Around the world, motorcyclists and other powered two-wheeler riders account for a disproportionate share of road deaths, with numbers still rising in many regions. In Great Britain, riders make up only a small share of traffic, yet every year hundreds are killed and thousands seriously injured. Motorcycling is integral to mobility, work and leisure, but riders remain among the most exposed road users on the network.
From a technology and policy perspective, the issue is not a lack of ideas. It is that some of the best motorcycle safety thinking of the last 20 years is sitting in reference libraries and project archives – gathering dust instead of saving lives. We keep launching new initiatives while robust, evaluated and often elegantly simple solutions from earlier programmes struggle to find their way into mainstream practice.
One of the clearest examples is eSUM – European Safer Urban Motorcycling. This was a forward‑thinking collaboration between major cities, the motorcycle industry and research organisations, created to understand how to make urban motorcycling safer in a systematic, transferable way, recognising that in many cities scooters and motorcycles are a vital part of the mobility mix. eSUM followed a disciplined chain: diagnose risk, identify good practice, demonstrate on real streets, evaluate, then package everything into toolkits and templates for others to use. It produced guidance on safer infrastructure, targeted training and communication campaigns, and helped shape thinking on safer urban PTW concepts and protective equipment. Then, as with so many funded projects, the cycle ended. Reports were completed, videos published, websites archived.
Outside specialist circles, how often do we hear eSUM referenced in today’s debates about micromobility, urban road space or Vision Zero for riders? Meanwhile, fast‑growing cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America are grappling with the same issues eSUM addressed: junction crashes, conflicts with buses and trucks, lane‑splitting, parking, road surface quality – often without knowing that a structured body of learning already exists and is ready to adapt.
The UK offers other examples of brilliant but under‑used ideas. Infrastructure‑based interventions such as purpose‑designed markings and signage to guide motorcyclists through high‑risk bends have shown measurable improvements in speed choice, lane position and braking behaviour at relatively low cost. Carefully designed post‑test training schemes have shown that when content is rooted in real crash causation and delivered well, riders do change their behaviour. Yet many such initiatives have had short lives as pilots, their insights recorded but not embedded, scaled or shared internationally.
Why does this happen?
First, road safety is often treated as a sequence of projects rather than a continuous programme. Once funding ends, teams disband and ownership evaporates.
Second, responsibility for motorcycle safety is fragmented: a little in transport, a little in policing, a little in health, a little in the private sector. Without a clear home, promising interventions fall between institutional cracks.
Third, international transfer is nobody’s day job. A toolkit written for one region does not make itself known – or relevant – to policymakers working in very different cultural, climatic and economic contexts.
Finally, we tend to equate “not widely adopted” with “not effective”, when the real issue may be visibility, not validity. From the perspective of a company like Redspeed International, which works with enforcement and data, there is a huge missed opportunity.
Many “forgotten” initiatives were hatched before today’s capabilities in automated measurement, integrated data platforms and near‑real‑time analytics. That makes them prime candidates for revival and enhancement. A campaign or infrastructure treatment that once relied on small observational studies could now be linked to worthwhile datasets from speed management systems, collision records and even telematics, giving a far clearer picture of impact and cost‑effectiveness.
So how do we stop excellent motorcycle safety work from gathering dust and instead turn it into sustained casualty reduction? I would suggest three practical actions.
We need a living global library of motorcycle safety practice – a curated, searchable collection of past and present initiatives, including projects such as eSUM. They need to be summarised in plain language, tagged by crash type, environment and evidence strength, and maintained by a partnership of public agencies, industry and NGOs.
We should fund “revival trials” alongside new projects. Before designing entirely fresh interventions, ask which existing concepts could be brought back, modernised and trialled properly in a new context – for example, an eSUM‑style urban motorcycle action plan, proven bend‑safety treatments on rural routes, or refreshed protective equipment campaigns using contemporary digital channels.
We must build cross‑sector coalitions with motorcycling right at the centre, not on the fringe. Genuine casualty reduction for riders needs infrastructure designers, vehicle manufacturers, enforcement specialists, trainers, health data experts and rider communities around the same table, agreeing shared priorities and reviewing the back catalogue of promising projects to decide which to adapt, which to scale and which to retire.
Motorcycling will remain a cornerstone of mobility in many parts of the world. The question is whether we allow effective, carefully-crafted safety initiatives to stay buried in reference libraries, or whether we rediscover and re‑deploy them with the benefit of current technology and a genuinely global perspective. The knowledge is there; the tools are there. What’s needed now is collaboration and the collective will to blow the dust off and put that knowledge back to work for riders everywhere.
