Making Motorcycle Riding Safer Around the Globe with Richard Hanowski

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Travis Williams

When I was younger, I visited some friends in Los Angeles, and while I made a lot of memories on that trip, one that has always stood out to me was my first time driving on the freeway. As I was sitting in traffic, as one does, I began to notice that motorcycles were passing all the traffic by driving in between the cars. I immediately thought that I must be in middle of a bank heist because I'd only seen driving like that in movies, but I soon came to realize that that was actually allowed there. This was perhaps the first time I'd realized that transportation policy, law, and even culture can vary greatly depending on what area of the world you're in. So when I learned that the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute's Richard Hunowski was working to make motorcycle riding safer in southeastern Asia, I was instantly curious about numerous things. And thankfully Richard was kind enough to share all of his insights on the project. Richard is a senior research scientist with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute and the founder and CEO of Motorcycle Safety Solutions. Richard shared all about his current work in Malaysia and Indonesia related to motorcycle riding. He told me exactly what is different about the riding culture there, what some of the challenges are, and what some of the possible solutions that him and his colleagues are working towards.

And we also talked a little about what's motivating them to share some of the research methodology and practices they've been honing here in Southwest Virginia with the rest of the world. I'm Travis Williams and this is Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

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Travis

Well, I know that you have done a tremendous amount of work when it comes to safer, creating safer systems for motorcycle riders in southeastern Asian countries, specifically Malaysia and Indonesia. So I guess just to start off with, how would you describe the situation for people riding motorcycles in these low to middle income countries?

Richard

Yeah, so it is, very different motorcycle riding that is than maybe the West, USA, Canada, Europe. One of the things is the type of bikes. I think in the US, when you see bikes, I drove to Baltimore over the weekend and you saw these big groups of bikes, and they're mostly Harley's, they'll be 15 or 20, it's perhaps more of a hobby in many cases, not always. In a lot of the countries that we're dealing with, these are the primary mode of transportation for individuals and often for families. The bikes are small, like 130 cc's, so low capacity. We might call them scooters here. So they're not the same type of bike as you would see typically in the West.

Travis

It sounds like a lot more people riding bikes and a smaller type of bike maybe. And maybe some more, maybe they're more dependent on motorcycles there than in the United States, you think?

Richard

I think that's true, just based on the volume of motorcycles, the percentage of motorcycles compared to the whole vehicle fleet, whether that's cars or trucks. Here in the US, if you drive, you might see one or two bikes. In that same period of time, you might see thousands of bikes. It's really overwhelming. And there's some great YouTube videos that you can get a sense for what, what I'm talking about in this kind of area. There's one I point to for people and I don't have anybody hasn't come back to me and said, I expected that. But if you Google, Taiwan motorcycle waterfall, you will see just, it really kind of puts things in perspective in terms of how many bikes are on the road in some of these cities in Southeast Asia. Latin America is very similar as well. Yeah, so it's not just Southeast Asia issue, but it's certainly prominent in Southeast Asia. A lot of it, I think, is cost related. mean, you know, a brand new, that's called a Honda Vario, which is a very common bike in Indonesia. think it's about 1500 US dollars brand spanking new sort of thing. So when I've talked to people over there about why do they ride bikes, it's a cost related issue. There's a convenience factor as well. But a lot of it is just based on cost. So we're not talking about the 1 % of the richest people in the world here as well. I these are people that don't have a lot of money. They're kind of forced into transportation needs that perhaps are, well, not perhaps, but are less safe than a car. They become a vulnerable road user just because if it doesn't take much of a crash you know, to knock someone off their bike. And, you know, whether or not they're wearing a helmet, obviously helmets can help a lot. A lot of people there don't wear helmets. So it doesn't take a lot to cause some pretty serious injury or death when an accident crash does occur with a motorcycle.

Travis

Aside from just the numbers of people riding motorcycles, what are some other differences in the riding culture or maybe even transportation culture as a whole that maybe the average person just wouldn't know about here in America?

Richard

Great question. it's really, it's hard to kind of as a Westerner to kind of explain it, you almost have to see it. So my partner, Carl Cosple, who rides motorcycles here in the US, he went to Jakarta, and was just what you know, he had prepared for it or kind of understood what it could be like. But he if you know, he could talk to him and he was It was profoundly changed in terms of what it was like to ride a bike. He said he wouldn't ride one there. He felt way too unsafe. And like I said, he's an avid rider in the US. It's very chaotic, I guess. Rules aren't maybe adhered to. They're certainly, in my experience, not enforced. Any types of rules that exist, the infrastructure isn't very intuitive, let's say in many cases, you'll see bikes and cars going down the wrong side of the road, maybe in odd kind of configurations. You know, maybe they miss a stop and they just back up in the middle of the street without any mind for for potential crashes that may occur based on that action. So it's just a different, it's really just a different environment, I guess, with respect to safety compared to the US anyway.

Travis

Yeah, I think I might've told you this before that I traveled out to Los Angeles when I was in my like mid -20s and I was sitting in a car after I got off the airport and all of the sudden these motorcycles were just like buzzing by the sides of the cars.

And I thought that somebody had robbed something, because that's the only time that I had no other context other than movies for that happening. But that's a pretty common practice, I think, in some parts of just California. I guess that's pretty common there as well.

Richard

Yeah, absolutely. And I think you'll probably, you might see more of this happening in, again, as I mentioned, I haven't spent a lot of time in South American countries. But what I've been told by people is that there are some similarities with respect to riding in some of these Southeast Asian countries that we're now focused in. So, you know, may see that bike culture, if you will, maybe migrating a bit to where there are larger populations, perhaps, of South American citizens, bringing that with them if that is a cultural issue.

Travis

I'm curious, aside from it just being kind of a culture shock and just seeming a little bit chaotic. What are the actual kind of numbers? What does the data tell us about how dangerous this type of situation is and maybe how it's contributing to fatalities on roadways?

Richard

Yeah, a really good question. putting into perspective a little bit, so I'm going to be in India in August at an event talking about some of this motorcycle safety. Motorcycle crashes are a huge problem, generally, in India as well did a tiny bit of research, about just the scope of the problem, you know, so just in really rough numbers in the U S we probably have roughly 40 ,000 deaths on due to road crashes every year, each and every year, about 40 ,000 India. think it's about 170 ,000, and 75 ,000 motorcycle deaths. So about twice the number motorcycle deaths compared to all types of road deaths in the US. In a lot of these countries, and then if you talk about Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, it's about 70 % plus of all road deaths are motorcycle related. In many countries, it's certainly, I would think, the most obvious type of vehicle modality that's involved in crashes that result in injuries and death. But not a lot has been done aside from wear helmet kind of thing or some advice about that behavior. So that's where we kind of got interested in what could we do to maybe support some of these riders to bend that curve a little bit in terms of the just the astonishing number of deaths that occur.

Travis

And I know one of the things that you've done is you all have created the motorcycle collision alert and management system. I believe I'm saying the name of it correctly. What does that do?

Richard

Yeah. So it was kind of based out of some work that I did in Malaysia for a number of years. I was working with a group called the Malaysian Institute for Road Safety Research or MIROS.

And again, Malaysia being one of those countries that has a large big problem with motorcycle related crashes and fatalities, roughly 70 % of all road deaths are motorcycle related. So we just kind of started investigating, you know, why that was happening. We did some on -road, some field studies looking at rider behavior. And one of the things that we noticed is that, again, as part of that chaotic environment, lot of riders were doing something called lane splitting, which maybe you've seen in California. they'll riders will ride up between cars, very high rates of speed, kind of on the dotted lines, if you will. They'll use that as a lane. Lane filtering was another technique that I had not heard before, but it's essentially when you're weaving in between cars from one lane into another and so one of the things that we noticed was that when riders were doing these activities and you can imagine it's very hectic, there's a lot of vehicles around. They were doing a lot of shoulder checks. They were looking over the shoulders, back and forth at again, your bike is moving forward when you're, you know, looking not forward, you're looking to the side. A lot of them, you know, if you have a helmet on, you can imagine too, that maybe your periphery, isn't quite what it is. If you don't have a helmet on sort of thing. your vision is somewhat occluded, I think, in the forward view if you're turning your head to the side on a bike. And one of the things that we noticed when we looked at the crash data was that there were a large number of what we coined the term truck struck. So there's a lot of bikes that were running into the back of large trucks and other vehicles as well. And so we just tried to figure out like, was that happening? Why would a motorcycle just run into the back at high numbers, high numbers. And then when that happened, fatalities occurred. And you can, again, kind of Google that. You can look at the news, different news reports from some of these countries. But it's just always filled with these reports of bikers running into the back of tractor trailers. in terms of looking at why that's happening, as engineers, as scientists develop some hypotheses, we thought Maybe it's a situational awareness issue. Maybe riders aren't looking forward because he wouldn't purposely run into the back of a truck if you could see it. So maybe their heads are turned or they're diverting their attention. And so, you know, with Miros, we kind of developed a very simple system, essentially forward collision warning. So it would give the riders a little alert when there was something that they were going to crash into. just telling them to course correct.

So we took that idea and concept back to Virginia Tech. We kind of fleshed it out a little bit further. And a big part of my career I was working in with onboard management systems. So these are often telematics, camera -based technologies in trucking. Again, that's kind of my background is in trucking research. So for...driver training, driver behavior. If there was a crash, say with a truck driver, not only the driver, but the manager can kind of review the video or lawyers could review the video in many cases to kind of understand what happened. And so we thought we would integrate that concept into what we were developing here in Virginia Tech. yeah, so the system does have, it continues to have some alerting mechanism to warn riders that need to course correct. But it also has this back end part to it where we record telematics and behavior data from the rider. And then, you know, should an event happen, a crash or a near crash happen, that telematics data can be processed and packaged in a way that riders can kind of understand where they made a mistake. And then we also have a training module that then overlays on top of that to tailor specific training, you know, tips, guidelines for the rider just for awareness. So they hopefully don't make that mistake again.

Travis

Yeah. So it sounds like you combined alert systems with maybe this ability to watch like game film of yourself.

Richard

Yeah. Currently the system isn't set up with video per se, it's other telematics data that we can garner through the technology. We also hook into the phone of the rider. That's really ubiquitous. I haven't met anybody, even some of these low-income countries that don't have a phone. So we utilize that as a sensor as well to kind of combine with our own technology that resides on the bike. So we're also getting some information from the phone as well as is our system. kind of package that all together to kind of understand the context. You know, was it raining? What route are they on? What's the road conditions like? So we can kind of through pulling in other data streams, kind of identify some of the factors that may have led or contributed to say a crash that occurred.

Travis

so do the riders through their phones, do they get like a report of their riding?

Richard

Yes, at end of the ride, they can kind of look at how their ride went. We give them a safety score. And you have to kind of think more broadly what we're trying to do is like risk mitigation. Risk mitigation is really kind of what we're trying to do. So just trying to make things safer for them. It's riding a motorcycle in these situations is always going to be have an inherent level of risk that people are just going to have to accept. So what can we do to make it a bit safer? So yeah, so part of that is we've tapped into different training tips. Motorcycle Safety Foundation, MSF is one. If you look at their website, they have a number of different guidelines and tips for riders. We've kind of integrated that in, those types of tips. And then also different localities, like in Thailand, they have their own tips that they've developed with the government and some other industries. And so we will also integrate kind of those kind of training aspects in to help these local riders avoid the circumstances associated, say, with a crash that we've identified through the technology.

Travis

Well, I know that you also got a proof of concept grant through Virginia Tech's launch to help commercialize this technology, help get it to more people. So where do you hope this road takes us?

Richard

Yeah, so that's a very philosophical question in many ways. And we've been thinking about that as a new startup tech company, as what are we trying to get out of this?

Ultimately, you know, we want to see people safe on the roads. This seemed to be an underserved group that was consistently showing high numbers of road deaths and injuries throughout the world. Though it's maybe not such an issue in the US, it is a huge issue in many parts of the world. So first and foremost, we want to get some type of technology that can immediately help riders, but also longer term maybe change their behavior to be safer riders. And so we've kind of combined those two things together. So yeah, keeping riders safe kind of in these chaotic conditions is ultimately what we want to do again, in terms of risk mitigation. You know, the other piece of this too, that a lot of people from the West might not know is a lot of, you know, when you see, when you get your packages off of Amazon Prime Day, you probably have a UPS truck or a FedEx truck pulling up there it's all motorcycles. So you would, you would have things delivered, whether it's food, e -hailing is big. So, you know, I mentioned I would get into a car for, for like an Uber type ride. Many people get on a bike. and so there are a lot of companies that utilize as much utilize motorcycles as part of their, their business operations. And so another part of this is who we're, who we're targeting are those companies that do deliveries, because.

you know, they can also help their own riders with risk mitigation. And they can also understand through their fleet of motorcycles who may be the riskiest riders are and can maybe do specialized training or take some other kind of approaches, you know, to, again, to mitigate risk with these particular riders. So that's that's kind of our goal again is to keep riders safer to mitigate risk. Again, giving, giving the large numbers of crashes and deaths that occur in some of these countries. And again, being relatively underserved, as I mentioned, these are low-income countries that they don't really have a lot of alternatives in terms of transportation. That's where you'll see the classic, you know, maybe five people on a bike. There'll be dad on the front, mom in the back, and three kids kind of squeezed in the middle. They don't have a choice. I mean, I can tell you if they could afford a car. or a minivan, they would opt for that, but they can't afford it. So this is what they have. So, wow, how can we help these people to be safe too?

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Travis

And thanks to Richard for sharing all about the work he and his colleagues are doing to help make motorcycle riding safer in Malaysia and Indonesia. If you or someone you know would make for a great curious conversation, email me at traviskw at vt .edu. I'm Travis Williams and this has been Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

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