With the building focus on safety improvements for vulnerable road users and how these users interact with road safety hardware, Ingal Civil Products is proud to introduce a new system to the market, the Ingal Motorcyclist Protection Rail, or Ingal MPR. The Ingal MPR is a protective enhancement installed on traditional guardrail systems to reduce the chances of serious injury to motorcyclists or pillion passengers associated with these.
Traditional highway safety barriers are installed on the road carriageways to restrain vehicles from impacting roadside hazards, these typically take the form of the W-Beam rail supported by a series of posts. These posts introduce a significant hazard to an errant motorcyclist in a run-off road accident. The Ingal MPR consists of an under-riding rail which is mounted on a spring bracket. Upon impacting this rail, the spring bracket deflects back absorbing some of the impact energy from the motorcyclist, whilst the rail contains and re-directs the motorcyclist away from the rigid posts and hazards.
The Ingal MPR system has been fully crash tested and evaluated according Standards UNE 135900-1 and 2 and UNE EN-1317-1 and 2, and has produced satisfactory results in the full scale dummy and vehicle crash tests. The dummy tests recorded an impact severity of Level 1 which is the lowest severity for this testing standard.
A number of trial installations have been commissioned in NSW and SA, the first of these being in the Royal National Park, south of Sydney. For more information on this project, view our project summary here.
The system is currently under the evaluation for approval by the Austroads Safety Barrier Assessment Panel. We look forward to this system getting national acceptance and being added to our growing range of products to protect motorcyclists and other vulnerable road users. If you would like some further information on the product, please view our product page here, and if you have any further questions please call your local Ingal Civil Products representative on 1800 803 795.