2BESAFE Presents

On the 12th December, FEMA (Federation Of European Motorcyclists Associations)  announced the final event of the 2BESAFE European research project to take place in Paris on the 14th December (today) at the Cité internationale universitaire in Paris.

2BESAFE was launched in 2009 and stands for “Two-wheeler Behaviour and Safety”. It aims at a better understanding of rider behaviour on the road.

The project is made up of  27 partners, (including FEMA) from Europe, Australia and Israel. The collaborative project is co-funded by the European Commission as part of the European Union’s efforts to improve road safety.

FEMA states that, “Over the course of three years, the research team reached interesting conclusions on a variety of fields; including conspicuity, risk perception, driver awareness of powered two-wheelers, safety measures and rider workload management.

In addition to a better picture of accident causation factors across Europe and Australia, 2BESAFE should provide the research community with new tools to study rider & driver behaviour, and a better knowledge of the motorcycle community in Europe.”

According to FEMA, the event’s keynote speaker will be Aline Delhaye, General Secretary of FEMA, who will present “her” views of motorcyclists on the needs for future research and the development of intelligent transport systems.

The final event and user forum will include a presentation of the project’s results to the research & motorcycling communities, with a full day of sessions, discussions and live demonstrations covering the project outcomes.

These outcomes include the coverage of the project’s results on:

  •  In depth accident analysis
  •  The first European Naturalistic Driving Study
  •  Risk taking behavioural analysis
  •  Poster session for the tools used for studying behaviour during the project
  •  PTW Conspicuity study
  •  The most rated safety countermeasures
  •  Round table session and guest speech
  •  Vehicle demonstrators will be presented

Right To Ride’s, Trevor Baird says, “2BESAFE might just ring a bell with riders, it was the launch of the 2BESAFE rider survey that caused much consternation amongst riders in April this year, which we reported on and gave our thoughts and comments.”

At the completion of this project, we hope that the partners have found useful information that could be used to help identify the causes of collisions on the roads.

The survey was done badly and demonstrated a certain arrogance which we presume was due to the lack of experience of the researchers who put it together.  Undoubtedly they received responses from motorcyclists throughout Europe who gave their views on the survey along with the answers.

Right To Ride’s Elaine Hardy was responsible for including FEMA in the 2BeSAFE project as FEMA’s research officer.

Her comments to the 2BeSAFE Consortium at the beginning of the project and later on to the partners who put together the survey, was and remains that motorcycle research must be conducted by motorcyclists.

The outcome of the project is unknown, however it does seem that the most important lesson from 2BeSAFE and other projects that focus on motorcycle accident causation, is to involve motorcyclists with research expertise.

Without this expertise the outcome of these projects will inevitably be flawed.

Information

Right To Ride on 2BESAFE – Click Here

2BESAFE – www.2besafe.eu

FEMA – 2BESAFE – Click Here

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