Solo motorcycle crashes in bends happen going downhill nearly twice as often as going uphill

Motorcycling crashes, 2021–2026 (2026 so far). From the bend study: totals across all years, not split.

Riders pass each bend in both directions about equally, so an even split is what no effect would look like. Direction comes from the crash report and the slope from elevation data along the mapped road. Not split by year.

The share is within crashes: with no counts of how many people walk, ride or drive where, it can't say how likely a crash is for anyone.

A scan of the crash records found it in the earlier years, among thousands of patterns tested with a false-discovery control, and it held in the later years, which the scan never saw. A person then read it and checked it isn't an artefact of how crashes are recorded. The numbers above are recomputed from the data each time the site is rebuilt. All findings and the method

• On roads posted 50 mph or more, head-on motorcycle crashes kill about one rider in four
• When a motorcycle crashes alone, hitting a fixed object is about three times as deadly
• People hit on foot in the dark with no street lights are killed about four times as often
• A crash with a person on foot on a freeway kills them more than a third of the time