Sorry... completely missed this...Dodgy knees wrote: ↑Mon Apr 27, 2020 9:33 am Cheers Spin,
It's good to hear the scientific side of it, but me being a twat, question everything where i don't see obvious logic.
1/5.. could not see the bike... Is this when bike overtaking and is behind another vehicle.??
1/3.. Looked but failed to see...aka not looking properly, too casual perhaps. If the eyes and brain aren't working together, you shouldn't be driving.
1/3.. misjudged, yes, I get this one. Vehicles moving faster than expected, Not enough time, also maybe a driver fannying around instead of getting up to speed quicker when joining a main road.
I also agree that drivers turn there heads in the direction of expected oncoming vehicles, but it's what's being processed in there head that is the worry.
looked but COULD NOT see
- could be another vehicle between bike and driver when filtering but also when following in an offside position... which is why I make a big thing about lines of sight and making sure that it's not just you that can see the hazard but that you give the driver a chance to see the entire bike top to bottom, side to side - it's the only way your hi-vis and light can have ANY possible effect.
- could be roadside furniture or pedestrians trees Hedges wheelie bins... Anything again that blocks the Line of Sight
- Could be the structure of the car itself so cold beam blindness where the pillars supporting the roof if or headrests or another passengers in the car create blind spots which hides the bike. A lot of roundabout collisions are likely to be down to the conversion path converging paths keeping the bike and car at the same relative angle, so that the bike never comes out from behind the a-pillar. A lot of sideswipes happened because the bike is in the mirror blind spot and out of peripheral vision. If riders were a little more aware of the need to not just see but to be seen they might be a bit more cautious about where they rode. Could be the structure of the car itself so cold beam blindness where the pillars supporting the roof if or headrests or another passengers in the car create blind spots which hides the bike. A lot of roundabout collisions are likely to be down to the conversion path converging paths keeping the bike and car at the same relative angle, so that the bike never comes out from behind the a-pillar. A lot of sideswipes happened because the bike is in the mirror blind spot and out of peripheral vision. If riders were a little more aware of the need to not just see but to be seen they might be a bit more cautious about where they rode. But most just seem to think it's the driver problem not theirs and that the solution is for the driver to look harder. My favourite expression is drivers should look into their blind spot. Think about it.
Looked that failed to see
- it's easy to say not if a driver fails to see the bike they didn't look hard enough. The fact is there are 1.2 million motorcycles on the road in the UK covering several billion miles each year. There are around 100 fatal junction collisions in the same time period. We don't even know how many junctions riders pass whilst out riding those billions of miles. But this simple bit of maths indicates that drivers are overwhelmingly successful in seeing motorcyclists. The looked but failed to see error is actually remarkably rare. So we can boot the 'didn't look hard' enough and 'didn't look because they were distracted' explanations into touch in my opinion.Yes they might contribute to some of the crashes but it's far from the standard driver behaviour. If it was and they didn't look properly or they were peering at their phone, we've never get much past the end of our own road. So we have to look at the visual perception problems for an explanation not behaviour and that's what I've done with science of being seen.
Looked saw and misjudged
Occasionally I'm inconvenienced by a driver who pulls out then 'fannys around' but unless the rider is a) blind and b) travelling at warp speed it's just that an inconvenience. Do the maths and work out how close a bike has to be unable to avoid colliding with a car. Hint. You can brake a modern machine to a complete standstill from 30 miles per hour in around 10 m if you are reasonably good on the brakes. If you're more than 10 m away you should be able to stop if you're ready to take evasive action. Clearly braking distances increase dramatically with speed - roughly 4 times as you double your speed - and unfortunately many riders never do practice hard braking so aren't capable of stopping as quickly as this, but even so so the bike has to be surprisingly close to a junction before the collision becomes completely unavoidable.
My thinking in all three cases is that the solution really lies in the hands of the biker we need to be aware of the errors that drivers make and we need to have strategies ready to deploy when we see them making that mistake.
We have had add almost 5 decades of Think Bike and Ride bright safety campaigns and they have had next to no impact [sic] on crash stats. And that's because no one tells the biker what goes wrong, why it goes wrong or how to get out of trouble when it does go wrong. We rely on the driver not to make a mistake, and we rely on passive aids - DRLs and hi-vis - to keep us out of trouble. We don't put any effort in to staying out of trouble for ourselves.
