Motorcycling and Leisure: Understanding the Recreational PTW Rider (review)

Published as part of Ashgate's Human Factors in Road and Rail Transport series, this book's objective is to aid road-safety "stakeholders" in shaping policy and pavement with respect to all "powered-two-wheeler" (PTW) users. Paul Broughton and Linda Walker attempt to achieve this by using standard social-science and human-factors methodology in describing who the PTW riders are, what they ride, and why, chiefly in the United Kingdom. As a PTW rider himself, Broughton brings inside knowledge to the effort, which includes a hefty dose of stereotype-dismantling about motorcyclists. The careful and detailed use of statistical analysis throughout the book ensures that it will be taken seriously by the engineers, psychologists, and other essential people throughout the world of the road-safety stakeholders (chiefly governmental, industrial, and academic institutions). Still, a valid question is whether or not there is anything useful for historians of technology.

Apart from the obvious response that anything scientifically descriptive of any group of users of important technology is useful, the answer is emphatically yes, for one major and several minor reasons. The most significant relevance of Motorcycling and Leisure in the context of automobility as what some (including this reviewer) think is the most transformational historical "force" in the last century is the careful study of and hypotheses about the risk-v.-reward behavior of PTW users. Because of the obvious vulnerability of PTW riders, it is often assumed by non-riders that they ride because they are adrenaline junkies or thrill-seekers, or because they enjoy being "outlaws." By now, several other trade and academic works have shown the fallacies in this viewpoint, but Broughton and Walker's careful research should eliminate any doubt that PTW riders are just as uninterested in inflicting pain, injury, or death on themselves as any other rational human beings.

The authors hypothesize that there are two main categories of enjoyment sought by PTW riders who ride for leisure: "Rush-Based Enjoyment" and "Challenge-Based Enjoyment." They also point out that RBE and CBE are not mutually exclusive in any PTW rider and depend on many factors, internal to the rider and external to him/her. In both categories, as the authors show, the concept of "flow"—as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990)—is central to the riders' motivations. To Csikszentmihalyi, "flow" is "the Holistic Sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement," and Broughton and Walker cite nine characteristics of this sort of flow: "clear goals; unambiguous and immediate feedback; skills that just match challenges; merging of action and awareness; centering of attention on a limited stimulus field; a sense of potential control; a loss of self-consciousness; an altered sense of time, and an autotelic (intrinsically rewarding) experience."

Here the authors show how the task of the PTW rider can lead to "flow"; they also note that flow is often achieved by car drivers, albeit less frequently, given the automobile manufacturers' successful engineering of the modern car to isolate the driver from the external environment. Broughton and Walker's objective is to highlight the differences between PTW riders, in this and other aspects of their road-using lives, from car drivers. But their research provides a historian with potentially valuable clues as to car-driver as well as rider motivations and behavior that are not widely available elsewhere.

Broughton and Walker conclude by noting that "PTW riders are a vulnerable road user group," and that "interventions for their safety are needed." However, they add that "for any intervention to be effective it must be designed specifically around the rider goals and not the goals that the intervention designers and policy makers believe they have." This injunction applies with equal significance to historians of automobility, in the context of determining cause and effect in the adoption and use of automobiles of all kinds. It is easy to assume, for example...