I’ve put a new twist on the SCIENCE OF BEING SEEN (SOBS) presentations!

As you’ll know if you’re a regular here, my project is an in-depth investigation into the ‘Sorry Mate, I Didn’t See You (SMIDSY) incident between motorcycles and other vehicles where a vehicle turns into the path of a motorcycle. Whilst some of these ‘right-of- way violations’ (ROWV) result in an actual collision, rather more are near-misses, and there are plenty of incidents where the driver starts to move then spots the bike at the last second and stops again, causing a heart-pumping moment for both.

The project started as the background research for a 30-odd minute presentation originally created for Kent Fire and Rescue Service’s (KFRS) ‘BIKER DOWN’ courses, a three-module intervention with sections on accident scene management, relevant first aid aimed at likely injuries in a bike crash, and of course my section – the ‘accident prevention’ module.

SOBS looked at the kind of errors drivers made that caused them to miss a motorcycle in the landscape, why hi-vis clothing and day-riding lights have proven less effective in preventing the collision than was hoped, and offered some strategies the rider could use to stay out of trouble if possible, and the importance of effective evasive action if staying out of trouble didn’t work.

The KFRS team ran the first pilot course with SOBS as the third module in early 2012 and we were soon nominated for – and won – a Prince Michael of Kent International Road Safety Award later that year. I continued to deliver SOBS every course for KFRS, and Biker Down itself went national with most FRS across the UK picking it up, and many of those ran a version of SOBS as their own third module.

The effectiveness of SOBS has been shown by the number of people who’ve openly started to talk about some of the drivers’ visual perception problems – blind spots created by the vehicle itself, motion camouflage, saccadic masking, workload issues etc.

Although uncredited, I also provided Biker Down Canada with the background material they used to create the new ‘Thinking Biker’ video that’s replaced SOBS as the third module of Biker Down here in the UK.

So, I’m now developing SOBS further on my own. There’s the website of course, at http://www.scienceofbeingseen.org, the work of many years of collating and cross-referencing scientific papers. There’s also the SOBS paperback. And I take the talk directly to bike groups across the country in person.

Though the talk has in the past been given from the perspective of the motorcyclist, I’ve also had some drivers attending them – and the feedback was they they also found the insights into driver error very interesting.

A key point in engaging with drivers is the fact that there’s no ‘didn’t look properly’ blame going on during my talk.

In fact, I make the point that the vast majority of drivers DO look, and in the vast majority of case DO look perfectly well – after all, with 1.4 million bikes on the road covering around 3 billion miles with 40 million drivers around them, the result is just 100 fatal collisions plus around 1000 injury crashes occuring every year.

I don’t think anyone has ever tried to estimate the number of times drivers and riders meet each other at junctions, but it’s quite obvious that compared with the number of opportunities for things to go wrong, the actual number of serious errors is actually tiny. Nearly every driver spots nearly every bike!

And that makes it as hard for DRIVERS to understand the cause of a ‘looked but failed to see’ LBFTS incident as it is for the RIDER to understand why a bike, apparently in plain sight, can go missing.

Thus the SOBS talk has now got an offshoot – SOBS for DRIVERS.

The science remains the same, of course. But the emphasis of the talk has been shifted – to explain why drivers miss bikes of course, but also to try to explain some rider behaviour which can contribute to the problem – activities such as filtering, how a rider’s lack of awareness of just how ‘Vision Blockers’ interrupt lines-of-sight plus a tendency to overrate a driver’s chances of seeing a bike in mirrors can lead to them riding in blind spots where they can’t be seen, plus a trusting tendency to leave it all for the driver to sort out.

Once again, there’s no blame aimed at the RIDER – but I do aim to explain that whilst most riders are aware of the issues of the SMIDSY, few have any real insight into the driver’s issues because when the riders themselves are driving, they too nearly always spot other bikes!

And finally, I suggest some strategies – such as slowing down the side-to-side scan we all make at junctions to reduce the risk of saccadic masking, a pause when making the check to the right to let a bike ‘uncloak’, and ‘bobbing the head’ in the car to look around the blind spots created by the vehicle itself.

So, if you belong to a DRIVER group and you’re reading this, why not drop me a line and we’ll see if I can’t arrange for a presentation to your own group, either in person or via Zoom?