International Motorcycle Safety Conference 2013 - A review - I

Orlando, 16-17 October 2013. The Motorcycle Safety Foundation organized the first edition of the International Motorcycle Safety Conference in collaboration with IFZ.

One of the most interesting projects presented at IMSC is the 100 Motorcyclists Naturalistic Study (website) conducted by the MSF in collaboration with the Motorcycle Research Group at Virginia Tech (VTTI). This study recruited 100 riders and their motorcycles for a large scale data acquisition in naturalistic conditions (normal every-day, real life riding, real world environment, non-intrusive equipment). The investigation has analysed 46 out of 100 riders and has already collected 42,000 trips of over 400,000 miles during 35,000 days of riding (corresponding to approx. 95 years). The duration of the participation of each rider ranged between 5 to 16 months and the types of motorcycles involved in the study were cruisers, touring and sports bikes. The huge study collected a large number of signals for each motorcycle, including five video views, vehicle state (speed, accelerations and rotations), and rider's control actions (throttle and brakes). The videos allowed for the identification of a large number of additional variables, including weather,  time of the day, lighting conditions, clothing, and protective gear worn by the rider.
Among the first results presented at IMSC, it was stated that the majority of the participants tended to ride during the day (24% of the trips were at night, 54% during the day and the remaining proportion at twilight). It appears that the riders did not wear any protective armor in at least 50% of their trips and from observations 28% of the riders never used armor. Concerning the helmet use, in less than 10% of the trips analysed the riders did not wear any helmet. In  4 out of 10 riders potentially allowed not to wear the helmet due to state legislation actually did not wear an helmet at some point.
More about this study is included in the paper "An Exploratory Analysis of Motorcyclist Apparel Using Naturalistic Riding Data" by V. Williams, S. McLaughlin and S. Williams presented at IMSC 2013.

...to be continued.