Hurt Report

The Hurt Report was a motorcycle safety study conducted in the United States, initiated in 1976 and published in 1981. The report is named after its primary author, Professor Harry Hurt.

Noted motorcycle journalist David L. Hough described the Hurt Report "the most comprehensive motorcycle safety study of the 20th century."

The study was initiated by the Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which contracted with the University of Southern California Traffic Safety Center — the work was ultimately conducted by USC professor Harry Hurt.

The Hurt Report findings significantly advanced the state of knowledge of the causes of motorcycle accidents, in particular pointing out the widespread problem of car drivers failing to see an approaching motorcycle and precipitating a crash by violating the motorcyclist's right-of-way. The study also provided data clearly showing that helmets significantly reduce deaths and brain injuries without any increased risk of accident involvement or neck injury. The full title of the report was Motorcycle Accident Cause Factors and Identification of Countermeasures, Volume 1: Technical Report.

After retiring from USC in 1998, Hurt established and headed the Head Protection Research Laboratory (HPRL), of Paramount, CA.

Professor Hurt, with a team of investigators (all of whom were motorcyclists themselves) examined motorcycle accident scenes in the City of Los Angeles, day and night, during the twenty-four-month period of 1976–77. They did on-scene investigations of over 900 accidents and studied 3,600 police reports from the area of each accident. Investigators later returned to 505 crash scenes at the same time of day, same day of the week and with the same environmental conditions to measure traffic volumes, photograph passing motorcycles and interview 2,310 riders who stopped to talk with investigators. This allowed the research team to compare accident-involved riders to riders in the same location who were not involved in a crash.

The study took place throughout the City of Los Angeles including urban as well as rural conditions, e.g., incidents of motorcycles striking animals.

Each accident was studied individually with approximately 1,000 data elements, collected for each of the 900 accident scenes, including measuring and photographing vehicle damage, skid marks, scrape marks, people marks, and interviewing survivors. Hundreds of accident-involved riders donated their helmet to the research, which allowed team members to disassemble, measure, photograph and record the accident damage as part of the study.

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