Multivariate systems only appear to be complex if you don’t understand them. The weather for example seems to be massively complex, but once people understood the heat cycle then how the weather actually worked was no longer a mystery. Same goes for continental drift, germ theory, evolution and a whole raft of other scientific enquiries. The road transport system looks at first glance to be very complex, but once you start to pare it down to its fundamentals it’s not as scary as it first appears.

What the road safety industry has been lacking up ‘til now is a simple theory of road accident causation. Without such a theory or framework all solutions to the accident problem may appear to be valid even though a lot of them are probably without merit. We have stacks of data about the problem, but no theory to determine which bits of data are valid and which are not worth bothering with. Continue reading →

How do we prevent ourselves from being caught out by a series of events that ultimately lead us to having an accident?

Once we have been taught how to do something, then we will never forget how to do it!… Wrong! Anything that has been learnt and requires some conscious thought can be ‘unlearned’, forgotten and even misplaced or misunderstood with the passage of time. Even something so ‘natural’ as speaking can be forgotten if we do not speak for many years. There are plenty of examples of this from forgetting a second language or forgetting foreign words to forgetting a first and only language.

We are kidding ourselves if we believe that we will always remember skills or knowledge without any form of practice, recurrent training and self awareness that we need to brush up on our skills and knowledge. Continue reading →

by Duncan MacKillop

There’s a strange moment of peace as you sail over the bonnet of the car that’s just pulled out in front of you. You have left the horrible splintering, crunching sound behind leaving just the faint whistle of the wind around your helmet as you begin to contemplate the next few seconds of your existence. You know that from this point on there is absolutely nothing you can do to affect what’s going to happen next and that whatever does happen is going to happen according to the immutable laws of Newtonian physics. I had plenty of time to see that it was the bonnet of a Hillman Avenger that I sailed over in what I eventually learnt was called a SMIDSY, but it was the fast approaching, hard and unforgiving Tarmac in front of me that really caught my attention. When the landing did finally happen it wasn’t what you would call elegant in any way. First to hit with a sickening cracking, crunching sound was my left shoulder followed in short order by the crack of the rather low-tech Stadium helmet I was wearing and then I can’t really remember much after that. Continue reading →

by Kevin Williams

Sometime in August 1975, aged 19, I got mobile.

I’d spent a year out between school and university and cycling to work when the railways were on strike had convinced me there were easier ways to get from A to B than bicycles. With a university place beckoning in central London, I also needed a way of getting around in the city, as well as something cheap to run and easy to park.

A motorcycle was the obvious answer. Continue reading →

by Alf Gasparro

Founder of HELI BIKES – Motorcycle Safety Initiative

UK Air Ambulance Pilot

Whilst working at the forefront of prehospital emergency medicine for many years on UK air ambulances, I have responded to hundreds of motorcycle accidents dealing with the full spectrum of injuries, fatalities and causes.

A few realisations gained prominence quite early on in my career and those still remain to this day as I continue to attend regular motorcycle incidents, along with the rest of the emergency services all over the globe! Continue reading →

Presentation by Kevin Williams MSc of Survival Skills Rider Training to the National Motorcycle Safety Seminar, Tuesday 16 November

Some years ago, I was waiting for a candidate to come back from the old-style Driving Standards Agency (DSA) motorcycle test when the examiner turned up early minus the trainee. That’s normally a sign the trainee’s lost the examiner (it happens), the bike’s broken down (occasionally) or the bike’s been dropped and is too damaged to ride (not uncommon if it happens during the on-road U turn – the brake or clutch levers can snap off). In this case, he told me that she’d dropped the bike. Continue reading →