REMARKS FOR
THE HONORABLE MARY PETERS
SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION
MOTORCYCLE INDUSTRY COUNCIL
INDIANAPOLIS, IN
FEBRUARY 16, 2007
9 AM
Good morning, everyone! And thank you all for that very warm welcome.
Tim (Buche), it’s great to see you again, and I want to thank you for that kind
introduction. The motorcycle industry means a lot to me personally, and I am
glad it has your strong leadership.
As Tim mentioned, I am a biker. In fact, my husband, Terry, and I ride every
chance we get. There is absolutely nothing that compares with the freedom of
getting out on two wheels, and really, there is no better way to experience
nature and appreciate this beautiful country.
So one of the reasons I wanted to be here in Indianapolis today was to thank
you. You are helping introduce more and more Americans to the exhilaration of
riding a motorcycle on the open road, or heading off-road on an ATV.
The main reason I am here, however, is because I need your help.
I mentioned growing ridership. More Americans than ever have motorcycles – 6.2
million registered motorcycles on the road at last count.
As an avid motorcyclist, I happen to think that is a good thing. What is not
good is the rise in motorcycle crashes and fatalities.
Despite the substantial progress we have made in reducing automobile crashes and
fatalities, more than 43,000 people a year are still dying on America’s
roadways. And motorcycle crashes are one of the main reasons our progress in
increasing highway safety has stalled.
Motorcycles are 2 percent of the vehicles on the road, but they account for over
10 percent of all crashes.
It is painful to see a shiny Honda or Kawasaki bike reduced to a pile of mangled
metal on the side of the road. It is tougher still to see the broken bones and
broken hearts these crashes leave in their wake.
Yet for almost a decade, motorcycle fatalities have been going up steadily. In
fact, they have more than doubled since 1997 – increasing by 115 percent. In
2005 alone, more than 4,500 motorcyclists lost their lives in crashes. An
additional 78,000 riders were injured.
One troubling trend is the aging Baby Boomers who are finding themselves with
empty nests and a little disposable income. Many of them are going out and
buying bikes – and wrecking them. The ten-year increase in crashes among the
Renaissance Riders like me – the 50-plus age group – is astonishing. Four
hundred percent!
There are faces behind those statistics. You are looking at one of them. On
August 28, 2005, my husband and I were riding our bikes back home to Phoenix
after visiting friends in Tucson.
Now there is something of a disagreement in the Peters household about who was
at fault. Let’s just say we miscommunicated. I ended up clipping his front tire,
and went down.
I remember the moment I knew it was going to happen. But God is merciful, and
the next memory I have, I was off the bike and lying on the pavement with a
broken collar-bone.
So as you can imagine, motorcycle safety is a subject that I take very
personally and very seriously.
The seriousness of the problem was underscored while I was on Capitol Hill last
week testifying about President Bush’s proposed budget for the fiscal year that
will begin in October. Senator Patty Murray of Washington state, who heads the
Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee, expressed strong concerns about
safety. She wants to do something about the growing fatality numbers. I assured
her that we are.
In fact, the President’s new budget dedicates almost a third of the Department’s
resources – more than $20 billion– to making travel safer. And this budget will
allow us to target problem areas like drunk driving and yes, motorcycle crashes.
At the Department of Transportation, we are attacking this challenge on multiple
fronts.
We know that the best way to guide our efforts is to be armed with good data.
And this summer, we plan to begin the pilot phase of the Motorcycle Crash
Causation Study. The study will help us to zero in on the factors contributing
to crashes involving motorcycles and to identify where we can best target our
resources to affect the outcome, perhaps even prevent the crash altogether.
For the first time this September, we awarded over $6 millions dollars in grants
to help riders navigate more safely and to make other motorists on the road more
aware.
And in October, I participated in the first meeting of the Federal Highway
Administration’s Motorcycle Advisory Council, the group focusing on making the
highways themselves safer for motorcyclists through better design, construction,
and maintenance practices. I know that Kathy Van Kleeck of the Motorcycle Safety
Foundation is here today. Kathy, thank you for serving on the MAC.
I also want to thank those of you who joined me at the Harley-Davidson Plant in
Wauwautosa, Wisconsin, last fall. We had some frank discussions there about how
the industry can help turn these crash numbers around.
Today, I am coming back to the motorcycle industry with a request for concrete
action on two fronts – training and helmets.
We could save more than 700 lives each year if everyone put on a helmet every
time they got on a bike. But, right now, only 58 percent of riders wear their
helmets. And that rate is 13 percent lower than it was just four years ago.
The first step is to get the helmet in the rider’s hands. So I am calling on
manufacturers to help save lives by providing a significant discount on the
helmet with every cycle sold in the United States – or even giving them away.
Helmets and proper training are just as important as brakes or headlights when
it comes to the well-being of motorcyclists. We shouldn’t be letting any
customer take a bike out of the store without a helmet as part of the package.
I know from first-hand experience how effective helmets can be. I am convinced I
would have suffered a severe head injury when I crashed my bike if I hadn’t been
wearing mine.
The helmet took a big bashing – I brought it with me and, as you can see, it
still bears the scars. But better the helmet than my head, hard though I’ve been
told it is.
The bottom line is this: Safety should not have to be an option when purchasing
a motorcycle. The time has come to make the helmet standard safety equipment.
And I must stress that dealers sell only DOT-certified helmets to riders.
Wearing a non-DOT-certified helmet is about as helpful as wearing a pot from
your kitchen when your ride.
But helmet-in-hand is not the same as helmet-on-head. That is why I am also
asking you to follow the lead of those in the industry who have already made
training part of the package when they sell a motorcycle.
Motorcycle education courses help riders understand the responsibilities that
come with the freedom the motorcycle offers.
They educate us, for example, on the importance of taking personal
responsibility for wearing our helmets and protective gear, and for getting
licensed and riding sober.
They teach motorcyclists how to share the road safely with each other – and yes,
my husband and I have worked out our communication issues.
And they educate motorcyclists about how to ride safely with other vehicles
around.
So I am asking you, as manufacturers and distributors, to take responsibility
for revving up training, to make sure it is accessible for all new and returning
riders, and to include a free training with each motorcycle sale.
Your customers look to you to get the most out of their biking experience.
Please, let them know it is a complete package – not only on the bike itself,
but protective gear, beginning with the helmet, and proper training. There is
truly no more important customer service you can offer.
And safety is good business. Selling safety and training as aggressively as you
sell the bikes themselves will help you keep your customers. A person who is
injured or who has a bad experience is less likely to be back.
You have let me know there are barriers in some parts of the country to offering
the kind of training courses you would like. And I make it a point when I meet
with state officials to raise the training issue.
In some states, legislation is going to be required, and I am encouraging
legislators to work within their states to make sure that you are able to offer
your life-saving safety training programs to motorcycle riders.
To make sure riders get as much out of their training as possible, I have asked
the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, or NHTSA – our safety
agency – to bring representatives of the motorcycling community together to
discuss ways to improve motorcyclist training.
We are involving everyone from individual manufacturers, to national
associations like the Motorcycle Safety Foundation, to state community rider
groups. We want you to tell us if there is more we can do at the federal level
to make sure motorcyclists get the right training so they can enjoy the freedom
of the open road – and return safely home.
Transportation is inseparable from the freedom we treasure as Americans, and no
form of transportation is more closely associated with freedom than the
motorcycle. And so I ask you to help me find common-sense solutions that will
make biking not only the freest form of transportation, but also one of the
safest.
Thank you all for being here today. I look forward to working with you.
# # #
Briefing
Room
