At the beginning of the year 2000 the European Commission set the goal to halve the number of road deaths till the year 2010. The main focus are passenger car and lorry traffic. A significant reduction of the accident data could be reached in these groups. The advancement of active vehicle safety systems is an important issue of the programme. The safety of the motorcycle traffic has been disregarded till now. Since 1991 the number of killed motorcycle riders per year has been constant. The number of killed passenger car occupants has been more than halved in the same period. This is why initiatives are caused for the increase of the motorcycle safety. A great safety potential is expected for the Antilock Brake System (ABS). ABS for motorcycles is considered from the economic view in this study. A cost-benefit analysis shall clarify whether the economic benefit of ABS for motorcycles is greater than the consumed resources. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis will determine the maximal justifiable consumption in resource for which ABS is worthwhile. After the sensitivity analysis is done a breakeven analysis will determine the market price respectively the annual mileage from which on ABS is worthwhile on user level. For this the fair end consumer market price is calculated which the user is ready to pay. For the considered market prices the annual mileage is determined from which on ABS is worthwhile for the user. The considered time horizon for this analysis are the years 2015 and 2020. For each of these years the accident data is forecasted. At this, it is assumed that the frequency of having an accident per million registered motorcycles decreases based on the present trend. Thus, riding motorcycle gets safer. Hence, the accident data in the years 2015 and 2020 is lower than the accident data today. The cost-benefit analysis is done for each year for four scenarios. Two scenarios handle the market penetration. The first one is the trend scenario, the second one is the mandatory equipment from the year 2010 on. The other scenarios describe the effectiveness of ABS. The effectiveness rates are determined by a literature review. The only potential which can be considered due to the available data is the potential due to an avoiding of the downfall just before the real accident happens. According to this the number of accidents will decrease by 2.4 %. The number of fatalities will decrease by 12.1 %. The number of severe injuries decreases by 11.7 %. However, the number of slight injuries increases by 2.1 %. The mentioned effectiveness rates are valid for the scenarios with the high effectiveness. Even these figures underestimate the actual effectiveness because there are only considered the avoided accidents with downfall. The necessary consumption in resources depends on the produced volume. The more ABS systems are produced, the lower are the costs per system. This is due to realised effects of scale and effects out of learning curves. The system costs depend on the penetration rate. In the trend scenario the system costs for ABS are 120 Euro for the year 2015 respectively 105 Euro for the year 2020. In the mandatory scenario the system costs are 115 Euro for the year 2015 respectively 100 Euro for the year 2020. The benefit-cost ratios are all over the critical barrier of 1.0. Thus, ABS is worthwhile on economic level. In the scenarios with high effectiveness the benefit-cost ratios range between 4.6 and 4.9. Thus, the values are even above the barrier of 3.0. The result of the break-even analysis is that ABS is worthwhile on user level. The considered market prices are 400 Euro in 2015 and 300 Euro in 2020. They are clearly below the determined fair end consumer market prices. The fair end consumer price for the year 2015 is 701 Euro respectively 622 Euro for the year 2020. Thus, ABS is worthwhile for motorcycle riders with an annual mileage higher than 2,200 km (year 2015) respectively 1,900 km (year 2020). The annual mileage of a motorcycle rider is 3,900 km on average. Thus, ABS is worthwhile for most of the motorcycle riders. The mentioned results are valid for the high effectiveness scenarios. (Author/publisher)
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