Overview on the development of a test standard for the evaluation of motorcyclists' impacts on road infrastructure elements¹

¹The current paper is an extended version of a paper originally published in TRB as a compendium of papers at the 88th Annual Meeting (paper 09-0789). The current study covers the motorcyclists' protection assessment of any road infrastructure elements, not only barriers, and a deeply accidental data review in order to propose new thorax criteria.

Abstract

The problem of injuries to motorcyclists caused by impacts with roadside barriers is not a recent issue (S. Peldschus, E. Schuller, J. Koenig, M. Gaertner, D. García, and A. Mansilla, Technical bases for the development of a test standard for impacts of powered two-wheelers on roadside barriers, Proceedings of the 20th Enhanced Safety of Vehicles Conference, 2007) but at present, few standards have been proposed in this field. In APROSYS SP4 ‘Motorcycle accidents’, one of the main objectives is to develop a proposal of test procedure to evaluate road infrastructure in terms of motorcyclists' safety. For that purpose, it is necessary to know which are the most representative scenarios describing real motorcyclists' impacts against the infrastructure. Conclusive results have been obtained neither from the database analysis nor from the literature review. A theoretical study, reconstruction of accidents and a computer simulation work have been performed in order to select the parameters to be used in the standard proposal. On the other hand, no crash-test dummies are available (specifically developed and validated) for this application. The use of similar test standards and a numerical human body model aiming to modify an existing (Hybrid III) dummy are seen to be the most applicable steps to improve the described situation in the medium term. Accordingly, injury criteria have been defined for head, neck and thorax. This paper describes the work methodology that has been followed for the establishment of guidelines which can lead to a future European Standard for the assessment of roadside furniture performance.

Keywords:

• motorcyclist
• injury criteria
• barrier
• accident
• safety
• new standard

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the support of J.L. Moreno, HIASA and the ESI Group. This work has been funded by the European Commission within the APROSYS project under the 6th Framework Programme.

Notes

¹The current paper is an extended version of a paper originally published in TRB as a compendium of papers at the 88th Annual Meeting (paper 09-0789). The current study covers the motorcyclists' protection assessment of any road infrastructure elements, not only barriers, and a deeply accidental data review in order to propose new thorax criteria.