Naturalistic study of the risky situations faced by novice riders

Abstract

This article sets out to identify the typical risky situations experienced by novice motorcyclists in the real world just after licensing. The procedure consists of a follow-up of six novices during their first two months of riding with their own motorbike instrumented with cameras. The novices completed logbooks on a daily basis in order to identify the risky situations they encountered, and were given face-to-face interviews to identify the context and their shortcomings during the reported events. Data show a large number of road configurations considered as risky by the riders (248 occurrences), especially during the first two weeks. The results revealed that a lack of hazard perception skills contributed to the majority of these incidents. These situations were grouped together to form clusters of typical incident scenarios on the basis of their similarities. The most frequent scenario corresponds to a lane change in dense traffic (15% of all incidents). The discussion shows how this has enhanced our understanding of novice riders’ behaviour and how the findings can improve training and licensing. Lastly, the main methodological limitations of the study and some guidelines for improving future naturalistic riding studies are presented.

Practitioner Summary:

This article aims to identify the risky situations of novice motorcyclists in real roads. Two hundred forty-eight events were recorded and 13 incident scenarios identified. Results revealed that a lack of hazard perception contributed to the majority of these events. The most frequent scenario corresponds to a lane change in dense traffic.

Keywords:

• Novice riders
• risky situations
• naturalistic study
• interview
• road safety

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the French National Research Agency for its financial support of the SIM2CO+ project. They are also grateful to the Fédération Française des Motards en Colère and Kawasaki France for their help in the recruitment of the novices. Lastly, they would like to thank all the project partners for their kind proofreading and valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. These tools were chosen because they allowed us to answer the research questions posed in this study and because they were identified by Baldanzini et al. (2009) as valuable techniques in the context of a naturalistic riding study.

2. This item was noted only when the rider reported that the weather conditions were involved in creating the risky event.