Hurt Report - Current Validity

Current Validity

When interviewed in 1999, Professor Hurt "confided that he believes the report is still basically valid."

Nonetheless, while the Hurt Report "remains the benchmark of motorcycle crash research" and contained at the time of its publication factual, verifiable information, in clear scientific terms — it has been described as outdated. In the year 2000, editors from the Motorcycle Safety Foundation wrote, in preparing the National Agenda for Motorcycle Safety:

It was apparent that our effectiveness would be limited by a consistent lack of viable, current research in most subjects related to motorcycling safety. Wide-ranging changes in motorcycling and related factors have altered the motorcycling landscape since the Hurt Report so thoroughly that it is impossible to determine if the findings of past studies are still valid.

The National Agenda for Motorcycle Safety study cited a broad list of changes that have occurred that affect the current validity of the Hurt Report, broken into four categories:

  • Motorcycle Engineering Changes
  • User Population Changes
  • Automobile Engineering Changes
  • Roadway Environmental Changes

Hurt argues that the age of the study does not necessarily invalidate all its findings or even its core findings; rather, it highlights the need for current work to affirm or update the current state of motorcycle safety:

The more time goes by, the less things look different. Riders today have the same sort of accidents as riders in the 1970s, except that today they crash much more expensive bikes.

—Professor Hugh H. (“Harry”) Hurt, Jr

Read more about this topic:  Hurt Report

Famous quotes containing the words current and/or validity:

    What in fact have I achieved, however much it may seem? Bits and pieces ... trivialities. But here they won’t tolerate anything else, or anything more. If I wanted to take one step in advance of the current views and opinions of the day, that would put paid to any power I have. Do you know what we are ... those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society’s tools, neither more nor less.
    Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906)

    There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.
    —H.L.A. (Herbert Lionel Adolphus)