“A pioneering new course based on groundbreaking research seeks to end the ‘sorry mate I didn’t see you’ accidents.”
Or simply reinventing the wheel?
That was the headline in an article in Motorcycle News on April 1. I confess that I rarely part with cash these days for MCN so I didn’t actually see this until a firefighter who runs a fire services’s ‘Biker Down’ course sent me a PDF of the item.
It turns out that Smurfit Westrock have collaborated with Phoenix Motorcycle Training to offer free advanced training, and then “asked Phoenix if there was anything we could do to extend the training to include non riders.”
And apparently, the result was a collaboration “with Phoenix Motorcycle Training, Smurfit Westrock, Esitu Solutions and Nothing Trent University” which explains why drivers don’t see motorcycles at junctions, and the result was simply astonishing:
“…we have evidence as to why this is. And it’s not simply a case of drivers failing to look, it is down to the fundamental biological and psychological make-up of human beings as well as their various experiences as road users.”
Wow. I wonder where I might have heard that before?
(HINT – click the picture below)
Anyway, MCN spoke to David Crundle, “a professor of psychology specialising in traffic and transport psychology at Nottingham Trent University” to understand more about the SMIDSY accident and what can be done to stop them being repeated.
I won’t repeat everything that David Crundle had to say, but I’ll summarise the main points.
Firstly, he said that “there are core psychological and physical reasons why drivers don’t see motorcyclists” and that “this isn’t always down to bad driving although this is undeniably sometimes the case” but “down to our physical and cognitive make up”.
And he stated that a chain of events can break down at any step:
1. the driver has to look – if he / she doesn’t look, the driver will not see the motorcycle
2. if the driver looks, the driver has to perceive the motorcycle – if the motorcycle is not perceived, the driver will not see the motorcycle
3. if the driver perceives the motorcycle, the driver has to assess speed and distance correctly – if the driver misjudges either, the result is likely to be an unsafe manoeuvre
I found this in a 2012 paper, and noted that there’s actually a fourth step needed – the motorcycle has to be where the driver can actually SEE it. So the corrected chain of events is:
does the driver look? > can the driver see? > does the driver perceive? > does the driver judge correctly?
That’s all on this page:
And he went on to explain why we look but sometimes do not see a motorcycle. He talked about how we “build up a mental model and set of rules on how to react and interact” as we gain experience, called schemata. And he pointed out that with motorcycles being just 1% of traffic, “drivers don’t gain much experience on how to deal with them and the habits on how to interact with the other 99% of the traffic take over” and their schemata which rarely have to deal with motorcycles become “more and more entrenched which is why it is often harder for more experienced drivers to see motorcyclists”.
This is what I described as the ‘prevalence effect’. You’ll find this discussed here:
Professor Crundall talks about how “our brains are hard wired to quickly spot big objects which might cause us harm but smaller objects take longer for the brain to see, as from an evolutionary perspective now less likely to harm us”. He termed this Global Precedence Theory.
That’s not my understanding (and I actually need to update Science Of Being Seen with my revised information), which is this: Global Precedence Theory, introduced by David Navon in 1977, suggests that in visual perception, humans tend to process the overall structure (the ‘global’ features) of an object or scene faster than its individual components. It’s sometimes referred to as the “forest before trees” effect, where processing the ‘overall shape’ of the scene interferes with the perception of the smaller components; in this case motorcycles. Nothing to do with harm.
But combine what with the schemata in which drivers expect to see cars, and it’s easy to see how a driver can fail to detect “the small unexpected object which is a motorcycle. The brain simply doesn’t see the motorcycle and assumes all is well”.
The page on which I talk about this is here:
Professor Crundall then introduces blind spots and says “to compensate the brain makes up the rest of the image to fill in this gap which is why you don’t have a black hole in your vision”.
I’ve never understood this particular theory, simply because of the location of each eye’s blind spot. The eye’s blind spot (known as the optic disc) is located approximately 12° to 15° out of the line of direct sight toward the temple and about 1.5° below the horizontal. This means the blind spot clearly sits outside our cone of clear, colour vision which is received by the part of the eye called the fovea. When we look straight ahead at a fixed point, keeping it in foveal vision, the blind spot for your right eye is to the right of that point, and the blind spot for your left eye is to the left, and slightly below for both eyes. And with both eyes open, the blind spot of one eye is covered by the visual field of the other. What he doesn’t mention are the physical blind spots created by the vehicle’s structure (covered here: https://scienceofbeingseen.org/2-smidsy-looked-but-could-not-see/ ), which are hugely more significant than the eye’s blind spots. There’s more about the limitations of the human eye here:
The next point made by Professor Crundall is that “our peripheral vision is nowhere near as good as we think it is . While the world looks very clear at the point we are looking at, the peripheral world is blurry and less colourful. Unfortunately if there was something small and important in these visual areas such as a motorcycle it can get overlooked” .
As I point out, since our clear, colour and focused vision only occurs across a tiny zone, the vast majority of incoming visual data falls into the fuzzy, colourless peripheral vision but our brains create an the illusion of full-colour vision over a wide area. You can read that here:
Then he moves to “the looming effect which is an optical phenomenon which can confuse the brain. Imagine you are waiting to pull out of a t-junction you look to the right and see a car coming towards you as the car gets close the size of its image on the retina expands. We use this information to judge the car’s approach speed. However the narrow profile of a motorcycle means that its retinal expansion expansion rate is much lower and can easily fall below the threshold to detect looming. An oncoming motorcycle might not appear to be getting closer and then all of a sudden it is on top of us”.
This connects with the ‘size-arrival’ effect which is a separate but linked phenomenon that explains why drivers often misjudge the approach of smaller vehicles like motorcycles. While looming is the primary visual cue used to perceive an approaching object, the size-arrival effect acts as a perceptual bias that distorts how we interpret that cue based on the object’s physical size. That’s all here:
He also says that “at this point psychological bias can also come into play as motorcycles are small and therefore not an evolutional threat” and that “a driver’s decision to pull out possibly taking a chance can be influenced by this perceived lack of risk”.
I have to be honest. This seems unlikely. I haven’t found any research that backs me up but my personal observation is that most people will back away from a wasp (very small) but I believe hippos kill more humans than any other animal. They are pretty big but people seem keen to approach them. I think this ‘harm’ believe goes back to an observation made by Harry Hurt in the 70s. More research required.
He then talks about ‘in groups’ and ‘out groups’, and says that we are psychologically drawn to people who we perceive to be like ourselves, and that “the out group contains people who you do not identify with and whom you do not understand”. I’ve referred to this as the ‘Classic Car Effect’, where if you start to drive something a bit unusual, suddenly other identical vehicles will jump out of the scenery. It’s called ‘semantic meaning’. That’s discussed here:
And he concludes: “wearing high visibility clothing helps, but a lot of the reasons car drivers don’t see motorcyclists are psychological and physical. If you understand the issues to do with looming effect, blind spots, global precedence theory and how drivers minds work you start to tailor your riding to take this into account. Errors still happen so you will need to be aware and make judgments to reduce the risks by giving yourself space and time to react but this knowledge into how a drivers brain and body work will help. The bottom line is that if you see a driver at a junction and they look towards you, don’t just assume you’ve been seen. They might have looked but not have actually seen you”.
All this is pretty much covered by my conclusions:
Now I appreciate that Professor Crundall has done primary research in the topic, and I haven’t. But he’s far from the only one. There is a body of research on the SMIDSY that goes back to the 1960s and I spent a lot of time and effort back in 2011 and 2012 (as well as in subsequent years updating everything) researching what became the Science Of Being Seen presentation, and a couple of years later the website, and the short explainer book of the same name. The PDF of that book can be found here by the way:
Science Of Being Seen https://ko-fi.com/s/88fbc15a82
Anyway, to carry on with the other element of the story. What could be done to fix the problem?
Well it turns out Phoenix boss Mark Jaffe has the solution. It’s a course for drivers to help them understand why looked but failed to see collisions occur and they want to roll it out throughout their network of 26 right the training schools .
Apparently according to Mark it would be very easy to roll out as it “just involves a training room”.
Blimey. Guess what I’ve been delivering personally to car groups since before lockdown?
It’s the Presentation called ‘Science Of Being Seen for Drivers’, where I suggest proactive scanning strategies to overcome these visual flaws, including:
1. Slow Down the Scan: Moving the head more slowly across the scene reduces the duration of saccadic gaps and allows for more frequent fixations.
2. The “Double Check” Pause: Incorporating a deliberate pause when looking in each direction allows the brain to “uncloak” objects that might have been missed during a quick sweep.
3. Head Bobbing: For drivers, moving the head slightly (“bobbing”) helps peek around “Vision Blockers” like the vehicle’s A-pillars that might be hiding a motorcycle..
Just add some collision scene management training, and some practical first aid to treat the injured motorcyclist at the scene of a crash and you’ve pretty much (re)invented…
…Biker Down!
It was never intended simply for bikers.
So claiming “groundbreaking research” is a clear failure to acknowledge the efforts of the original Biker Down team put together in Kent by firefighter James Sanderson, and a failure to reference SOBS which was (as far as I am aware) the first attempt to pull all the science on the SMIDSY into one place.
Whether the Professor is aware of the Biker Down/SOBS history, I cannot say. However, the work has been widely publicised within the industry. Starting as a module for ‘Biker Down’ when it went national, I have presented it to an online RoadSafetyGB webinar, it’s featured in Devitt Insurance’s biking articles, I’ve delivered the presentation to groups and clubs in-person and online, and I’ve written numerous articles for my own Facebook and social media accounts. I’ve delivered it to the UK police in London and Kent and I’ve even taken it out to New Zealand for bikers down under. Mark Jaffe is also a regular on LinkedIn, where I have frequently shared SOBS updates.
And I wrote a short explainer book of the same name, which you can purchase as a paperback or an instant download PDF.
Ultimately, while I am happy to see this knowledge reaching a wider audience, it is important for the integrity of road safety research that the foundational work — developed back in 2012 and offered freely via scienceofbeingseen.org since 2018 — is correctly attributed. After all, I’ve spent my own time (and money) making it available to anyone free, gratis and for nothing.
Oh, and final point. Actually you don’t even need a classroom to deliver these educational . You could run it as a webinar and make it accessible to pretty much anyone.
Guess what…?
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