The effects of a one-day advanced rider training for motorcyclists. This report discusses an evaluation study of an advanced rider training for motorcyclists. The training aims to improve motorcyclists’ higher order skills. The study is the result of the Action plan road safety improvement motorcyclists of the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, which proposes a number of measures to improve road safety for motorcyclists. Motorcyclists have a relatively high risk of being involved in a crash. In addition, crash consequences are relatively more severe, due to the limited protection of the motorcyclist. Although in the Netherlands the number of fatalities among motorcyclists has been declining over the years, the decline is less sharp than that for other modes of transport. The main interest of this evaluation study is to explore whether motorcyclists’ higher order skills can be trained with an advanced rider training. Examples of higher order skills are recognizing and analysing traffic hazards and anticipating on them. Advanced rider and driver trainings are seen as a way to speed up learning through experience. However, previous research into advanced driver training, for instance among (young) drivers, did not always show a positive — and sometimes even a negative — effect on crash rate. Especially training aimed at teaching complex skills such as how to recover a vehicle from a skid seem to be contra-effective. A possible explanation might be that trained drivers overestimate their skills and at the same time underestimate the traffic hazards.
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