Australasian Road Safety Research, Policing and Education Conference Proceedings, 2003, Sydney

ACC is the lead agency for motorcycle safety as part of New Zealand’s 2010 Road Safety Strategy. All motor vehicle injury related claim costs to ACC are continuing to increase dramatically. Motorcycle injury costs are not going up any more drastically than other motor vehicle injuries, nor are motorcycle claim costs any higher than motor vehicle claim costs in general. However motorcycle injuries (as measured by numbers of claims to ACC involving motorcycles) are extremely high in number considering the small size of the motorcycle fleet. The number of new claims per licenced motorcycle in 2001/2002 was 12.09 per 1000 compared to 1.07 per 1000 for all licenced vehicles excluding motorcycles. In 2003 ACC piloted a motorcycle community based initiative aimed at increasing motorists’ awareness of motorcyclists, particularly at intersections. The pilot formed part of ACC’s wider Motorcycle Injury Prevention Programme aimed at reducing the number and severity of injuries sustained by motorcyclists in road crashes. Eleven projects were piloted in ten regional centres between February and March 2003. Each pilot had a project co-ordinator, nine of which were volunteers from the Ulysses Club of New Zealand. An evaluation of the pilot has just been carried out to assess the effectiveness of the intervention as a community based project. The achievements of the pilot are notable. ACC successfully created a voluntary community based injury prevention resource. Perhaps even more notable is that the impact on the target group (motorists) in the test region was considerable i.e. one in three respondents recalled the promotions about being safe around motorcyclists at intersections, with a 75% recall of the key sponsor, and of these, 60% correctly identified the main message.