SOBS featured by Devitt Insurance

The ‘Science Of Being Seen’ (SOBS) has just got a comprehensive write-up on the Devitt motorcycling pages:

www.devittinsurance.com/guides/motorcycle-features/the-science-of-being-seen/

The Science Of Being Seen was part of the ‘Biker Down’ course in Kent since a pilot course run in early 2012. Here I am mid-presentation at Kent Fire & Rescue’s ‘Road Safety Experience’ facility in Rochester in 2019, explaining the phenomenon of ‘saccadic masking’

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A little history…

After we won a Prince Michael of Kent International Road Safety Award at the end of 2012…

The Biker Down team from Kent Fire & Rescue Service at the Savoy November 2012 

…Biker Down was picked up by many of the other Fire and Rescue Services in the UK, and most of them used a version of SOBS as the Module Three ‘collision prevention’ element. 

  Setting up the laptop to run the presentation in 2019

Until COVID put everything on hold last March, I personally delivered the talk for ‘Biker Down’ in Kent for almost 10 years.

The KFRS website (June 2021) with SOBS as the third ‘pro-active’ module of Biker Down

In February in 2020, I was able to invite Brittany Morrow to see our course in action at Rochester in Kent whilst she was in the UK.

Brittany in a typical pose with the Biker Down team

Little did I know that was to be the final SOBS presentation I delivered for Biker Down Kent. 

Brittany with her Biker Down certificate of attendance   

I’ve run some special SOBS presentations as well, including one for MCN staff at Peterborough, and another for Honda UK at Bracknell. 
Danny John-Jules gets two of my books

The latter was attended by actor Danny John-Jules who was so impressed with my recommendation of pink as a hi-vis colour, he sent me some photos of him riding his own machine. 

Those bikes are VERY pink!

SOBS has also been recognised internationally. I personally took SOBS to New Zealand for their month-long Shiny Side Up roadshows in 2018 and 2019. 

SOBS in the tent at SSU in 2018!

On my second trip in 2019, SOBS was featured in a New Zealand bike magazine, and during the tour I was interviewed for the New Zealand Newshub show.

In 2020, SOBS featured on the US REVVTalks series and it was one of the presentations for the RoadSafetyGB powered two wheeler event earlier this year (2021).

And I made a virtual return for the 2021 Online SSU event after the roadshow was curtailed by a lockdown in New Zealand. 

The present…

Earlier this year I was informed that all elements of Biker Down in Kent would be brought ‘in-house’ and subsequently, the associated fire services decided it was time for a fresh presentation. 

And so, nearly a decade after I first put the pilot presentation together for firefighter Jim Sanderson at Kent, SOBS is no longer a part of Biker Down. 

And next, the future…

And so it’s time to relaunch Science Of Being Seen as a standalone project. 

And the first step along that path is added by this great work by David Williams on the Devitt website.  

I hope even more riders will become aware of the issues because SOBS provides vitally important information to ALL motorcyclists and drivers as it explains why motorcycles aren’t seen at junctions. 

And to ensure that SOBS remains in rider consciousness, I’ll be running a series of Science Of Being Seen LIVE ONLINE webcasts.

It’s YOUR CHANCE to see the ORIGINAL and FULL presentation, but constantly UPDATED with the most recent research.

The presentation explores a range of problems: 

:: ‘looked but COULD NOT see’ collisions, where for various reasons – including ‘beam blindness’ and the ‘constant bearing issue’ – it was physically impossible for the driver to see the motorcycle in the run up to the crash

:: ‘looked but FAILED TO see’ collisions, where the bike was in a place it could be seen but visual perception issues meant that the driver failed to spot the bike

:: ‘looked, SAW AND FORGOT’ collisions where short term visual memory and workload issues meant that the driver was likely to have seen the bike but mentally lost track of it

:: ‘looked, SAW AND MISJUDGED speed and distance’ collisions, which tend to happen on faster roads

We’ll also take an objective look at the effectiveness or otherwise of the usual ‘passive safety’ conspicuity aids – hi-vis clothing and day-riding lights (DRLs), before suggesting some general rules to make them more effective.

And the talk concludes with an explanation of the concept of a ‘Two to Tangle’ collision where someone else makes the initial error but the motorcyclist fails to take evasive action, then offers some simple pro-active measures any rider can take to reduce the risks of being caught up in a SMIDY collision themselves. 

NEXT PRESENTATION: Wednesday 6 October @ 8 PM.  

EVENT LINK

http://thq.fyi/se/3279523bdcc9

TICKETS ARE JUST £5. Attendance is limited to 30 people per event. YOUR ACCESS CODE WILL BE EMAILED TO YOU APPROXIMATELY 24 HOURS BEFORE THE EVENT.

Look out for future webcasts on the first Wednesday of alternate months. 

I hope to see at least a few of you there!

“The Science Of Being Seen – understanding visual perception and motorcycle conspicuity” – a presentation from Kevin Williams of Survival Skills Rider Training.

Find out more about the SOBS project at https://scienceofbeingseen.wordpress.com
Support the SOBS project at www.ko-fi.com/survivalskills
Find out about Survival Skills post-test training courses at www.survivalskills.co.uk
Follow Survival Skills on Facebook at www.facebook.com/survivalskills

A few years back, I came across an interesting experiment. And the results may well surprise you.

But first, some background. Historically, we’ve been aware that motorcycles are hard to spot – low salience in the jargon – so research has largely focused on enhancing drivers’ ability to detect motorcycles. Hence the focus on conspicuity issues, and interventions such as day riding lights, novel lighting arrangements, brightly coloured or reflective clothing, helmets and fairings.

But although research has shown that these interventions sometimes have positive effects, the fact is that drivers still “look but do not see” motorcycles.

More and more research has focused on just how we see the world around us – the topic of visual perception. As we’ve seen in articles here, we’re all subject to looking at an object in ways that change depending on context.

In one instance, researchers suggested that our prior experience changes the way we search a scene:

“When viewing a photograph or scene observers most commonly fixate on the most physically salient regions first, but if the observers have relevant content expertise (for example, a history student viewing a photograph of artefacts from the US Civil War) then they focus less on physically salient areas and more on semantically meaningful areas.” ((Humphrey & Underwood, 2009)

This aligns with studies that suggest that motorcycle license holders have that ‘relevant content expertise’, and that as a result, ‘dual-drivers’ are better at detecting motorcycles than drivers without experience riding on bikes. We pick out the ‘semantically meaningful areas’ – ie, other motorcycles – more rapidly from the other features.

This same phenomenon is seen when we look at paintings. Eye-tracking shows that rather than study the entire picture for meaning, our brain takes short-cuts to direct our attention to limited parts of a scene. And just WHICH parts we study changes depending on the question asked.

So one team of researchers suggested that an observer’s ability to detect motorcycles could be changed by making that observer more aware of motorcycles, and that they would do this by the simple expedient of showing a group of drivers a traffic scene containing more motorcycles.

Because motorcycles are hard to spot, the researchers deliberately picked two test objects for their experiment; a bike but also a bus, something which certainly isn’t low salience.

This is how the experiment worked.

The simulator was based on a vehicle cab constructed from genuine vehicle parts and standard controls together with an audio feed, to give an accurate ‘look and feel’, whilst the visual environment was provided by three 19″ screens providing a 120 degree view and what the researchers describe as ‘medium fidelity’.

The test drives were set in urban areas, with regular intersections and with a 60 kph / 37 mph speed limit. Apart from the target vehicles, everything else was four-wheeled. Vehicles appeared from right and left, as well as ahead. Traffic was moderate, with the target vehicles appearing at random.

The drivers were split into two groups, placed in the simulator and sent on a 7.5 kilometre ‘exposure’ drive. All they had to do was drive following normal road rules, but the traffic stream was different. One group encountered an unusually high number of motorcycles with no buses appearing. The other drove with an unusually high number of buses but with no motorcycles appearing.

Having completed that, both groups were sent on a second, longer 39 km drive, where they were asked to count the number of motorcycles or buses they saw, and they were told that their reaction time and accuracy were both being measured.

In this longer drive, the ‘high motorcycle prevalence’ drive contained 120 motorcycles and 6 buses. In the ‘high bus prevalence’ drive, the numbers were reversed, with just 6 motorcycles and 120 buses.

Two custom buttons on the steering wheel allowed the subjects to respond by pressing the appropriate button when they detected the targets. At the same time, their driving performance was monitored by a range of sensors including speed, lateral position, braking and acceleration.

The participants were recorded as having missed a target if they failed to respond, or responded after the target had passed them.

You’ll probably not be surprised that the drivers told to look for buses missed seeing some motorcycles. You probably WILL be surprised that when tasked with looking for motorcycles, drivers missed a greater number of buses.

That’s almost certainly not what we’d expect.

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Before you panic, most of the drivers successfully detect ALL vehicles. The detection rate was actually over 99%.

But looking at the less than 1% of cases where drivers failed to see one or the other, 68% detected all buses and 78% detected all motorcycles.

What we’re seeing here is research based on on something called the ‘prevalence effect’. The original theory grew out of research into detection issues in medical screening procedures. Highly trained staff looking through microscopes at tissue samples tend to miss the rare anomalies, even though they know what they are looking for.

In effect, motorcycles are just like those medical anomalies because we make up less than 1% of traffic on UK roads. Although drivers know they will encounter motorcycles and should “Think Bike”, the researchers wondered that if they are so rare that drivers subconsciously don’t expect to encounter any and instead focus on other parts of the scene.

Now, I must make clear again that this isn’t ‘carelessness’, it isn’t ‘not looking properly’, it isn’t ‘bad training’ and it isn’t any of the other blame-game explanations we so commonly see. What it is, is yet another example of the hidden power (and weakness) of the brain, working far below the level of our awareness.

Of course, the participants in both groups didn’t realise they hadn’t seen some of the motorcycles or some of the buses. As far as the brain’s concerned, “what we see is all there is”.

The authors’ conclusion was that the detection rates for motorcycles would be improved by the ‘simple’ expedient of putting more motorcycles on the road.

Not too surprisingly the research has been picked up by interested outfits such as FEMA and the MCIA and used as evidence that motorcycles should be promoted as a means of transport to make them safer.

In reality, we’re not about to see floods of powered two-wheelers on the roads, and drivers detection rates are not going to snowball overnight.

But don’t forget the reverse prevalence effect operates. We’re used to seeing plenty of cars – it’s easy enough for us to spot them. All we have to do is understand the Science Of Being Seen to see how drivers make ‘looked but did not see’ mistakes, then take the necessary action to avoid the collision! No Surprise? No Accident!

Reference:

Can Drivers’ Expectations and Behaviour Around Motorcycles Be Influenced by Exposure?
Beanland, Lenne and Underwood

Yesterday on my Elevenses webcast (https://youtu.be/j8Hk_quPL4Q) I talked about the newest tag-team on the block. MAG and Transport for London (TfL) will be working together to identify – and hopefully improve – accident black spots for powered two wheelers, and I commented how the press release announcing this partnership is almost exactly four years to the day that I wrote a Facebook article on a then-new study into bike crashes commissioned by TfL.

This study concluded – not very shockingly – that bike crashes were most likely to happen at junctions. The good news was that based on their research, the TfL were producing an action plan to improve junctions for bikers, which were set duly forth in an ‘Urban Motorcycle Design Handbook’, which was published early in 2017, if I remember right.

Rather bizarrely, the alternative riders’ rights organisation, the BMF, reviewed the then-new TfL action plan into bike crashes in their online blog and said:

“We don’t understand motorcycle accidents.”

It was a puzzling statement four years ago, because – as I pointed out in Elevenses yesterday – I think it’s clear we have a pretty good handle on motorcycle crashes thanks to 50+ years of research!

Certainly, that research has steadily IMPROVED.

The research has improved in quality- some early studies were particularly simplistic, and there was also an element of ‘cart-before-horse’ detectable in some studies, where facts were bent to fit the theory – that’s evident in some of the studies supporting the use of hi-vis clothing and day-riding lights.

The research has improved in technique – with new developments like immersive simulators and sophisticated eye-tracking equipment, it’s possible to really pinpoint exactly where and at what drivers are looking. There are also sophisticated new tools for analysis of real-life data too.

And the research has certainly improved in quantity – whilst every now and again new papers appear with fresh ideas, there are plenty of other works which confirm and improve on earlier studies.

The most recent paper I’ve read – “Why are powered two wheeler riders still fatally injured in road junction crashes? – A causation analysis” – starts by stating the issue of concern:

“Powered Two Wheeler (PTW) crashes continue to be a road safety concern with a plateauing of the number of associated fatalities.”

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They then looked at two groups of crashes:

“Group A, where the other vehicle was travelling in the opposite direction to the PTW and commenced a right turn across the PTW’s path; and Group B where the other vehicle turned right out of a side road (or entrance) across the PTW’s path.”

This is important.

Group B – the collision with the vehicle that emerges into the bike’s path is the collision that most riders are familiar with – either because they’ve picked themselves off the deck after the event, or because they survived via some rapid evasive action.

But Group A is less familiar to riders. There’s good reason for that. Not only is it far less common, but it accounts for a significant number of the fatalities. Crudely put, many of the riders who DO have this crash don’t come back to warn the rest of us about it.

Now, here’s the first interesting comment:

“…the other vehicle drivers in Group A [were] more likely to have ‘attention allocation’ as a causation factor.”

What’s attention?

We tend to use it incorrectly when we’re talking about road safety. We tend to assume it’s a state in which we’re capable of responding to ANY stimulus. We talk about attentive riders and drivers being aware of their environment.

The fact is we’re misusing the term. ‘Attention’ is not some kind of Zen-like state where we are capable of absorbing everything happening around us. Instead, it’s the behavioural and cognitive process of SELECTIVELY focusing on a specific pieces of information, whilst IGNORING other information which would – if we changed the focus of our attention – be perceivable.

“PAY ATTENTION!”

Why do people say that? Because there’s something specific they want our focus on. Do you see the difference?

This is vitally important, because it explains one of the mechanisms by which a ‘perfectly attentive’ driver can ‘look but fail to see’ a motorcycle. Something ELSE in the driving task became the focus of attention. And so the motorcycle went unseen.

This piece of understanding has been a key piece of my ‘Science Of Being Seen’ presentation since 2012. In the presentation I refer to it under the term ‘workload’, because it better explains that there is simply too much happening around us as we drive (or ride) to be able to absorb ‘everything’ – our attention is therefore selective, focusing on a subset of the environment that experience has taught us is crucial to the task. And I explain that ‘prevalence’ and the relative rareness of PTWs within the traffic stream leads drivers to overlook them.

And here’s the second interesting comment:

“the PTW riders in Group B more likely to have ‘insufficient skills’”

Specifically, they found that riders who had suffered the more common SMIDSY collision with the emerging driver demonstrated “too high speed” and “too late action”.

‘Too high speed’ is somewhat subjective, because to some extent whether a speed is too high in the moments before a potential collision depends on whether or not the rider is capable of shedding that speed in an emergency.

But we know from other research that the danger zone for riders is around three seconds out from a junction.

If the vehicle turns into the rider’s path when the bike is more than three seconds from impact, the rider is usually able to stop.

If the manoeuvre happens when the bike is less than three seconds away, then frequently the rider is unable to stop.

Here’s my point – the fact that the RIDER turned out to be unable to stop doesn’t mean that the MACHINE wasn’t capable of stopping. Some riders lose control of the machine – that’s why we now have mandatory ABS. Many others never get close to full power on the brakes – studies routinely show that riders generate 60-70% of braking force when they believe they are braking hard. And many simply freeze and either react too late or never react at all.

We’ve known for a long time that had the rider been able to bring the bike to a controlled halt by braking to the fullest extent, many junction collisions would be avoided.

The authors concluded… “that drivers failing to give way to PTW riders at junctions is still a problem.”

Why?

Back in 2002, in the VERY FIRST COLUMN that I wrote for the MAG magazine – called Slipstream back then – I said:

“It’s easy to point the finger of blame at car drivers but it’s worth remembering “it takes two to tangle” – one vehicle operator to make the initial mistake, but the second (all too often a rider) to sail blindly into the trap.”

18 years on, a new generation of riders are clearly making the same mistakes.

It’s great to see MAG involved with TfL in a constructive way – by all means address the roads and re-engineer junctions. And it’s equally important we continue to campaign to raise driver awareness of the vulnerability of riders…

…but riders MUST develop decent avoidance and evasion skills as part of the package. As I said yesterday at the end of Elevenses:

“For heavens sake, never forget that it’s ME, it’s YOU that holds the final trump card. We just have to remember a) we’re holding it and b) know how to play it.”

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Why are powered two wheeler riders still fatally injured in road junction crashes? – A causation analysis
Rachel Talbot, Laurie Brown & Andrew Morris
Journal of Safety Research
Volume 75, December 2020, Pages 196-204

SUMMARY – if you’re a driver, you need to understand how you’re likely to make the ‘looked but failed to see’ error before it happens… far from being ‘dangerous’ or ‘badly-behaved’ road users, both the driver and the rider in a SMIDSY are likely to be riding and driving as they usually do… turn your head more slowly and remember that bikes can be harder to spot… on busy roads take a moment longer to give bikes chance to appear from where they might be hidden… on faster roads take a moment longer to see how quickly bikes are moving… move your head from side to side to check behind the car’s blind spots…

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The material is free to all to access and use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you can share it with your family and friends, and re-use it for club magazines and websites, so long as you acknowledge the source and author and include the same Creative Commons license in the derived works.

Please note, this Creative Commons license excludes commercial use. If you wish to use any of my work for commercial purposes, including (but not limited to) articles in pay-for magazines or commercial websites, please contact me.

Kevin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Photo credit Paul Townsend
https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/20001313491

SUMMARY – solving the SMIDSY collision may sound simply but it’s not… whilst there is limited evidence that conspicuity aids reduce the collision rate, their use is far from a guarantee the rider will be seen… even when seen, drivers may still misjudge speed and distance… pink hi-vis, the night-time ‘ghost jacket’ and yellow lights would seem to be more effective than conventional hi-vis and DRLs…. but whatever strategy we do adopt, there’s no guarantee we will be seen…

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THIS PAGE HAS MOVED

IMPORTANT:

The material is free to all to access and use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you can share it with your family and friends, and re-use it for club magazines and websites, so long as you acknowledge the source and author and include the same Creative Commons license in the derived works.

Please note, this Creative Commons license excludes commercial use. If you wish to use any of my work for commercial purposes, including (but not limited to) articles in pay-for magazines or commercial websites, please contact me.

Kevin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Photo credit Paul Townsend
https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/20001313491

SUMMARY – collisions between cars and motorcycles increase when it’s dark… drivers misjudge ‘time to collision’ more often when motorcycles have single headlights… retro-reflective material is often too high up or the approaching bike is at the wrong angle for the car’s lights to illuminate it… garments used at night feature blocks, stripes or even random patches of retro-reflective material and fail to create a recognisable shape…

 

THIS PAGE HAS MOVED

IMPORTANT:

The material is free to all to access and use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you can share it with your family and friends, and re-use it for club magazines and websites, so long as you acknowledge the source and author and include the same Creative Commons license in the derived works.

Please note, this Creative Commons license excludes commercial use. If you wish to use any of my work for commercial purposes, including (but not limited to) articles in pay-for magazines or commercial websites, please contact me.

Kevin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Photo credit Paul Townsend
https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/20001313491

SUMMARY – it’s long been recognised that a dipped headlight is not the most effective day-riding light… making the bike stand out has become a more difficult problem now cars also have day running lights… an effective DRL has to work under multiple conditions… DRLs are most effective at dawn and dusk but less effective in daytime conditions of bright sun… single headlights offer poor help to drivers in judging speed and distance… but DRLs also have to provide a ‘visual signature’ so drivers realise they are seeing a motorcycle and drivers are quick to recognise single headlights as belonging to a bike… twin lights may be mistaken for a car… the ‘triangle of lights’ is ineffective in terms of daytime conspicuity but help drivers judge speed and distance more accurately… unusual lights risk not being recognised as being fitted to a PTW… like hi-vis clothing DRLs are not ‘fit and forget’…

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THIS PAGE HAS MOVED

IMPORTANT:

The material is free to all to access and use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you can share it with your family and friends, and re-use it for club magazines and websites, so long as you acknowledge the source and author and include the same Creative Commons license in the derived works.

Please note, this Creative Commons license excludes commercial use. If you wish to use any of my work for commercial purposes, including (but not limited to) articles in pay-for magazines or commercial websites, please contact me.

Kevin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Photo credit Paul Townsend
https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/20001313491

SUMMARY – the 1975 Ride Bright campaign in London encouraged riders to ride lights-on in daytime… studies proposing safety interventions nearly all state that dipped headlights are effective in reducing collisions… but the claim is often based on laboratory studies or poor quality evidence from the roads… when legislation forced riders to switch on headlights in daytime in Malaysia, 80% complied but the overall reduction in collisions was only around 7%… the pan-European MAIDS study found that in collisions with drivers who did not see the motorcycle, 69% of riders were using their lights… we cannot rely on day riding lights to be seen…

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THIS PAGE HAS MOVED

IMPORTANT:

The material is free to all to access and use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you can share it with your family and friends, and re-use it for club magazines and websites, so long as you acknowledge the source and author and include the same Creative Commons license in the derived works.

Please note, this Creative Commons license excludes commercial use. If you wish to use any of my work for commercial purposes, including (but not limited to) articles in pay-for magazines or commercial websites, please contact me.

Kevin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Photo credit Paul Townsend
https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/20001313491