a debrief where I remind the trainee of the aim of the course (ie, what they wanted to get out of it and what I thought they needed), how we approached those goals, what was achieved, what remained weak, and the need to continue working AFTER the course. The last point is one of the most important, but also one of the most overlooked. Any course of training has a limited effect… unless the trainee commits to continually reviewing and practicing what was covered.

Training courses require three steps:

the first stage is ‘preparation’ which is all about the behind-the-scenes work that the trainer does to prepare for the course
the second stage is’engagement’, which very briefly indicates that the training has to be interesting AND relevant to the trainee.
and third is ’embedding’, which is whether or not the training is delivered in a way that ‘sticks’.

“Preparation is all” is something you’ll hear regularly. Actually, it’s important but it’s not everything, and even a technically well-prepared course can fall down because the content is wrong for the student (or the trainer fails to show the trainee why it IS relevant). Or it can fail because the worthwhile content is boring.

But even if a course is well-prepared, well-delivered and relevant, there’s no guarantee it’ll stick. It needs to become ’embedded’.

The first version of this article, written quite some time ago recognised the need to get the trainee to do some work to help with this embedding. I talked about the need for practice, and I used a phrase I first heard from one of my earliest trainees, who happened herself to be a horse riding instructor. She said:

“Practice doesn’t make perfect. What it actually does is makes PERMANENT. So if you practice the wrong techniques, you won’t get better, you will only make the wrong techniques a permanent part of your performance. And that’s why you need to practice the perfect.”

That actually made an awful lot of sense. But practice alone isn’t enough. Training needs to be structured in a way that breaks a particular skill down into manageable chunks, which build back together in a logical order. This is something I’ve been doing since the earliest days and one day at the end of the session, I was explaining how the trainee could use this approach to schedule meaningful practice. I called it ‘compartmentalisation’ and he said: “Ah, the Salami Principle” and explained that thin-sliced, a salami is delicious and digestible. But try to eat the entire salami in one go, and we’ll simply make ourselves sick.

The Salami Principle applies to riding. Don’t try to practice everything at once, but remember the structure of the training and how it was broken down into simpler techniques which can be practiced one at a time. Even if we think we can remember everything, when still in the ‘practice makes permanent’ stage of development, it’s all too common for it all to fall apart again. Bang goes the trainee’s new-found confidence.

Slow riding skills are a good example. What do riders do when they want to practice slow control? They go out and attempt U-turns. They often do it on a new bike that they’ve never attempted a U-turn on before. What happens? They fall off. Why? Because a U-turn is the END product (albeit a pretty useless one in itself) of a sequence of skills, NOT the starting point. It’s only a moment’s thought to realise that controlling a bike around any tight turn needs sub-skills:

posture - gripping the tank with the knees and keeping the shoulders, elbows, wrists and neck loose
the ability to slip the clutch
the ability to balance clutch and throttle together
the ability to ride the bike at a consistent speed by controlling speed with the rear brake
the ability to look into the turn
knowing where to look into the turn and what NOT to look at
knowing how and why we should use counter-weighting
understanding where and when to make steering inputs
being comfortable with the bike leaning

All those can be practiced in that order, working on one skill at a time until we are happy we’ve got the hang of it. Some can be done at a standstill – posture and turning our head for example, or looking for ‘reference points’ to help make a tight turn and not get distracted by the kerb. Only when each is mastered do we move onto the next one. And then the skill set is pulled together using easy exercises like the Figure of 8 where there is plenty of room to start fast and wide before pulling the circles in tighter.

But set off straight into a U-turn without having practiced and mastered these skills and things can – and do -go wrong very quickly indeed.

But it was rather more recently that I discovered why practicing makes permanent. It’s known as the ‘Ebbinhaus Forgetting Curve’ and it dates from as far back as 1885, when Hermann Ebbinghaus first realised that we rapidly forget most of what we just learned, retaining relatively little from any learning experience.

What he showed over a century ago remains true to day. Any training course can fail to bring about lasting behaviour change, even when the first two stages of training – preparation and engagement – are well-designed, and even when the student has a strong intention to change.

Likewise with rider training. It’s incredibly easy to slip back into old habits within a very short time. What can be done to try to maximise the chance that the skills learned in the session are actually embedded? There are two possible solutions.

The first – also discovered by Ebbinghaus – is known as ‘over-learning’. The idea is that a particular skill is repeated over and over, beyond what would normally be seen as necessary to master it. To some extent, that is built into my courses – I tend to repeat the same ‘trigger phrases’ many times and I try to ensure that the trainee gets plenty of opportunity to work on particular skills during the session. But there’s a risk that if the trainee thinks he or she is simply repeating what’s already mastered, rather than embedding the necessary skills, the training can become boring and demotivating. U-turn practice, anyone?

The second is to repeat the training. Ebbinghaus discovered that after five re-runs, retention becomes near-perfect. This is the approach often taken by safety-critical industries like a nuclear plant.

Unfortunately, it should also be fairly obvious that when delivering my kind of one-off training course I have a bit of a problem. Unless I can persuade trainees to come back for a refresher, I generally only get to see them once. So now the onus is on the trainee to ensure that having completed the course, they actively continue to practice what was learned.

How can I encourage that? One way is to provide structured notes both before and after the course. The first lays out the content we will be covering, the second – which also offers a structured path for continued development – repeats the information in terms of “what we worked on”.

And I have a trick up my sleeve. Rather than send on the review immediately after the course, I send it ten days or so after the course. Why? If they read it next day, when their retention rate from the course is up near 100%, they skim through it, say “oh yes, I remember that”, and then promptly forget it. With the delayed review, the forgetting curve has kicked in so I’m REMINDING them of what was achieved. There is a better chance the trainee will read the notes properly and thus gain more from the feedback.

But of course, ultimately it all depends on the trainee – once they’re headed head home, if I’ve failed to drive home the ‘practice makes permanent’ point and if they think “that’s it, I’m trained now”, then there is a significant risk that in fact they’ll slither rapidly down that forgetting curve.

So, here are the takeaways.

If we accept that we can improve our riding through learning new techniques, then it’s essential that we practice to embed what we learned into long-lasting improvements to skill and confidence. And if we accept the need for practice, then break it all down into the into the simpler, relatively straightforward elements that were learned, and practice each part of the skill-set. Then move onto the next area of skills.

So if you’re reading this post-training, wherever it might be, and whoever might have trained you, ask yourself, “am I reviewing and practicing what I have learned frequently enough?” Schedule some time to go out on a regular basis, to think about your riding, give yourself a goal of a specific part of your riding to improve – and then practice, practice, practice.

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08. How far is too far?

When this piece was first written, the language of “cognitive load”, “human factors” and “decision fatigue” was not yet commonplace in rider training. Since then, research and experience have only strengthened the case made here: that learning on a motorcycle is limited not by ambition or mileage targets, but by the rider’s capacity to concentrate, absorb feedback and recover. High-mileage, endurance-style training made sense in an operational policing context; its uncritical transfer into civilian advanced training remains questionable. Traffic environments are now busier, bikes more capable, and distractions more numerous — making the question “how far is too far?” more relevant than ever. Mileage alone is a poor proxy for training value.

How far is too far?

There is undoubtedly a fine balance to draw between theory and practical time on the bike but good teaching demands both. Genuine riding exercises have a definite place but they require explanation. Simply piling on the miles is not good teaching technique, just as endless ‘chalk and talk’ offers limited opportunity to practice the theory.

Reading an industry mag some years back, the star letter writer – a training school owner – referred to a discussion with the owner of another school who, he claims, boasted of controlling his costs by: “padding out talks and never covering more than 50-60 miles during a full day’s training”. The letter writer, by contrast, claimed to offer “maximum on-road instruction” which reminded me of an ex-police instructor who claimed never to cover less than 200 miles in a day when out with his trainees.

So how far is too far?

There’s a simple answer to this. If the trainee is getting tired, then the session has gone too far.

Fatigue is dangerous. When we’re tired we make mistakes. Think back to your car lessons and remember how knackered you were after a two-hour session behind the wheel. Or remember how exhausting CBT and each day’s subsequent training was. As concentration slips, learning deteriorates and far worse, the risk of a riding error is magnified manyfold.

An experienced WORKING rider (such as a police rider, an instructor or a courier) may well be able to ride all day, but I worry when I hear of trainees doing eight-hour days and 200 mile rides. If the rider averages a reasonable 40 mph, that’s 5 hours riding time. 200 miles would have been a fair distance to ride in a day when I was despatching. These kind of distances will push typical commuting or recreational riders to (and possibly beyond) the limit.

And we still have to fit in the theory training, any off-road exercises and some breaks. Given the need for rest stops, I really wondered what the 200-miles-a-day instructor was actually managing to deliver in his eight hour day. It’s a lot more informative to ride short stretches for ten or fifteen minutes with interim debriefs whilst everything is still fresh in the trainee’s head, than hack fifty miles up the road between cafes. Well-designed theory sessions, as well as short off-road practice sessions, give the trainees a physical rest and a mental change of gear.

It’s also often overlooked by training schools that whilst the instructor is likely to be close to home, the trainee may well have had an early start and a long ride to get to the school. Even starting from an inn just ten minutes from the circuit, I had to set off at 7am for a race school to arrive in time to complete the formalities. By 1pm – six hours later – I’d spent two hours on track and another two hours in briefings and debriefings, and I was shattered. That’s why my own Survival Skills advanced rider training courses are pegged at five hours; beyond that fatigue sets in and learning drops off. And trainees have to get home again! I had 170 miles to ride back after that session. I left at 2pm and missed the afternoon session completely.

The perfect balance will vary from rider to rider since different trainees respond to different approaches. Too much talk is a turn-off for some, who want to get on the bike and ride, but others actually want to talk – they may want to discuss particular issues at length or be willing and able to learn from in-depth question and answer sessions. It’s up to the instructor to vary the lesson to suit each client, and not to make a teacher-centric decision about how the course should proceed.

The least charitable view would be that trainers running high mileage courses are actually padding out the lack of theory by simply keeping the trainee sitting on the bike all day! After all, spending a few ££s on another five litres of unleaded is much easier than actually writing a decent syllabus and putting together a lesson plan for the day. But mostly I get the feeling it’s simply lack of imagination and a case of “that’s the way it’s always been done” and yet another hangover from police training.

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06. Where riders crash – dispelling some myths

LATEST UPDATE JANUARY 2025

SUMMARY

Updating this article with the latest UK motorcycle crash statistics show that the fundamental patterns of motorcycle collisions have remained consistent over the past two decades — even as total numbers have moved mostly down. These figures come from the 2023–2024 “Reported Road Casualties Great Britain” factsheets published by the Department for Transport (DfT), which are the latest comprehensive government data available.

Overall Casualty Numbers (Trend vs 1998)

Then (1998):

  • ~24,969 injury accidents involving motorcycles

  • 498 rider deaths

  • 5,944 serious injuries

  • 18,168 slight injuries

Now (2024):

  • 340 motorcyclists killed in reported collisions

  • 5,468 seriously injured (adjusted)

  • 10,152 slightly injured (adjusted)

  • On average (2020–2024) about 6 riders are killed and 101 seriously injured per week in GB reported road casualty data.

Interpretation:
While the exact numbers have shifted due to changes in traffic levels, exposure, reporting and other factors, the pattern remains: motorcycles are still involved in disproportionately high numbers of serious and fatal collisions relative to their traffic share (under 1% of traffic).

Collision Type: Rural vs Junctions

Junction Incidence (2019–2023):

  • A majority of motorcycle fatalities (≈59–63%) occur not at or within 20m of a junction.

  • Only around 27–32% of fatalities occur at T/Y or other junction types.

  • Junction collisions remain a noticeable but not dominant proportion.

  • Majority of fatalities are not at junctions; many occur on rural roads.

Rural Roads:

  • ~69% of motorcycle fatalities occur on rural roads (where speed and cornering challenges are greater), even though rural traffic is a much smaller proportion of total vehicle miles travelled.

Interpretation:
This echoes my original point that high-speed rural road accidents and loss-of-control incidents continue to be very significant, rather than urban/driver-at-junction scenarios being the overwhelming cause.

Involvement of Other Vehicles

Recent breakdown (2019–2024):

  • A significant portion of fatalities still involves other traffic—fatal accidents involving two vehicles including a car ≈38%

  • These include overtaking crashes, not just collisions at junctions.

  • Many fatalities occur without any other vehicle involved, underscoring the role of single-vehicle incidents.

Interpretation:
This supports the earlier narrative that not all crashes are “car vs bike”, and that single-vehicle crashes are a significant part of the overall picture. While total fatal and serious injury numbers have decreased compared to the late 1990s, the distribution of crash types is little changed.

Back to the Future: the original article

Starting work as a courier in late 70s London made me very aware of the consequences of crashing – after all, if I couldn’t ride, I couldn’t eat. So not only did I do my very best to avoid crashing out on the roads, I also researched the topic as I tried to find out as much as possible about where, how and why motorcycle riders crash. The result was that I survived sixteen years and around half a million miles as a courier. Not surprisingly, once I became a motorcycle trainer, it became a self-appointed goal to educate other riders about why we crash.

Naturally, avoiding crashing has been a feature of my Survival Skills advanced rider training courses but I’ve also been writing on the topic for well over twenty years. My very first column for the Motorcycle Action Group’s magazine back in 2002 addressed crashing, but unfortunately it seems the topic needs revisiting on a regular basis.

Let’s start with a fact. There are a lot of urban collisions between bikes and cars. In 2019, just before re-publishing this article, MAG launched a new safety intiative online and one of the very first comments was along the lines of “it’s time we stopped drivers killing bikers”. It’s an attractive belief – after all, we hear a lot about bikes colliding with cars and now we have YouTube as an easy means of posting up the ‘evidence’.

Unfortunately, it’s largely a myth. Whilst there are fatal collisions at junctions, the fact is that far more riders kill themselves running wide in corners or through a badly-judged overtake.

But so is the idea that it’s power which is the problem. Here’s the text of an article that went up on my website in the early 2000s as I researched my first MAG articles in response to threats of a power restriction on bikes.

Since then, I’ve kept an eye on each new report or study into motorcycle crashes. And here’s the bad news. If you care to dig out the latest stats on motorcycle accidents, you’ll find nothing’s changed. We’re still having the same crashes in the same places. Some elements have changed since I wrote the article below – the ‘gentleman’s agreement’ on power went out of the window – but the essential analysis of crashes is still entirely relevant two decades on.

Power Output

If you are a member of either the BMF or MAG, or just interested in motorcycle politics, you’ll know that the EC and various member governments have had serious concerns about power and motorcycle accidents.

Motorcycle manufacturers are slowly waking up to the fact that there has been a change of approach by road safety campaigners, and that vehicles capable of such high speeds are being targeted as socially unacceptable, and possible solutions include compulsory bhp limits and speed restrictors.

Limiting speed of traffic has been on the agenda in the UK for months, and Dutch and German governments have shown concern over recent high performance models. Euro-wide plans for a power limit have been around in one form or another for ten years. Some countries have had power restrictions in place for years. Since 1984 French bikes have been restricted to 98 bhp and Swiss riders have to make do with 85 bhp.

A 125 bhp “gentleman’s agreement” in the UK was scuppered, ironically enough, by Triumph when they released their 143 bhp Daytona 1200, and since then the power race has been on, and speeds have climbed to match, to the point where the Hayabusa and ZX12-R are nudging the 200 mph barrier. The result of concerns in the UK is that the Big Four Japanese manufacturers have put in place a voluntary speed limit of 186mph on their most powerful models.

Power limits are generally justified on the grounds that power equates directly to speed, and that speed causes accidents. The mid 90s Martin Bangemann-inspired 100 hp limit was only ditched by the EC when the research on which it was based was shown to be flawed. More recently a Dutch safety study into motorcycle accidents found no link between accidents and bikes of 100 hp or more and clearly showed that power is not an issue in motorcycle accidents. The study, which was carried out by the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, included a survey of existing reports, as well as evidence from the Dutch police.

Existing reports clearly showed that the major factors in accident risk were not engine power, but the motorcyclists themselves

age
experience
attitude
alcohol

and the accident circumstances

type and condition of the road
location
weather etc.

Evidence from the Dutch police accident investigators showed that high speed and taking risks was also a significant factor :

losing control on a bend
other road users wrongly estimating speed
reckless riding

Even there though, there was no evidence that more than 100bhp was being used at the time.

Accident Statistics

Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) figures published in February 1999 show that in 1998 there were:

24,969 Injury Accidents Involving Motorcycles
498 Motorcyclist Deaths
5,944 Serious Injuries
18,168 Slight Injuries

Motorcycle riders and passengers accounted for 15% of those killed or seriously injured in 1998, but powered two wheeler traffic represented less than 1% of all road traffic.

There were 17,422 two vehicle accidents involving motorcycles in 1998 and 5,529 single vehicle accidents. Of the single vehicle accidents, 1,446 involved one or more pedestrians; in these accidents there were 1,490 pedestrians hit, of whom 29 were killed and 344 seriously injured.

On built-up roads, over three quarters of motorcycle accidents occurred at junctions, and almost a half at T or Y junctions. By comparison, on non built-up roads, less than a half of motorcycle accidents occurred at junctions, and just under a fifth at T or Y junctions.

The motorcyclist casualty rate was higher on built-up than non built-up roads. Less than half of motorcycle traffic was on built-up roads, which accounted for 72% of casualties. The lowest casualty rate was on motorways. However, the proportion of accidents involving serious injury was higher on non-built up roads and motorways, reflecting the higher speeds on these roads.

London had the highest rate of motorcyclists killed or seriously injured in road accidents but was only slightly higher than that for Scotland as a whole, but twice that of the South West region which had the lowest rate. London had the highest rate and the North East had the lowest rate for all severities of casualty.

Per registered motorcycle, Great Britain had a high death rate in comparison with other countries. Ireland had the highest and Japan the lowest. Britain’s death rate of 6.8 per 10,000 licensed motorcycles is about eight times that of the Czech Republic, with the lowest rate.

When accidents occur

The average daily casualty count was higher during the week than at the weekend, with Fridays having the most casualties in 1998. However, the proportion of casualties killed or seriously injured was higher at the weekend, at 32% compared with 24% during the week.

There is a marked difference between the proportion of motorcyclist casualties injured during summer and winter, whilst there is much less seasonal variation in all road user casualties. The highest percentage of casualties occurred in August for motorcyclists and in November for all road users.

Who causes accidents?

Riders have long taken (cold) comfort in the findings of the Booth Report (1987) which, looking at accidents in urban areas, concluded that car drivers were at fault in two thirds of accidents involving motorcycles. Equally, high casualty rates amongst the under 25’s were often put down to youth and lack of experience.

The DETR figures show that accidents involving a motorcycle and another vehicle still account for 2/3rds of all motorcycle accidents. However, they also show that single vehicle accidents with no pedestrians or other road users involved accounted for 18% of all motorcycle accidents resulting in injury. This compares with 14% for cars and 7% for goods vehicles.

However, an in-depth analysis of accidents in Cheshire between 1 April 1998 and 31 October 1998 reported in Street Biker (Feb-Mar 2000), the MAG newspaper. John Moss MBE, Chief Road Safety Officer for Cheshire (and MAG member) revealed that fully 67% of all the crashes studied were due to rider error and that the traditional view that most motorcycle accidents are down to blind Volvo drivers is badly flawed.

Let’s look at the bald statistics:

lost control on right hand bend - 16.7%
lost control on left hand bend - 13.7%
right turning vehicle hit by overtaking motorcycle - 12.7%
motorcycle hit by emerging vehicle at junction - 9.8%
motorcycle collides with rear of stationary vehicle at junction - 7.8%
fell off - 6.9%
collisions on roundabouts - 6.9%
motorcycle crosses carriageway on l/h bend
and collides with oncoming vehicle - 5.9%
motorcycle crosses carriageway on r/h bend
and collides with oncoming vehicle - 3.9%
motorcycle collides with vehicle turning right across its path - 7.8%
stationary motorcycle hit from behind - 5.9%
others - 2.0%

Sports bikes were involved in 43% of these accidents and the 26-40 age group in an overwhelming 55.3%. The supposedly high risk group of under 25’s accounted for 23.6%. Not unexpectedly in a survey area which includes the infamous “Cat & Fiddle” over 50% of riders lived outside the survey area.

How can we interpret these figures?

The fact that London dominates the casualty list is hardly surprising. The population of London is something like 6 million, around 10% of the entire population of the UK. In addition, several million drivers and riders more commute into and out of London. Traffic density is high over a very large area. What is rather more of a surprise is that Scotland was only slightly lower. What is not clear is whether the casualties are concentrated in the Glasgow and Edinburgh areas or whether rural accidents make a significant contribution.

Neither is it surprising that over three quarter of motorcycle accidents and just under three quarters of injuries occurred at junctions. If you hit a car, even at twenty miles per hour speed you are likely to be injured.

What is not so clear until you look at the figures more closely is that the DETR figures show that accidents out of town occur at higher speeds and result in more serious injury, even though the figures for in-town accidents appear to dominate the statistics. The problem is one of interpretation. Lumping together serious and fatal injuries is misleading and many serious injuries are not necessarily life threatening. As I understand it a broken finger requiring medical treatment would be considered a serious injury and relatively minor injuries of this kind are much more likely to occur when you ride a bike and are involved in a minor accident than if you drive a car.

The way the figures for serious injury and fatalities are taken together tends to disguise the consequences of rural accidents. Earlier statistics from 1994 show that 50% of all fatalities occur out of town.

Although single vehicle accidents account for slightly less than 1/5th of all motorcycle accidents according to DETR figures, these accidents usually occur outside town and at higher speeds and lead to more serious injury. This is borne out by the higher proportion of serious injuries and fatalities occurring at weekends and in the middle of the summer, which implicates recreational riders rather than workday commuters.

So who is at fault for rural accidents? A common factor between Californian, Dutch and UK research into motorcycle accidents is that many could have been avoided it the motorcyclist had the rider shown more awareness of potential danger, been more visible or had been capable of braking, steering or cornering properly. Alcohol, experience, attitude, high speed and risk taking were other contributory factors, as were the type and state of the road and weather conditions.

The Dutch study in particular showed that losing control in bends was a significant factor. The Cheshire figures show that accidents involving misjudging bends make up 40% of accidents in rural areas. The fatality rate for these kind of accidents is high. This was made clear in our local IAM magazine a couple of years ago when a serving police officer revealed that out of twelve riders killed in Kent in a year, eleven lost control on bends. The Dutch study also found that many of the accidents investigated would have been less serious, or avoided altogether, if the rider had been able to make an emergency stop.

Other more recent statistics than the DETR report showed that there has been a shift in location of accidents from urban to rural environments and that the peak age for accidents has moved away from young to “born again” riders.

The Cheshire report should shake the traditionally-held view that bikers are usually the innocent victims of car drivers, which the DETR figures appear at first glance to support, or that only young riders are at risk. The reduction in accident rates amongst youngsters resulting from Compulsory Basic Training is well documented, and these figures highlight that the 25-40 age group of riders who largely predate the widespread emergence of training schools and would have been mostly self-taught are very much at risk too.

Mr. Moss goes on to consider what conclusions can be drawn from the research. He says:

“Consideration of the various factors relating to rural motorcycle crashes leads unerringly to the conclusion that riders are failing to ride their machines within their personal capabilities even though the bike itself may have been well within its performance envelope at the time of the crash. The vast majority of the “bend” crashes had clues which indicated that the riders had either braked or shut their throttles mid-bend, resulting in understeer crashes. In the crashes where right turning vehicles were hit by overtaking motorcyclists, it seemed that the rider should have foreseen the likelihood of the turning movement e.g. garage forecourt, side road etc..”

Look at the figures. 20.5% of the accidents, the total of bikes hitting cars turning right or hitting them from behind, can be largely attributed to poor observation and anticipation, probably made worse by excess speed, and in my opinion this is not entirely unexpected.

However, the fact that 40.2% of the accidents occurred when riders either lost control in, or ran wide in bends is chilling and far worse than I thought. Bend-swinging is so fundamental to our enjoyment of the sport that we take it for granted. Now it seems that we have to think again. As well as a lack of the observation and judgement skills we need to ride safely, it also betrays that most riders lack a fundamental lack of understanding of the way a motorcycle steers and behaves in a corner.

Mr. Moss recognises that whilst police enforcement of existing traffic laws is important in restricting the activities of a “lunatic fringe” of riders who flout deliberately regulations, it cannot by itself tackle the underlying problem of lack of skill, and cites the North Yorkshire BikeSafe 2000 initiative as kind of mix of enforcement, education and encouragement that police forces across the country should be pursuing. However, he rightly points out that it places heavy demand on police manpower so that its impact is not as widespread as would be desirable, and indicated that some forces have declined to join the scheme as they “do not have a problem”, even though their riders may be crashing on another county’s roads.

He goes on to say “there is a countywide need to equip riders with the skills needed for them to avoid or minimise crashes caused by their shortcomings in machine control, otherwise increased machine sales will be reflected in a parallel increase in casualties” and points out the valuable role that the IAM, RoSPA and commercial advanced riding schools have to play in rider training.

Conclusion

So, research shows that claims that power causes accidents is flawed. But so is the traditional motorcyclist’s view that it is blind Volvo drivers that kill motorcyclists.

Riding experts like the IAM agree that speed and power alone don’t kill. Speed in the wrong place, speed without judgement, speed without skill can and does.

The evidence also pinpoints the sad fact that a lot of us can’t manage to negotiate corners without falling off or hitting oncoming vehicles, and when we get it wrong, the result is often very bad indeed. The message John Moss is giving is that it is down to us as riders to put our house in order. As a member of MAG, he can hardly be classed as a killjoy or a scaremongerer. “Get trained and improve your riding skills” he says. With the proper skills you can have fun, but be safe at the same time.

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01. Rider Competence: Who’s Truly Ready for the Road?

I’ve been directly involved in rider training for just over three decades as I write. Even before that, I was writing about riding technique, based on what I’d personally learned via the usual mix of theory from books like ‘Motorcycle Roadcraft’, and how I had interpreted what I’d read in those books via my own experience as a motorcycle courier, a job I enjoyed for sixteen years. And I was doing a bit of informal coaching with a university bike club too. It was that role that pushed me towards getting some formal qualifications. This article explores the question of rider competence and how to judge it.

As I write this short note, the UK government is holding consultations on reforming rider training. Whether anything will happen, who knows? If it does, I’ll update this particular article.

Rider Competence: Who’s Truly Ready for the Road?

Back in 1995, I was just starting out on my journey to become a qualified rider coach by starting at the bottom – as a CBT instructor. Along with three other novice instructors, I took a very intensive and thorough training course with CSM – at that time the biggest rider training school in the country. The course was very hard work, and as I was to discover over the next couple of years, an excellent foundation for working with riders at all levels – I learned more about teaching in six days than I had in six months on a post-grad education course.

But at the end I still didn’t have an answer to a crucial question:

“How do you know if a trainee rider is at an adequate standard to issue a CBT certificate?”

Rider Competence and CBT

So I asked our trainer. Here was his answer:

“Is he or she likely to kill themselves as soon as they ride out of the training school gate? If yes, then they’re not at the CBT standard. If no, then give them the certificate.”

That was pretty brutal but it answered the question. If the rider could cope out on the road, being aware of the most likely hazards and having the necessary skills to change speed and direction to negotiate those threats, then that was good enough. Scary, really. It certainly doesn’t demonstrate rider competence.

And that brings me to a question that anyone involved in coaching riders, whether directly via a training course, or even when writing articles online:

“Rider competence – what is it, what level should it be set at, and who qualifies as competent?”

Rider Competence – who qualifies?

Here’s my answer.

Competency is about being to move beyond rigid context-free rules. My favourite example of a rigid routine that is often followed without thinking about WHY we’re applying it is the basic routine taught to all new drivers (*) in the UK:

‘Mirror – Signal – Manoeuvre’.

Condensed to MSM to help us remember, it’s all too often followed by “oops!”

It’s taught to new riders too – just substitute ‘Observation’ for Mirror and you have the OSM routine.

Using mirrors and indicators competently requires us to understand the limitations of mirrors and why a blind spot check may be needed, how our signals will be interpreted by other road uses and why it’s still necessary to double-check all the way through the manoeuvre to ensure that it’s still going the way we planned it.

This is one measure of competence – being able to assign importance to particular activities and events, and thus being able to prioritise our responses to situations by analysing what matters most, rather than following a routine we learned by rote.

CBT routes are carefully chosen to take the new riders around a range of hazards, but at the end of the two hour road ride, the trainees have only learned ‘by rote’ routines for a very limited number of traffic situations. And of course, the instructor is there all the time at the end of the radio link, ready to stop in with help and advice at any moment.

Learning by rote doesn’t allow for thinking application, and learner riders straight out of CBT may not even remember the OSM routine at the end of the long day. So, if you ask me, a rider straight out of CBT definitely isn’t about to demonstrate rider competence – far from it. CBT really doesn’t equip a new rider to cope with the roads. It offers the barest selection of survival tools. And that’s why the DVSA always intended CBT to be the lead-in to training for the full motorcycle test.

But what about riders who’ve passed that full bike test?

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Rider Competence and the DVSA bike test

One thing I’ve heard many times is that trainees carry their trainer’s voice in their heads, sometimes for years after taking the UK motorcycle test, but out their on the road in front of the examiner, there’s a crucial difference when compared with CBT.

Candidates have to make their own decisions.

They don’t have the comfort zone of their instructor and the radio link to keep them out of trouble, though the examiner will step in when there’s clear danger, though of course that’s an instant test fail.

And since on test a candidate can end up anywhere, those riders cannot apply fixed rules – they have to be able to use their knowledge to solve problems. They may need to negotiate an unfamiliar roundabout or junction by using reason and analogy, thus applying what they already know to a novel situation.

This ability to move beyond rules and and rote learning, and to apply what’s already known flexibly to new challenges is the first of our measures of competence.

This is exactly why practice must be structured — something I explore in my piece on the Salami Principle and why practice makes permanent.

So by this measure, I’d say that a rider who passes the bike test – or at least, passes it without racking up a dozen minor faults – qualifies as competent. Since riders who manage a test pass must have managed to ride the test route without putting themselves at risk, I’d say most riders with a full licence are by these measures competent. Not necessarily ‘proficient’,  note, and definitely not ‘expert’. But most are competent enough to deal with the the majority of the challenges they will encounter on the roads in the next year or two…

…with one major proviso. The DVSA test creates rider competence within the context of the riding environment they are tested in. And given the limitation of the the basic DVSA motorcycle test, that’s urban riding with a bit of country road and dual carriageway thrown in. The test simply isn’t in-depth enough to cover much ground physically – the candidate is on the bike for not much more than half-an-hour. Thirty minutes doesn’t allow for much riding outside town centres so basic training rarely covers cornering or single carriageway overtaking, for the simple reason neither are likely to be severely tested on the DVSA test.

In reality, both of which are actually pretty essential skills. Nor do most learners get to tackle heavy city-centre congestion or mountain roads. And none ever ride on motorways. So by these measures, whilst a newly-qualified rider should be capable of coping with standard town traffic, they would not likely be competent in all areas.

I’ve written elsewhere about how cognitive load and fatigue limit learning — see my article on how far is too far for a training day.

What about riders who’ve taken post-test training, maybe gaining an advanced riding qualification along the way?

Rider Competence and post-test training

Well, even with their gong, some riders continue to dodge big cities. Others still avoid motorways. Many actively stay away from narrow country roads. Many a time I’ve been told “I don’t enjoy riding in those conditions so I avoid them”. We may not enjoy all riding environments, but when there are places we actively avoid, then we can’t claim to be fully competent either, regardless of having demonstrated an ‘advanced’ level of riding skills on test.

There’s also a mental element to rider competence which I believe is very much ignored at both basic and post-test level, And that’s the acceptance of responsibility for our choices.

And that starts with understand that we actually MADE choices and that we weren’t forced into a course of action by unavoidable circumstances. A driver didn’t pull out on us “from nowhere” – the car came from somewhere. The bend didn’t “tighten up on us” – we didn’t read it correctly. Most dangerously of all, if an overtake goes wrong, it wasn’t “the driver’s fault for not checking his mirrors”, it was our responsibility not to put ourselves into the position where we could end up in difficulties. In short, if we’re still blaming other road users when we end up in a potentially-dangerous situation, then we’re not demonstrating competence either.

So here’s what I do when I’m training; I apply a cascade of questions:

1. did we arrive in one piece at the end of the journey? If we didn’t then we’re obviously not competent. If we did, we can move to the next question…

2. did we force other road users to change speed or direction to avoid us? If we did, then it’s the actions of others keeping us safe on the road, not our own riding behaviour – we’re still not competent.

3. did we scare ourselves and have to take serious evasive action along the way? If we did, then clearly there was an element of luck involved in keeping us out of trouble, and we’re not competent yet. If we got there with no frights, then the next question…

4. did we arrive by gliding around other road users without impacting their choices, did we arrive without any sudden scares or evasive manoeuvres on our part? If we did, then it’s likely we are competent enough.

If you want to check your own riding for competence, you can try answering  these questions based on your own riding. But naturally, those answers lead to another series of questions. What are the skills and knowledge that are absolutely NECESSARY for a rider to know and to be able to perform to reach competency? What SHOULD a rider know? And what’s just NICE – the superficial gloss which looks good but doesn’t actually add any particular value to our riding? Next time, I’ll try to answer that.

Final point. We are unlikely to be competent at every area of riding. But the more areas we can tick off, the safer we’re likely to be out on the roads.