*** SOBS *** “Plus ca change” – from the archives
The full expression in French is, as I recall from O Level days: “the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing”. And I was reminded of that as I was looking through some old editorials that featured in my ‘blog before blogs were invented’ back in 2001.

What was I writing about? It was an article written in the weekly paper Motorcycle News which suggested that:

“…the reason that car drivers did not see motorcycles was because they were looking in the wrong place. It seems that some research into the way that drivers look for hazards had revealed that experienced drivers looked too far away and failed to spot bikes close by, whilst inexperienced drivers didn’t look far enough down the road and failed to see bikes travelling at speed.”

That particular piece of research threw some light on one of the complex sequence of visual perception issuess that can result in the ‘looked but failed to see’ LBFTS error – that is, what happens when the driver DID look but failed to spot a motorcycle that WAS visible.

Right now in 2023 you probably won’t be surprised to know that the LBFTS issue is now examined in depth in my ‘Science Of Being Seen’ (#SOBS) project, as one of the three types of error that result in drivers failing to react correctly towards powered two wheelers approaching an intersection:

:: looked and COULD NOT see

:: looked but FAILED to see

:: looked, saw but MISJUDGED speed and distance

SOBS was researched over the winter of 2011 and launched with Kent Fire and Rescue’s pilot ‘Biker Down’ courses in early 2012 and was used by many Biker Down teams until 2020 when the course was absorbed into the fire service generally during a COVID reorganisation.

But long before I put it all into a coherent body of thought to create SOBS, I’ve always attempted to make sense of the findings of research into car / motorcycle collisions.

It really kicked off in 1995 when I made the switch from courier to rider trainer, and was told that I had to tell CBT trainees that using hi-vis clothing and riding with their lights on in daytime would help protect them from the LBFTS collision.

My courier experience said that that was a dangerous strategy, and what was actually needed was a far more proactive approach which involved not being where a car driver’s error would put me at risk. And thanks to the internet, I was able to start reading scientific papers online and discover the findings of research into the collision issue.

But of course, the needs of journalism have never let reality stand in the way of a good story. As I wrote back in 2001:

“In best MCN style, instead of making something constructive from this research, it was instead used to justify the claim that because car drivers were going to knock us off anyway, we might as well not bother with Hi-Vis clothing or daytime lights.”

If that sounds a totally bonkers conclusion, it was, and actually still is.

Talking about the need to understand why these LBFTS errors happen and then do something about them, I continued:

“…it doesn’t absolve us from taking some responsibility for the situation.”

The sad fact is that this kind of article offers riders an excuse to offload all the responsibility for ‘two to tangle’ collisions persist and live on in biking folklore. Riders ‘know’ that it’s the driver who causes the crash because magazines like MCN told them twenty-plus years ago, and continue to state as fact that “drivers don’t look properly”.

But claims like this continue to be made, and continue to allow riders to duck the fact; whilst it may be driver error that sets up the crash, the biker still has to RIDE INTO IT to make it happen. For every driver that makes the LBFTS error, there’s a rider who failed to predict ‘what happens next’.

I continued:

“It’s true many riders rely on lights and bright clothing and assume they will be seen. Big mistake. Many riders still don’t understand how position of the bike and other traffic / road layout etc. influences how much drivers can see and what they are looking for, so they don’t take active steps to put themselves into a position where they can be seen, nor make allowances for the car driver’s problems: for instance busy junctions mean the driver is looking for the smallest gaps to get out into the traffic, looking for traffic coming from several different directions and may well have pedestrians wandering around too. The amount of attention he has to spot YOU and decide what to do is limited.”

I also noted the consequences of speed in confusing drivers looking at an approaching motorcycle:

“Whilst general awareness of bikes has increased, for every car driver who thinks I am further away than I am and does pull out, there seems to be another who waits for 5 minutes for me to reach the junction and won’t pull out till I’m past. Many drivers (and bikers – I’ve had them pull out on me) are hopeless at judging distance, but more particularly it’s SPEED that confuses them. Again it’s something that riders rarely consider. Not only does approaching junctions at high speed make it very difficult for you to get out of trouble, but it also relies on the driver to make the right judgement.”

And I concluded:

“Contrary to what MCN appears to believe, just because the research tells us what we knew already, there is no excuse for not doing something about it, and it’s pretty irresponsible of them to feed the natural tendency we all all have to blame someone else for our own lack of awareness.”

So that’s where we were getting on for a quarter of a century ago. And despite writing on the topic for even longer, I still encounter plenty of riders stating as fact that “drivers don’t look”.

I met one the other week who claimed I had no evidence for my analysis of crashes – I do, and it’s all documented in SOBS.

And the fact is it’s pretty easy to prove the ‘drivers don’t look’ claim is nonsense by playing a simple numbers game.

There are 1.3 million bikes on the road, and around 40 million drivers. If all those drivers never looked ‘properly’ and thus never saw any of those 1.3 million bikes, NONE OF US would get much further than the end of our own road. In fact, there are around 100 fatalities that result from collisions between motorcycles and cars at junctions, and around 1000 serious injuries. It’s still far too many, but that means 1,298,900 riders DON’T have a serious incident. Even if there were 10,000 minor injuries, that would still be 39,988,900 drivers who don’t take out a motorcycle.

The only conclusion is that vast majority of drivers clearly [sic] DO see the vast majority of bikes.

I continue to build new research into SOBS, with the aim of helping riders and drivers alike understand WHY these visual perception failures continue to happen, and to give both groups of road users some help in avoiding the vision errors on the one hand, and staying out of trouble on the other.

If you want to contribute to the project and help spread facts rather than fiction, visit the website:
https://scienceofbeingseen.org/support-sobs/