The Department for Transport commissioned the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) to undertake a literature review of motorcycle rider fatigue. The aims of the review were to: investigate the incidence of fatigue-related accidents among riders; investigate the causes, symptoms and effects of fatigue on riders; assess the impact of fatigue in riders on possible accident causation; and explore possible countermeasures to combat the effects of fatigue and review campaign strategies that have addressed fatigue and its dangers. The review covered data from a wide variety of sources, including publications in the open literature and ongoing work by major transport research centres. Overall, it found that there have been few studies investigating the causes and effects of rider fatigue. Where they do exist, they tend not to provide a definition for fatigue and also not to separate the definition into the above three components of fatigue, namely sleepiness, ETDs and effects due to under-stimulation, which may have quite different effects on performance. Additionally, there tends to be a reliance on self-report questionnaires rather than on directly observed effects of task performance or safety. Similarly, the literature does not provide much evidence for the effectiveness of potential countermeasures or campaign strategies specifically to combat the effects of rider fatigue. However, information from the literature about driver fatigue and fatigue in general has, with careful interpretation, provided some insight into the possible causes of fatigue and the likely effects that it can have on motorcycle riders. Taken as a whole, the available literature and accident data provide very little scientific information specifically on the subject of rider fatigue. The knowledge gaps found are introduced at the end of this report, and it is recommended that the first step should be to establish much more clearly the importance of motorcyclist fatigue as a road safety problem — for example, by more precisely quantifying the level of involvement of fatigue in motorcycle accidents (including through the use of rider self-report survey data). This should provide a firmer basis for justifying research expenditure on the other aspects of motorcyclist fatigue. (Author/publisher)
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