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SECTION I
Summary
Introduction
The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials' (AASHTO's)
Strategic Highway Safety Plan includes 22 key emphasis areas that affect highway safety.
Each of the emphasis areas includes strategies and an outline of what is needed to implement
each strategy. A series of guides is being developed, including this guide on motorcycle
safety, to assist state and local agencies in reducing injuries and fatalities in targeted emphasis
areas. The guides correspond to the emphasis areas outlined in the AASHTO Strategic
Highway Safety Plan.
One of the plan's hallmarks is to comprehensively approach safety problems. The range of
strategies available in the guides will ultimately cover various aspects of the road user, the
highway, the vehicle, the environment, and the management system. The guides strongly
encourage the user to develop a program to tackle a particular emphasis area from each
perspective in a coordinated manner. To facilitate this, the electronic form of the material
uses hypertext links to enable seamless integration of various approaches to a given problem.
Several guides have already been developed for other emphasis areas, so the integration
between guides should be very useful.
AASHTO's overall goal is to move away from independent activities of engineers, law
enforcement, educators, judges, and other highway safety specialists and to move toward
coordinated efforts. The implementation process outlined in the series of guides promotes the
formation of working groups and alliances that represent all of the elements of the safety
system. In so doing, they can use their combined expertise to reach the bottom-line goal of
targeted reduction of crashes and fatalities associated with a particular emphasis area.
Goal 11 in the Strategic Highway Safety Plan is to improve motorcycle safety and increase
motorcycle awareness; that is, the awareness by highway agencies of the unique characteristics
of motorcycles and their needs on the roadway. This guide includes strategies intended to
reduce the number and severity of motorcycle crashes. Strategies include not only operation
of the motorcycle, but also ways of improving both the traveled way and roadside to be
more `motorcyclefriendly.'
This volume addresses many topics covered in other emphasis areas, but will approach each
one solely from the viewpoint of how each affects motorcycle users.
A key resource for guidance on improving motorcycle safety and awareness is the National
Agenda for Motorcycle Safety (NAMS), published by the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration (NHTSA, 2000) and available on the Internet at http:/ /www.nhtsa.dot.gov/
people/injury/pedbimot/motorcycle/00-NHT-212-motorcycle/toc.html. NAMS
represents a significant effort by many stakeholders in motorcycle safety and provides
recommendations to improve motorcycle safety. The recommendations provided by NAMS
served as a resource and a starting point for the development of this guide. The reader is
encouraged to compare and compile information from the National Agenda for Motorcycle
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