Improving car drivers' perception of motorcycle motion through innovative headlight configurations

The most frequent cause of motorcycle accidents occurs when another vehicle violates the motorcycle's right-of-way at an intersection. In addition to detection errors, misperception of the approaching motorcycle's speed and time-to-arrival is another driver error that accounts for these accidents, although this error has been studied less often. Such misperceptions have been shown to be related to the small size of motorcycles and to their small angular velocity when approaching. In two experiments we tested the impact of different motorcycle headlight configurations in various ambient lighting conditions (daytime, dusk, and nighttime). The participants drove on a driving simulator and had to turn left across a line of vehicles composed of motorcycles and cars. The motorcycles were approaching at different speeds and were equipped with either a “standard” headlight, a “horizontal” configuration (added to the standard headlight were two lights on the rearview mirrors so as to visually increase the horizontal dimension of the motorcycle), a “vertical” configuration (one light on the rider's helmet and two lights on the fork were added to the standard headlight so as to increase the vertical dimension of the motorcycle), or a “combined” configuration (combining the horizontal and vertical configurations). The findings of the first experiment in nighttime conditions indicated that both the vertical and combined configurations significantly increased the gap car drivers accepted with respect to the motorcycle as compared to the standard configuration, and that the accepted gaps did not differ significantly from those accepted for cars. The advantage of the vertical and combined configurations showed up especially when the motorcycle's approach speed was high. The findings of the second experiment in dusk and daytime conditions indicated similar patterns, but the headlight-configuration effect was less pronounced at dusk, and nonsignificant during the day. The results are discussed with regards to possible applications for motorcycles.