Rider and Passenger Casualties on Small Motorcycles in North East England, 2006 – 2010

This report is intended to assist road safety professionals in identifying the current trends in rider and passenger casualties on small motorcycles. It looks at the overall regional picture of motorcycle collisions and casualties in the North East, and then looks specifically at casualties in each of the three police authority areas.

In most cases, trends are very similar between the three police authority areas, and in these cases the report comments on the trends in the North East as a whole. However, in other sections the figures are further broken down to look at the individual areas where trends across the North East vary significantly from one area to another. This is done to assist local road safety teams, allowing them to better target resources at local problems.

A major factor in why small motorcycles were chosen as the subject for this report is that casualties on smaller motorcycles tend to be overlooked in favour for casualties on vehicles over 500cc.

However, overall in the North East there are more casualties who were a rider or passenger on a small motorcycle than a large one during the period, so this shows that this area should definitely be looked into further.

In addition to this, figures published by the Department for Transport in their Motorcycling Statistics: 2010 report show that nationally there are more motorcycles that are over 500cc licensed than under this size, so the number of casualties on the smaller vehicles is disproportionate to the number of motorcycles being ridden.