Washington State Dept. of Transportation: Biased Against Or Just Ignoring Motorcycles?

This question has, from time to time, been asked.  It deserves an answer.  In public transportation planning policy, there are world and national standards for highway infrastructure.  Safety features are designed into these pieces of highway infrastructure that afford a safety benefit to automobiles, and larger vehicles.  Transportation policy planners are aware of these standards.  Designing and planning policy around them.  Except for motorcycles.  In a 2016 Traffic Safety Conference, Dr. Chiara Dobrovolny, Ph.D. of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute stated that there is; “Limited research to address riders safety when impacting roadside safety hardware.  No US testing standards for motorcycle riders safety when impacting roadside safety devices” and “No world testing standards when impacting in an upright position.”

As early as 1982, Dr. J.V. Ouellet of the University of Southern California published a report entitled “Environmental Hazards In Motorcycle Accidents”.  This study had its data taken from the same data sets as the 1981 Hurt Report”.  The “Hurt Report” is widely considered the most in-depth motorcycle traffic safety study of the 20^th Century.  In the abstract for this 1982 report, Dr. Ouellet states; “Considerable research and development effort has been devoted to making the roadway environment a safer place for automobile collisions, but a commensurate effort for motorcycles is lacking.”

In the decades since, there have been several studies on the effects of motorcycles colliding with roadside safety barriers.  The results of these studies seem to be unknown to WSDOT policy planners or are discounted by them.  However, when a WSDOT study finds that the percentage of serious injury or fatal motorcycle crashes jumped significantly after installation of one of these safety features, the motorcycle datasets were “exempted” because “they are skewing” the analysis of the data.  The study also reported that; “The research team found that motorcycle crashes were heavily influenced by horizontal curves, which were linked to 30 of the 35 crashes. Of those 30, 26 were lane departures to the outside of the curve.”  However, the researchers did not even attempt to look at any possible contributing effect the “safety feature” they were researching may have had to these crashes.  All the while, this “safety feature” lay directly in the middle of the roadway, and were crossed by the 26 “lane departures to the outside of the curve”.  What was this “safety feature”?  Centerline Rumble Strips. 

The researchers apparently had so little understanding of the handling differences between motorcycle and automobiles that even their own words did nothing to draw their attention to a possible correlation between their installation and the increase in serious and fatal motorcycle crashes.  Their research was focused only on the primary contributing circumstances the CLRS were to influence when installed.  This was; “The primary contributing circumstances CLRS are expected to influence are those where an operator is asleep, fatigued, or distracted.”  Since there were no reports of “asleep, fatigued, or distracted” drivers in the motorcycle crashes, no other conclusions appear to even have been worth looking at.  Other than making the comment that the “motorcycle findings are an interesting study on their own” the dataset was exempted and no other related motorcycle study was ever conducted.

In all further studies on the performance analysis of centerline rumble strips, motorcycles were not even mentioned.  Not even to say their data had been exempted.  This is quite a common situation in WSDOT highway performance reports.  While studies around the world are being done that show the serious and significantly dangerous effects motorcyclists incur during a crash involving highway safety features, motorcycles and motorcyclists are rarely even mentioned in WSDOT studies and reports.

For example; both the “Two-Lane Rural Highways Safety Performance Functions” and the “Urban and Suburban Arterial Safety Performance Functions” from 2016 have a combined 574 pages.  In those pages; pedestrians are mentioned over fifty times, and bicyclists are mentioned nearly forty times. 

Neither motorcycles or motorcyclists are even mentioned once.  All while motorcycles account for four percent of Washington State’s registered vehicles.

Several studies from around the world have focused on the effects of motorcycles colliding with roadside safety barriers.  These studies have clearly shown the effects of a motorcycle colliding with barriers such as guardrails, jersey barriers, and cable barriers.  In the 2010 Virginia Tech-Wake Forest study “Fatality risk in motorcycle collisions with roadside objects in the United States” by Daniello and Gabler, one of the conclusions were that; “that motorcycle collisions with guardrail have a greater fatality risk for motorcyclists than collisions with the ground. Based on the most harmful event, collisions with guardrail were 7 times more likely to be fatal.”  Yet WSDOT seems to be resistant to performing simple mitigation efforts that would reduce significant fatal collisions between motorcyclists and these roadside safety barriers.  Rarely, if ever, admitting that any benefit would result in doing so.  Even

If only as a pilot program to mitigate effects on sections of roadway WSDOT’s own studies show have a significantly higher rate of motorcycle crashes.  While the WSDOT may hold the position that a high percentage of these crashes are “single-vehicle”, and therefore the riders fault.  It has also been shown that infrastructure “safety features” designed to protect automobile occupants can have an adverse effect on motorcycle stability and lead to crashes with no other vehicle involved.  There are always other factors that may need to be considered on an individual crash by crash basis, but disregarding those factors because of the class of vehicle involved will never allow WSDOT and the State of Washington to attain its “Target Zero” goal of zero fatal or serious traffic collisions by 2030.  By refusing to view motorcycles as a part of any comprehensive transportation planning policy, WSDOT would seem to be sacrificing the safety of Washington’s motorcyclists through either an institutional bias or worse by an institutional disregard for the safety of a class of Washington’s citizens.

Catch ya on the road sometime…

Studies referred to in this article:

1.        2016 Traffic Safety Conference, Dr. Chiara Dobrovolny, Ph.D. Texas A&M Transportation Institute

2.        Environmental Hazards In Motorcycle Accidents, Dr. J.V. Ouellet, Traffic Safety Center, University of Southern California 1982

3.        Performance Analysis of Centerline Rumble Strips in Washington State, Olson, Manchas, et al, March 2011 WSDOT WA-RD768.1

4.        Two-Lane Rural Highways Safety Performance Functions, Shankar, Hong, et al, May 2016, WSDOT WA-RD 856.1

5.        Urban and Suburban Arterial Safety Performance Functions: Final Report, Shankar, Venkataraman, et al, June 2016, WSDOT WA-RD 857.1

6.        Fatality risk in motorcycle collisions with roadside objects in the United States, Daniello, Gabler, Virginia Tech-Wake Forest University, School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, 2010