The previous post about the young man losing his life unnecessarily has got me thinking of ways to prevent such accidents and ways in which we could all learn from such tragedies.
In the aviation industry, whenever an incident or accident occurs, a very detailed accident report is compiled. All aspects of the accident are looked at: the aircraft type, crew experience, conditions prevailing, circumstances at the time, events leading to the accident, a description of the accident itself and the probable causes concluded by the investigators.
These accident reports are extremely useful to pilots, it?s the best way to learn from others mistakes and helps in identifying dangerous conditions and situations as they are developing. This brings me to my point.
If reports of biking accidents, detailing as much as possible, where made available to bikers this would be excellent information to have to improve defensive riding or adjust your attitude towards riding. I would assume that such information is recorded in police reports and could be available. The data would have to be collected and the accident reports compiled containing at least:
Riders age and experience / motorcycle type / conditions (i.e. day/night, raining or not) / how the accident happened / injuries & any other relevant info.
With a sufficiently big enough database trends will most likely start appearing identifying dangerous situations that we should all look out for. Whether it is the bikers fault or the cars fault, something can be learned from it. After reading enough of these reports you will automatically react early to dangerous situations that ?you have seen before? and hopefully take action in time. I believe the risk of ridding could be greatly reduced by this, reading about an actual accident has a lot more effect than reading an article on safe ridding for example. A real event tends to stick with you. This works in flying and these accident reports help, amongst many other things, in making flying a safe mode of transport. I don?t see why it couldn?t work for motorcycling. If an established campaign like ?Think Bike? made such info available on its website I would imagine many bikers would be interested in checking out the reports and therefore learn from others unfortunate accidents.
I know that every time I have heard a description of a bike accident I have always learned something & used it when riding which in the end hopefully makes me a safer rider.
Any thoughts on the viability of such a thing?
In the aviation industry, whenever an incident or accident occurs, a very detailed accident report is compiled. All aspects of the accident are looked at: the aircraft type, crew experience, conditions prevailing, circumstances at the time, events leading to the accident, a description of the accident itself and the probable causes concluded by the investigators.
These accident reports are extremely useful to pilots, it?s the best way to learn from others mistakes and helps in identifying dangerous conditions and situations as they are developing. This brings me to my point.
If reports of biking accidents, detailing as much as possible, where made available to bikers this would be excellent information to have to improve defensive riding or adjust your attitude towards riding. I would assume that such information is recorded in police reports and could be available. The data would have to be collected and the accident reports compiled containing at least:
Riders age and experience / motorcycle type / conditions (i.e. day/night, raining or not) / how the accident happened / injuries & any other relevant info.
With a sufficiently big enough database trends will most likely start appearing identifying dangerous situations that we should all look out for. Whether it is the bikers fault or the cars fault, something can be learned from it. After reading enough of these reports you will automatically react early to dangerous situations that ?you have seen before? and hopefully take action in time. I believe the risk of ridding could be greatly reduced by this, reading about an actual accident has a lot more effect than reading an article on safe ridding for example. A real event tends to stick with you. This works in flying and these accident reports help, amongst many other things, in making flying a safe mode of transport. I don?t see why it couldn?t work for motorcycling. If an established campaign like ?Think Bike? made such info available on its website I would imagine many bikers would be interested in checking out the reports and therefore learn from others unfortunate accidents.
I know that every time I have heard a description of a bike accident I have always learned something & used it when riding which in the end hopefully makes me a safer rider.
Any thoughts on the viability of such a thing?
