WHEN exploring the reasons for North Yorkshire's poor road safety record, it is perilously easy to over-simplify the issue.

Take two equally grim news stories on consecutive days. Yesterday we reported how a motorcyclist killed in Wigginton Road, York, was the 17th biker to die in North Yorkshire this year.

Today we reveal how a quarter of all the fatal road casualties are 21 or under. A quick leap takes us to the nearest conclusion. We can blame much of the road carnage on youthful hot-headedness.

Not so. Some of the bikers who lost their lives were middle aged. And a proportion of the young people who have died were car passengers.

Neither should we apportion blanket blame. Some of the motorcycle accidents will be due to rider error; others will have been someone else's fault. Equally, just because the driver in a death crash is young does not mean they are automatically culpable.

Every accident is different, so it is wrong to look for a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, we should concentrate on the prevailing factors which crop up regularly in accident investigations. Two such factors are inexperience and speed.

Add driving inexperience to a desire for thrills and the misplaced sense of immortality which characterise the "boy racer", and you have a potentially lethal combination. The only way to counter these forces is to educate: the road safety video being shown in schools aims to bring home the devastating consequences of using roads as a racetrack.

But what about the impetuosity of middle age? That is what prompts so-called born-again bikers to swap the family saloon for two-wheels. Yet modern motorcycles are far more powerful than those they rode in their youth. Education is vital here, too, beginning at the motorbike sales outlet.

As for speed, we must rely on North Yorkshire police's traffic officers to continue their commitment to penalise road users who put themselves and others at risk by recklessly flouting both the law and good sense.

Updated: 10:59 Tuesday, July 29, 2003