Initial age of unlicensed motorcycling experience
for a cohort of high school students
Tsu-Hurng Yeh
a,∗, Hsin-Li Chang
b,1, Hsin-Wen Chang
b,c,2aResearcher of Institute of Transportation, Ministry of Transportation and Communications, 7F, 240 Tunhwa North Road, Taipei 105, Taiwan, ROC bDepartment of Transportation Technology and Management, National Chiao-Tung University, 1001, Ta Hsueh Road, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan, ROC
cDepartment of Leisure and Recreation Planning and Management, Chung Hua University, 707, Sec. 2, WuFu Rd., Hsinchu 300, Taiwan, ROC Received 18 October 2006; received in revised form 24 July 2007; accepted 9 August 2007
Abstract
The aim of this study is to use retrospective data to examine the initial age of unlicensed motorcycling experience for a cohort of senior high school students in Taiwan. The life-table method was applied to estimate the probability of unlicensed motorcycling at different age intervals below the minimum licensing age. The results indicated that an increase in the prevalence of unlicensed teenage motorcycling began at 10 years of age and peaked in the ages between 16 and 17 years. Only 38% of students had no motorcycle riding experience when they reached the minimum licensing age of 18 years. Gender and parental attitude were the factors that had a significant influence on the initial motorcycling age. In addition, we observed a significant difference between licensed and unlicensed students in the following areas: parental attitude, proportion of students using borrowed motorcycles, and riding and accident frequency. The results reveal a number of important implications, such as the promotion of alternative modes of transport, increased parental monitoring, and penalty enhancement, that may help to suppress the tendency of teenagers’ unlicensed motorcycling.
© 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Initial age of motorcycling; Minimum licensing age; Unlicensed motorcycle riding; Life-table method
1. Introduction
The minimum legal licensing age for motorcycle riding in different countries reflects diverse policies of risk manage-ment. Taiwan has set a higher minimum licensing age of 18 years before gaining legal access to motorcycle riding, while the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and most European countries allow adolescents to ride a motorcycle from 15 or 16
years of age (TaiwanMTC, 2002; Schoon, 2004; Haworth and
Mulvihill, 2005).
Taiwan’s licensing system classes motorcycles into three types: mopeds (≤50 cm3), light motorcycles (from >50 cm3to ≤250 cm3), and heavy motorcycles (>250 cm3). The minimum
licensing age for mopeds and light motorcycles is 18 years of
∗Corresponding author. Tel.: +886 2 23496856; fax: +886 2 25450429.
E-mail addresses:barryyeh7@hotmail.com,yth@iot.gov.tw(T.-H. Yeh), hlchang@cc.nctu.edu.tw(H.-L. Chang),hwchang@chu.edu.tw(H.-W. Chang).
1 Tel.: +886 3 5731908; fax: +886 3 5712365. 2 Tel.: +886 3 5186691; fax: +886 3 5372832.
age. No prior experience or compulsory training is required for these two types of motorcycles before the license test except a medical examination. Therefore, almost all teenagers riding these lower-powered motorcycles gain their skills and experi-ence through a process of self-learning and trial-and-error. In contrast, heavy motorcycle license requests a person aged over 20 years to have held a light motorcycle license for at least 1 year, and to have completed 32 h of compulsory training at a driving school before completing the tests. In Taiwan, most young people aged under 18 experience motorcycle riding prior to car driving because they have comparatively little chance to buy or borrow a passenger car and car driving has higher skill requirements.
A higher age limit, however, does not necessarily prevent adolescents from riding motorcycles while unlicensed. Curios-ity, thrill-seeking, low degrees of parental monitoring, and transportation needs may result in adolescents engaging in motorcycling prior to reaching the legal licensing age. Unau-thorized motorcycling by persons under the legal age appears to be prevalent in several countries.Chang (1996)reported that
0001-4575/$ – see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.aap.2007.08.005
approximately 38.8% of Taiwan’s junior high school students and as many as 68.9% of senior high school students had rid-den a motorcycle without a license at some stage.Rathinam et al. (2007)reported that boys as young as 8 years old engage in motorcycle riding in India, where underage riding is a com-mon occurrence. Even though a learner license can be granted at the lower age of 15 years in New Zealand,Reeder et al. (1995)
reported that most licensed riders (86%) had ridden on public roads before gaining their licenses.
Young riders may have a higher likelihood of being involved in an accident, especially young male riders with higher risk behavior (Chesham et al., 1993; Rutter and Quine, 1996; Lin et al., 2003). Pre-licensing riding may also involve more severe injury when accidents occur (Lin et al., 1998). The increased likelihood of an accident and greater severity of injury for young unauthorized motorcyclists may result from their lack of experi-ence or immature mindset (Senserrick and Whelan, 2003; Chang and Yeh, 2007). This raises concerns over issues of safety for unlicensed teenagers. To address this problem and develop effec-tive intervention strategies, it is crucial to undertake research on the prevalence of illegal riding by various age groups and determine the reasons for engaging in such behavior.
This study aimed to examine the probability of unlicensed motorcycling at different age intervals up to 18 years using ret-rospective self-reported data from Taiwan’s senior high school students regarding when they first rode a motorcycle. We also assessed differences in initial experience related to gender and parental attitude, differences in motorcycle use, and differing behavior between licensed and unlicensed groups.
2. Methods
2.1. Data
This study used a retrospective self-reported survey of the attitudes of senior high school students to motorcycle use. The attitudinal survey of the student cohort was administered by Tai-wan’s Institute of Transportation (IOT) and documented their experience in motorcycle use and opinions on lowering the minimum motorcycle licensing age (IOT, 2006). Considerable attention has been focused on a cohort of senior high school students because they have a higher likelihood of experiencing unlicensed riding (Chang, 1996). In addition, the students in this education level can provide us with more complete recall experi-ence for their motorcycling debut before the minimum licensing age of 18 years.
A stratified random sampling method was applied according to the population distribution of the age cohort from 16 to 18 years within 23 distinct administrative districts. The sampling frame was based on senior high schools within each district. A pre-designated number of questionnaires according to the popu-lation of youth aged 16–18 for each district was then distributed to the students affiliated with two randomly chosen schools in each district. A total of 1860 questionnaires were sent to 46 chosen schools and randomly sampled students in these schools were asked to respond the questionnaire. There were 1634 valid observations collected and the overall sampling error was
con-Table 1
Basic statistics of the sampled data
Variable Category Frequency
(percentage)/ mean (S.D.)
Age Mean (S.D.) 17.18 (0.95)
Gender Male 939 (58.8%)
Female 658 (41.2%)
Parental attitude Approval 544 (33.9%)
Neutral 653 (40.6%)
Disapproval 409 (25.5%)
Unlicensed riding experience Yes 868 (53.1%)
No 766 (46.9%)
Schooling level at first unlicensed experience
Elementary stage (age 7–12) 111 (13.1%) Junior high stage (age 13–15) 418 (49.4%) Senior high stage (age 16–18) 317 (37.5%) License type Without license 1488 (91.6%)
Moped 15 (0.9%)
Light motorcycle 121 (7.5%) Heavy motorcycle 0 (0%)
trolled to within±3%. The survey showed a high response rate (87.8%) because the students completed the questionnaires in class via the assistance of the teachers in the sampled schools.
Some of the questions on which this study was based were taken from the questionnaire. The central questions were related to whether the sampled students had undertaken unlicensed motorcycle riding, and if so, their initial age and schooling level. To improve the accuracy of the recall data for the initial age of motorcycling, the schooling level at which unlicensed riding occurred was used as a time reference. Self-reported explanations of why the students had engaged in unlicensed motorcycling or not were also collected. In addition, gender and parental attitude were recorded to distinguish between demographic and family factors affecting the initial age of motorcycling.
The basic statistics of the sampled data are listed in
Table 1. The mean age of the students was 17.2± 0.95 years
(mean± S.D.). Fifty-nine percent of the students were male
and 41% were female, while 40.6% of the sampled students perceived their parents’ attitude towards their motorcycling as “neutral”, 33.9% felt their parents “approved”, and 25.5% per-ceived that their parents “disapproved”. More than half of the sampled students (53.1%) had ridden a motorcycle while unli-censed. Of these, 49.4% did so at junior high level and 13.1% at a very early age in elementary school. At the time of the survey, 91.6% of the sampled students did not hold a license, 0.9% held a moped license, and 7.5% held a light motorcycle license.
2.2. The life-table method
When considering the prevalence of youths’ engaging in unauthorized motorcycling at ages below the legal licensing age, the life-table method is useful in examining the probability of unlicensed motorcycling at different age intervals accord-ing to the numbers of sampled students who had experienced
motorcycle riding and their ages at initial experience. Specif-ically, this approach enables us to estimate the conditional probability of students experiencing unauthorized riding within different age groups and the survival probability (i.e., the term “survival” in this study means students have no motorcycling experience) for students who had not ridden a motorcycle beyond a specific age.
The observation of the initial motorcycling age in this study is a time-to-event process with two possible outcomes: an event observation or a censored observation. An event obser-vation indicates the initial age of a sampled student engaging in unlicensed motorcycling. A censored observation, however, represents a sampled student who has yet to experience motor-cycling; his/her age at the time of the survey is the censored time. As the age of motorcycling debut is retrospective data obtained through recall, the stated age may be an approximation of the real value, even though the stage of schooling was used as a sup-plementary question for recall. The life-table method was used because it is suitable for large data sets and imprecise timing data (Allison, 1995).
The conditional probability of events for a given age interval in the life-table provides an estimate of the probability that a student will experience motorcycling in this age interval given that the student has not yet experienced motorcycling at the start of the interval. The life-table method assumes that any cases are censoring within an interval as if they are censoring at the midpoint of the interval; therefore, they only count for half in establishing the number of cases exposed to risk (i.e., cases who have yet to experience motorcycle riding at the start of the inter-val). Consequently, the number of cases exposed to risk (Ri) in
the ith age interval is then calculated as
Ri = Ni− 0.5 × Ci (1)
where Niis the number of cases with no experience of
motorcy-cling at the start of the ith interval and Ciis the number of cases
censoring in the ith interval.
The conditional probability of events in the ith interval, Qi,
is defined as
Qi= ERi
i (2)
where Eiis the number of cases experiencing motorcycle riding
in the ith interval.
The survival probability at the beginning of the ith interval,
S(ti), which represents the probability of cases who have not
yet experienced motorcycle riding up to age ti or beyond, is
calculated as S(ti)= i−1 j=1 (1− Qj) (3)
For i = 1, and hence ti= 0, the survival probability is set to 1.
To compare the difference in motorcycling experience among the groups in terms of gender and parental attitude, we applied the Wilcoxon test, giving more weight to early times than late times (Allison, 1995).
3. Results
3.1. Life-table results for initial unlicensed age
The age distribution for the first motorcycling experience is examined by the life-table based on the overall samples, the classification by gender and by parental attitude respectively (seeTable 2).
3.1.1. Overall life-table
An interval of 2 years was assigned to deal with the imprecise nature of the recall data. Although some students reported that they motorcycled at a very young age (from 6 to 7 years), the group who rode while less than 10 years of age was very small. The conditional probability of experiencing unlicensed riding was the highest for the ages of 16–17 years. For this age inter-val, approximately 41.9% of the sampled students had their first unlicensed experience. Students aged 14–15 years also had a higher probability for initial motorcycling experience; 27.1% of the students in this age interval made their motorcycling debut. The survival probability for students who had not yet experi-enced motorcycling declined sharply after students reached 14 years of age. The survival probability for those students without any experience of motorcycling was approximately 90.3% for those aged over 14 years, 65.8% for those aged over 16 years, and just 38.3% for those aged over 18 years. The median sur-vival age was 17.15 years, indicating that half of the students younger than this age had ridden without a license.
3.1.2. Life-table by gender
The median survival age was 16.74 years for male students, approximately 1 year earlier than that for female students (17.84 years). This difference was statistically significant (Wilcoxon test, α = 0.05). Approximately 30.6% of males within the age interval of 14–15 years and 49.4% of males aged 16–17 years engaged in motorcycling. The corresponding figures for female students were approximately 21.9% and 33.5%, respectively. Before reaching the licensing age of 18 years, only 31.0% of male students and 48.1% of female students had yet to ride a motorcycle. In addition, a proportion of students aged over the legal licensing age were still engaging in illegal riding. For the age category of 18–19 years, male students had a clearly higher violation percentage (36%) than female students (11.8%).
3.1.3. Life-table by parental attitude
Parental attitude was divided into three categories: “disap-proval”, “neutral”, and “approval”. A pairwise comparison of the Wilcoxon test among the three groups of parental opin-ions indicated a significant difference between all possible pairs of groups. When parents approved the riding of a motorcy-cle, students had a shorter median survival age (16.65 years) than those whose parents disapproved (17.78 years) or gave a neutral opinion (17.35 years). The results indicated that the students with parents who held an “approval” attitude had an increased likelihood of engaging in motorcycling at an earlier age.
Table 2
Life-table results by different factors
Age interval Ni Ci Ei Qi S(tˆ i+1) Median survival age (years)
Overall [6,8)a 1540 0 1 0.06% 99.94% 17.15 [8,10) 1539 0 7 0.45% 99.48% [10,12) 1532 0 39 2.55% 96.95% [12,14) 1493 0 103 6.90% 90.26% [14,16) 1390 67 367 27.05% 65.84% [16,18) 956 571 281 41.91% 38.25% [18,20) 104 88 14 23.33% 29.32% [20,22) 2 2 0 0.00% 29.32% By gender Male [6,8) 882 0 1 0.11% 99.89% 16.74 [8,10) 881 0 6 0.68% 99.21% [10,12) 875 0 28 3.20% 96.03% [12,14) 847 0 68 8.03% 88.32% [14,16) 779 50 231 30.64% 61.26% [16,18) 498 280 177 49.44% 30.97% [18,20) 41 32 9 36.00% 19.82% Female [8,10) 623 0 1 0.16% 99.84% 17.84 [10,12) 622 0 11 1.77% 98.07% [12,14) 611 0 35 5.73% 92.46% [14,16) 576 17 124 21.85% 72.25% [16,18) 435 273 100 33.50% 48.05% [18,20) 62 56 4 11.76% 42.40% [20,22) 2 2 0 0.00% 42.40%
Wilcoxon statistics = 31.67, d.f. = 1, p-value = 0 By parental attitude Approval [10,12) 511 0 14 2.74% 97.26% 16.65 [12,14) 497 0 49 9.86% 87.67% [14,16) 448 18 139 31.66% 59.91% [16,18) 291 159 108 51.06% 29.32% [18,20) 24 19 5 34.48% 19.21% [20,22) 387 0 2 0.52% 19.11% Neutral [6,8) 620 0 1 0.16% 99.84% 17.35 [8,10) 619 0 5 0.81% 99.03% [10, 12) 614 0 16 2.61% 96.45% [12,14) 598 0 35 5.85% 90.81% [14,16) 563 33 142 25.98% 67.21% [16,18) 388 243 101 37.90% 41.74% [18,20) 44 37 5 19.61% 33.56% Disapproval [8,10) 387 0 2 0.52% 99.48% 17.78 [10,12) 385 0 8 2.08% 97.42% [12,14) 377 0 19 5.04% 92.51% [14,16) 358 16 77 22.00% 72.16% [16,18) 265 166 63 34.62% 47.18% [18,20) 36 32 4 20.00% 37.74%
Wilcoxon statistics = 25.41, d.f. = 2, p-value = 0 a[6,8) represents the age range is between6 years and <8 years.
Approximately 51.1% of the students who had their parents’ approval rode a motorcycle at the age of 16–17 years. This is higher than the probability for students whose parents disap-proved (34.6%) or gave a neutral opinion (37.9%). The results also showed that before reaching the licensing age, only 29.3% of students had not experienced motorcycling if their parents
had a positive opinion, whereas 41.7% and 47.2% of students had no motorcycling experience if their parents had neutral or disapproving attitudes, respectively.
To establish why the students had ridden a motorcycle or not, we analyzed the self-reported reasons (seeTable 3). “For convenience” (76.9%) and “transport needs” (70.5%) were the
Table 3
Self-reported reasons for motorcycling and not motorcycling
Self-reported reasons Percentage
For motorcycling 100
Showing off 7.6
Other reasons 11.0
Curiosity 13.9
Lower traveling cost 19.4
Transport needs 70.5
For convenience 76.9
For not motorcycling 100
Restriction by school 18.5
Other reasons 18.6
For safety considerations 23.6
Disproval by parents 42.0
Fear of being caught 42.1
No need to 43.3
two leading explanations for students who rode a motorcycle, while “curiosity” (13.9%) and “showing off” (7.6%) did not rate highly. The students with no motorcycling experience reported “no need to” (43.3%), “fear of being caught by the police” (42.1%), and “disapproval by their parents” (42.0%) as the three leading reasons for not riding unlicensed.
3.2. Comparisons of motorcycle use between licensed and unlicensed students
Among the 876 students with riding experience, just 136 were licensed at the time of the survey. The licensed students
repre-sented 15.5% of the overall students with riding experience. Only 16 of the 136 licensed cases (11.8%) waited until formally obtaining a license before first using a motorcycle.
Table 4shows the differences in motorcycle riding experience between licensed and unlicensed students. Licensed students had a mean age of 18.9 years, while unlicensed students had a mean age of 17.0. A higher proportion of male students engaged in motorcycle use than female students, regardless of whether they belonged to the licensed or unlicensed group, but the proportion of male and female students was not statistically different (χ2 test,α = 0.05).
Parental attitude tended to be associated with a difference between the unlicensed and licensed groups. Licensed students reported a higher percentage of parental approval (46.7%) than unlicensed students (38.7%), as well as a higher percentage of disapproval (26.7% compared with 21.0%). Parents of unli-censed students were more likely to have a neutral attitude (40.3%) than those of licensed students (26.7%).
The ownership of the motorcycle being used by the two groups was clearly different. Most students in both groups used a motorcycle owned by their parents (66.1% for unlicensed stu-dents and 45.4% for licensed). Very few stustu-dents (2.6%) rode their own motorcycles if they did not hold a license, whereas 31.9% of licensed students used their own motorcycles.
We observed a significant difference in the frequency of motorcycle use between licensed and unlicensed students. Over half of the students with a license (53.3%) rode a motorcycle at least once a day, compared with only 17.7% of unlicensed students. The proportion of licensed students using a motorcycle
Table 4
Comparison of riding experience between unlicensed and licensed students
Variable Category Frequency (percentage)/mean (S.D.) χ2
Unlicensed Licensed
Agea Mean (S.D.) 17.02 (0.74) 18.86 (1.15) –
Gender Male 473 (64.5%) 93 (71.0%) 2.06
Female 260 (35.5%) 38 (29.0%)
Parental attitude Disapproval 152 (21.0%) 36 (26.7%) 9.06b
Neutral 292 (40.3%) 36 (26.7%)
Approval 280 (38.7%) 63 (46.7%)
Owner of the motorcycle usually ridden My own 19 (2.6%) 38 (31.9%) 144.0b
Parents 480 (66.1%) 54 (45.4%)
Brother or sister 79 (10.9%) 14 (11.8%)
Classmate 59 (8.1%) 6 (5.0%)
Friend 60 (8.3%) 7 (5.9%)
Others 29 (4.0%) 0 (0%)
Riding frequency over the past 6 months Once/day 130 (17.7%) 64 (53.3%) 98.8b
Three times/week 123 (16.8%) 25 (20.8%)
Once/week 107 (14.6%) 18 (15.0%)
Once/month 88 (12.0%) 8 (6.7%)
Less than once/month 218 (29.7%) 1 (0.8%)
Almost never 67 (9.1%) 4 (3.3%)
Accident frequency over the past year None 640 (87.7%) 77 (62.1%) 60.5b
One 58 (8.0%) 22 (17.7%)
Two 20 (2.7%) 14 (11.3%)
Three or more 12 (1.6%) 11 (8.9%)
aThe “(minimum age, maximum age)” for students without a license was (15.1, 20.0) and for students with a license was (18.0, 24.3), respectively. b Theχ2test statistics were significant atα = 0.05.
Table 5
Comparison of traffic means between unlicensed and licensed students
Traffic means Unlicensed Licensed
On weekdays On weekends On weekdays On weekends
By others 1.0% 0.8% 2.5% 2.5% Collected by car 4.2% 5.5% 1.7% 1.7% Collected by motorcycle 7.5% 6.3% 2.5% 6.7% By walk 10.5% 4.7% 10.9% 0.8% By school bus 29.0% – 20.2% – By motorcycle 5.2% 27.7% 31.1% 61.4% By bicycle 12.5% 23.0% 5.0% 2.5% By public transport 30.1% 32.0% 26.1% 24.4%
three times per week (20.8%) was also higher than that for unli-censed students (16.8%). Unliunli-censed students were more likely to ride a motorcycle less than once a month (29.7%) and showed two peaks in their riding frequency (at least once a day and less than once a month); however, licensed students had only one peak in riding frequency.
Accident frequency in the past year also produced a signifi-cant difference between the two groups of students. Unlicensed students (87.7%) were more likely to be accident-free than licensed students (62.1%). The unlicensed students who were involved in a crash for one, two, and three or more times a year had a lower likelihood (i.e., 8%, 2.7%, and 1.6%, respectively) than their licensed counterparts (17.7%, 11.3%, and 8.9%, respectively). This result may reflect the fact that unlicensed students report lower motorcycle use than licensed students.
The choice of transport used by students with or without a license revealed diverse patterns on both weekdays (going to school) and weekends (seeTable 5). On weekdays, groups with-out a license were more likely to take public transport (30.1%) or a school bus (29%) to school. Less popular options for getting to school were bicycle (12.5%) and walking (10.5%). Only 5.2% of students without a license rode a motorcycle on weekdays. In contrast, students with a license were more likely to ride a motorcycle (31.1%), take public transport (26.1%), or a school bus (20.2%). Only 5% of licensed students went to school by bicycle.
On the weekends, however, students without a license increased their motorcycle riding and bicycle use to 27.7% and 23.0%, respectively. In addition, students with a license also increased their motorcycle use to 61.4% and increased their like-lihood of being a pillion passenger from 2.5% on school days to 6.7% on the weekends. Compared with motorcycle use on weekdays, unlicensed students showed a greater increase rate in usage on the weekends than licensed students.
4. Discussion
In terms of advances on previous studies, the present report has detailed results on the use of motorcycles by youths at differ-ent age stages and iddiffer-entified factors such as gender and pardiffer-ental attitude that influence the age at which a young person first rides a motorcycle. In addition, comparisons of motorcycle use between licensed and unlicensed students revealed important
implications that may be useful in reducing the likelihood of illegal riding for young people.
4.1. Promotion of alternative modes of transport
The initial motorcycling age reported by the sampled cohort of Taiwan’s senior high school students increased from 10 years of age, peaked at the ages of 16–17 years, and then began to decrease. The overall life-table results indicated that a young person was most likely to first ride a motorcycle at the ages of 14–15 years (27.1%) and 16–17 years (41.9%), which corre-spond to the years of junior and senior high school, respectively. Only 38.3% of the students had no riding experience when they reached the minimum licensing age of 18 years.
Increasing transport need appears to be a principal factor for those students engaging in illegal riding. The public tran-sit systems in most of Taiwan’s districts are underdeveloped, meaning that motorcycles are a principal mode of transport in many areas. Senior high school students are usually involved in more extra-curriculum activities, such as part-time jobs, and have longer home-to-school trips than those of junior high stu-dents; therefore, the prevalence of unlicensed riding will not be easily reduced unless the transport needs of adolescents are met, especially during the weekends and as they get older. It is impor-tant to promote alternative modes of transport that meet young people’s needs, such as electric powered bicycles, rather than relying solely on penalty interventions.
4.2. Promotion of parental monitoring
Parental monitoring might be another key issue that affects the prevalence of unauthorized riding. Parental disapproval appears to delay the time at which the unlicensed adolescent first engages in motorcycling and is one of the main reasons that students in our study refrained from riding at all. It is also the parents who lent their motorcycle to the students, especially to students without a license.
Research has shown that parental monitoring affects teenagers’ driving behavior and safety performance.Hartos et al. (2000)found that low parental monitoring and control were asso-ciated with higher rates of risk behavior, violation, and crashes among teenagers’ driving automobiles. The effectiveness of parental management of teenage driving when their obtaining
a learner’s permit or provisional license is significant, along with placing limits on teenage driving in the first few months of holding a license (Simons-Morton et al., 2002, 2003). There-fore, we propose that stricter parental monitoring may result in the prevention of illegal teenage riding or at least delay such behavior.
4.3. Prevention of early age motorcycling behavior
Unlicensed riding is prevalent and the likelihood of this behavior increases significantly from about 14 years of age. The need to reduce the level of unlicensed motorcycling among young people, especially those who ride before the age of 16, should be addressed with urgency because of their high acci-dent risk and immaturity raised by much research. Research has shown that teen motorcyclists have a disproportionately higher likelihood of being involved in an accident (Chesham et al., 1993; Rutter and Quine, 1996; Lin et al., 2003) and that the accident will be more severe than those involving older riders (Schoon, 2004; Lin et al., 1998). As reported bySenserrick and Whelan (2003), the increased crash risk due to a low licensing age may reflect three factors: an increase in the total number of novices on the roads, less time available to gain experience, and immaturity. The immaturity of young people may be associated with their weaker cognitive ability, including the slower speed at which they process information in their short-term mem-ory, their reduced ability to filter out irrelevant information and focus on appropriate information (Eby and Molnar, 1998), and their propensity towards risky behavior (Rutter and Quine, 1996; Mullin et al., 2000).
The fear of being caught is one of the main reasons that students in this study chose not to ride while unlicensed. On this basis, increasing penalties and ensuring their enforcement, especially for very young age groups and their parents, could prove effective.
Taiwan has set a licensing age of 18 years with the aim of delaying the age at which adolescents first ride motorcycles. The results of the present paper reveal that unlicensed teen riding is prevalent. Even though unlicensed students ride less and are less likely to be involved in an accident than licensed students, the high prevalence of unlicensed teen motorcycling is still a significant problem in the current licensing system. To reduce the probability of young people riding motorcycles while unlicensed, promotion of alternative modes of transport, increased parental monitoring, and harsher penalties have been raised by this study. The lowering of Taiwan’s motorcycle licens-ing age together with matched countermeasures by imitatlicens-ing the graduated licensing system in some western countries might be another strategy to develop. However, the negative safety effects resulted from lowering licensing age is still a debatable issue in
Taiwan. We suggest that more studies need to be conducted to evaluate the overall safety effectiveness of the current licensing system.
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