Diss. Göteborg : Chalmers University of Technology, 2016

Health loss among motorcyclists is a global road safety problem for which innovative countermeasures are needed. While the traditional motorcycle safety approach has focused on protective gear and rider education, the Safe System approach adopted in Sweden and other countries implies that the road, the vehicle and the road user, in conjunction with a safe speed limit, should interact to create a safe road transport system. Motorcycles are intrinsically unstable vehicles and the most likely consequence of instability is the rider becoming separated from the motorcycle. In this case, the only countermeasures to avoid health loss are the rider’s protective gear, or a forgiving road infrastructure. The overall aim of this thesis is to understand the chain of events leading to crashes involving motorcycles with Antilock Braking Systems (ABS), compared to similar motorcycles without ABS. This resulted in five studies based on real-life crash data from Sweden, Norway, Spain and Italy. The integrated chain of events was used as a theoretical framework: the chain of events leading to a crash is no longer seen in separate blocks; rather it is a process in which one factor in the early phases of the chain can affect the following ones, thus creating conditions for other countermeasures to be effective. The findings indicated that Motorcycle ABS reduced emergency care visits by 47%. The severity of the crashes that did occur was lower, which reduced the overall risk of sustaining impairing injuries, although leg injuries were not addressed to the same extent. It was also found that almost 90% of fatal crashes with ABS were upright.