A motorcycle safety risk index would be a valuable tool for assessing risk to individual riders, and comparing risk between states that have different policies regarding motorcycle safety. Many of our motorcycle safety laws, programs, and policies are based on intuition or confounded data. But we can demonstrate, scientifically, what can improve the riders odds as well as each state's motorcycle laws.

As an example, let's divide safety risk factors into two major categories:

1. Those that reduce accident risk for the individual rider
2. Those that improve survivability odds of the accident victim

Reflective gear, rider training, eye protection, and sobriety would be some of the factors for the first category.

Helmets, riding leathers, and air bags (yes, air bags) would be some of the factors for the second category.

There are probably some items that would affect both categories, e.g., helmets can prevent head injuries but reduce situational awareness.

We could then assign weights to each factor, and then compile them into an overall risk index.

There would be two primary uses for the index. We can graphically see how each factor affects accident risk and accident survivability. We can also compare states based on their various safety approaches and rank them accordingly. States with the lowest rider risk and the highest survivability odds would stand apart, as would states with worst.

Riders could easily identify the most important factors and decide how they can improve their odds, both in avoiding accidents as well as surviving accidents. It would also be interesting to see how the states would stack up against each other with respect to helmet laws, rider training, drunk driving enforcement, and road design, etc.

Then we could then make sound decisions based on hard data, rather than emotional decisions based on half-truths.