Europe Rider Dispatch #5: Everything Fell Except Us — Reading Britain’s 384

Last time I wrote about Brussels: 77 organisations lining up 17 demands, and a 50-kilometre ride through the city where the Parliament sits. That was a story about a blueprint for Europe as a whole. This time I want to talk not about blueprints but about the numbers that actually came back. The UK Department for Transport has published its provisional road casualty statistics for 2025. Total road deaths came to 1,556, down 3% on the previous year. The killed-or-seriously-injured (KSI) figure was 29,911, up 4%. It was widely described as a year of almost no progress. And within it, motorcycle user deaths reached 384, up 13% year on year — 25% of all road deaths. While the total, including car occupants, pedestrians and cyclists, went down, motorcycling alone went up. The DfT itself notes that this is the second consecutive annual increase.

Numbers deserve care. In the same document the DfT writes that "given year-to-year volatility in fatality numbers, it is too early to determine whether this represents a sustained upward trend or a short-term fluctuation." That is not evasion; it is the correct posture for anyone handling statistics. But line up the surrounding figures and another face appears. The department's own motorcyclist factsheet shows that, averaged over 2021 to 2025, seven riders died and 104 were seriously injured every week. Seventy per cent of motorcycle fatalities happened on rural roads, which carry only 38% of traffic. The fatality rate runs at 128 per billion vehicle miles, and motorways account for just 3% of motorcycle deaths. Policy debate fixates on the image of a bike filtering through city traffic, yet the place where riders actually die is the blind country road. There is another figure too: 37% of motorcycle fatalities occurred in two-vehicle collisions between a motorcycle and a car. A large share of these deaths, in other words, happens somewhere that educating the rider alone cannot reach. Together with the fact that 92% of motorcycle KSI casualties were male, these statistics say a great deal about who dies, where, and against what — and yet policy discussion keeps rounding all of it down to the single line "motorcycles are dangerous."

What interests me is how Britain's rider organisations moved in response. The National Motorcyclists Council (NMC), working with the industry association and the dealers' association, is pressing government across four areas: responsible riding and access to the road, how motorcycles are treated within automated vehicles, road safety policy, and licensing reform. On automation they have pushed government to confirm that motorcycles are explicitly accounted for in filtering and junction scenarios. On licensing they have submitted joint proposals: an incentivised progression pathway, a review of the two-part test, better standards for compulsory basic training, and rules that reflect how electric L-category vehicles actually work. There is also a campaign called Ride Right — protect the right to ride legally, while drawing the line against illegal and antisocial riding yourselves. When the numbers turn bad, be the first to table your own reform. That is a discipline European rider movements have taken a long time to learn.

Wim Taal, FEMA's General Secretary, put it this way: "Motorcycling policy should not be limited to restrictions. A genuine Safe System approach must also recognise motorcycles as a legitimate form of mobility." I read that as strategy, not excuse. When a figure like 384 lands on a minister's desk, the easiest policy available is simply to stop people riding. Cut the speed, close the section, make the licence harder. The number will indeed fall. But what falls is the travel, not the crash rate, and nobody has been made safer. In its relationship with society, motorcycling is always a minority in the traffic mix. When a minority is hit with numbers, feeling will not win the argument. What you need ready is not "please don't regulate us" but a concrete account of what you are offering instead. That is why the London organisations turned up carrying a licensing reform proposal. Do not deny the numbers; take responsibility for how they are used. The fact that 384 people died does not get lighter under any interpretation, and it should not. Precisely for that reason, whether the 384 becomes grounds for reducing motorcycling or grounds for fixing the roads motorcycles ride on depends on whether our side has the words ready first. Against the day the same debate opens in Japan, that discipline is worth importing.