Bikers to help cut NI road deaths

Motorcyclists are being asked to give their views on road safety

Motorcyclists are being asked to help with research and make NI roads safer, after a weekend when two bikers died and a third was critically injured.

The Department of Environment wants motorcyclists to share their views about why crashes happen and how they can be stopped.

Last year, 153 bikers were killed or seriously injured on NI roads.

Two motorcyclists died in separate crashes on Sunday. Billy Craig, 48, was killed on the north Antrim coast.

The second motorcyclist died following an accident at tea-time on the Comber Road in Killyleagh.

And a 24-year-old biker was critically injured in a crash in Ballymena on Saturday evening.

Bikers' views will feed into the Department of Environment's new road safety strategy which aims to cut road deaths by a third each year and reduce children's deaths and injuries by half of the 1996 - 2000 average.

Seamus Mullan is a biker and also principal consultant for the research team.

He said researchers were working to canvass opinion from within motorcycling communities about behaviour, attitudes and experience.

"We need to understand the different sectors of the motorcycling population and find out if are there certain types of attitudes within one section of the motorcycling community compared to another," he said.

Motorcyclists can log onto www.motorcyclecasualtiesni.com to complete a short survey which looks at rider attitudes on the roads.