February 2012
I hope you all had a safe and happy Christmas and that it will continue through the New Year. As you can see by this report thing have been a bit slow over the Christmas break but will be picking up over the next few weeks with most the workers on road safety returning to normal duties after a well earned break.Following on from the meeting that Jeff and I had with Troy Buswell our Minister for Transport to discuss a proposed Motorcycle and Scooter Transport Policy in October I attended a follow up meeting at The Department of Transport in December to discuss our idea’s and investigate the feasibility on the changes we would like to see implemented. At the meeting was Ben Harvey (Executive Director of Transport Policy and Systems, Ian Petkoff, Like O’Donoghue. We discussed ideas on how motorcycles and scooters will help ease the congestion on our roads as the number of vehicles increases in the next decade and the more efficient of our road assets. We also discussed funding for motorcycle and scooter road improvements. We agreed our next step is to set up a working group to look at all the possibilities and opportunities and the challenges and benefits that they will present. We agreed the first informal meeting of the working group will be held in February. I will let you know of our progress.As I mentioned in my December Safety Report we held our 5th motorcycle and scooter safety forum in November and I have since condensed all the ideas from the workshops held at the end of the forum after the presentations from our visiting experts on road design, protective clothing study and crash barrier design. We ended up with 23 new suggested actions and I will get them onto our website fir you all to have a look at. If you think something needs to be added to our list of actions on rider safety please give me a call.Dave WrightRIDE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT.