Suddenly the EU wants to be our friend!The news about the C-ITS research consortium being established, initially by collaboration between BMW, Honda and Yamaha, is the kind of industry initiative that has the EU purring.
The announcement came a few days after this year's 11th annual ACEM conference in Brussels had showcased the dramatic distance travelled by the motorcycle industry in the past decade.
From being seen as part of the problem by many EU, national and regional policy regulators and planners, the volte-face that has been seen has been dramatic.
All kudos to our trade associations, riders’ rights groups, motorcycle manufacturers and transport specialists for investing so much effort and resources, and achieving so much against a climate of extreme challenge to the industry and against a background of negativity about the place of motorcycling in forward-facing transport and infrastructure policy making.
kudos to our lobbyists
From being seen as excessively polluting, inherently unsafe and fundamentally anti-social, motorcycles, PTWs in general, are now recognised for the positive contribution to transport policy they can have, and that now riders are the victims of road safety issues rather than the authors of other road users' misery, potentially valuable contributors to the EU's urban mobility transport policy objectives and represented by consumer and industry lobbyists who have listened and acted.
We have a lot to thank Dutch MEP Wim Van de Camp for - a classic case of the right man being in the right place at the right time, and we also have a lot to thank those who started the ball-rolling twenty years ago with initiatives such as the establishment of ACEM and seemingly simple ideas that have subsequently punched well above their weight - the annual MEP motorcycle ride has been a huge such example of first class PR for riders everywhere.
The EU Parliament's report on the implementation of the White Paper on Transport, launched by the Commission in 2011, and that Mr Van de Camp and well wishing fellow traveller MEPs successfully steered through the minefield of procedure that could have hijacked it at any stage, clearly sets out policy imperatives that formally and permanently place motorcycles on the transport "good guys" agenda.
At the ACEM conference, that coincidentally was staged just a week or so later, EU Commission staffers were falling over themselves to embrace the opportunity to associate themselves, their departments and their policy perspectives with this new-found best-friend of Europe's forward-looking march towards transport nirvana.
The EU calculates that traffic congestion currently costs the European economy about 1 percent of its GDP every year. At present some 4 bn people worldwide live in urban/suburban environments; that figure is expected to be around 6.5 bn people by 2050.
Already some 73 percent of Europeans live an urban/suburban lifestyle; that figure will exceed 80 percent in the 2040s. Reliable independent academic research has shown that if just 10 percent of car drivers were to swap to PTW use in making their time-consuming relatively short distance urban journey, congestion would be reduced by 40 percent! Indeed a 25 percent migration onto two wheels would eliminate it altogether.
With some 36 million PTWs in use on Europe's roads, approximately one in every 10 EU citizens of riding age already uses or has regular access to use of a PTW.
That means that 10 cents in every Euro spent by local, regional, national and European level administrators has motorcycling connections; 10 percent of the salary of every politician and bureaucrat, including EU Commission employees, has got motorcycle DNA in it somewhere, somehow.
Now that we have the EU's attention, the industry must make the most of it. As Stephan Schaller pointed out, the current recovery in registration numbers is a start, but having lost 55 percent of our market in less than ten years, there is a long way to go.
The investment being made by the manufacturers in technology, safety and reduced environmental impact, and the response that we have now had from the EU, has opened the door to our industry being able to reverse that decline and build further on that by the mid-point of the 21st century.
