Unfortunately, I went down with a thumping headache on Wednesday afternoon last week, so the SOBS In-Depth webcast that was due to go live at 8pm that evening had to be cancelled – I could barely focus on the screen, so rather than push on with a second-rate performance, I decided to put it back a week to Wednesday 8 June.
So if you hadn’t booked for the original event, you have a SECOND CHANCE!
The ‘SCIENCE OF BEING SEEN’ (SOBS) presentation is an in-depth investigation of the most common motorcycle crash of all – the ‘Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You’ or ‘SMIDSY’ collision at junctions.
In this SCIENCE OF BEING SEEN – IN-DEPTH – which alternate with the FULL version of SOBS – I’ll be taking a look at how we scan the scene around us and explain that we don’t capture camera-like images of the world around us – discover the role played by fixations and saccades as we attempt to gain situational awareness, and explaining why lateral motion may be important in helping a driver see us. .
Even if you have already seen the full version of SOBS, the additional detail will help you understand why drivers occasionally don’t see bikes… and why riders often fail to realise there’s a threat!
Use the booking link here for information about how the webcast runs.
*** SCIENCE OF BEING SEEN *** The importance of lateral movement “Where other drivers turn across the path of a motorcyclist, this can be because the motorcyclist…is not seen by the driver…This points to the need to improve driver awareness of motorcycles, as well as raising awareness among motorcyclists of this issue, which is a key factor in many collisions. By running headlights during the daytime and wearing high visibility clothing, motorcyclists can help to improve their visibility to drivers.”
That’s from Transport for London’s ‘Motorcycle Safety Action Plan’ published back in 2016. I don’t know if there’s been an update since, but essentially it ignores one very big problem behind the ‘Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You’ SMIDSY collision.
IF THE DRIVER CAN’T SEE THE BIKE, HOW DOES MAKING IT MORE VISIBLE HELP?
The motorcyclist also has to be aware that they have to position TO BE SEEN. When plans like this ignore this issue, it’s hardly surprising that so many riders still seem completely oblivious to the problem – OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND.
In researching the Science Of Being Seen #SOBS, I found that there were actually THREE causes of these crashes.
LOOKED BUT FAILED TO SEE: These are the visual perception failures where a bike that is capable of being seen isn’t spotted. These make up around 1 in 3 of all junction collisions, and for a variety of reasons to do with the way the eye ‘sees’ the world and the brain processes the visual feed, these drivers simply didn’t pick out the presence of a motorcycle even though it was there to be seen. These ‘Looked But Failed To See’ crashes are so common they are actually referred to as LBFTS incidents in the research literature.
Causes include ‘saccadic masking’, which happens when our vision shuts down as we turn our head, a narrow field of clear vision which leaves much of our ‘worldview’ dependent on peripheral vision, and ‘motion camouflage’ where the bike simply ‘grows’ against the background and the driver’s brain fails to detect it.
I have a very good clip of a Spitfire simply ‘appearing out of nowhere’ as it flies directly towards the camera. It’s visible if you look in the right place, but with our attention focused on the presenter, it falls outside our narrow cone of clear vision and in peripheral vision, and is effectively invisible. It’s only when it’s scarily close that it simply ‘pops out’ at the viewer.
And I think we’d all agree that a Spitfire is rather bigger than a motorcycle!
The problem is that lack of lateral movement to attract our attention, and there’s a very specific form of motion camouflage that happens when two moving vehicles are on a collision course. This problem has a name – it’s known as the ‘Constant Bearing, Decreasing Range’ issue. It’s a term used in navigation and flying which means that some object, usually another ship viewed from the deck or bridge of one’s own ship or another aircraft viewed from the cockpit, is getting closer but staying at the same angle – or maintaining the same absolute bearing.
If they both continue on the same course at the same speed, they WILL collide. And it CAN happen on the roads. Just ask yourself where; for example, when you’re approaching a roundabout and another vehicle is on an intersecting course and will arrive at the same time, or when approaching a cross-roads and another vehicle is approaching head-on. Since neither vehicle will appear to move relative to the background, it can be difficult for either driver / rider to perceive the other, even when in clear view. I’ll be coming back to this in a moment.
LOOKED, SAW AND MISJUDGED: And then there is a second type of driver perception error where the driver actually sees the bike, but thanks to the tall and narrow shape of a motorcycle, simply misjudges speed and distance and therefore miscalculates the all-important ‘time to collision’. Once again, it’s a well-known phenomenon in the research and accounts for a further 1 in 3 of junction collisions, usually on faster roads. These are ‘looked, saw and misjudged’ errors.
From the point of view of the rider, the result is that the driver begins a dangerous manoeuvre. Unfortunately, the driver often recognises for themselves half-way through that it’s not going to end well. The rider will often see this change-of-mind when a driver starts to turn across the bike’s path then stops again, frequently ending up stranded across the road ahead of the bike.
This happened in front of me years ago when I was couriering. With a car coming the other way, I had no ‘out’ to the right of the emerging car but had just enough room to turn behind it and shoot obliquely between the gate posts from which the vehicle had just emerged, braking safely to a halt on an immaculate grassy lawn.
The ‘looked but failed to see’ and ‘looked, saw and misjudged’ errors are the classic ‘driver fails’. And it’s always been assumed that advice to use improved scanning techniques would reduce the frequency of these errors. But speaking plainly, the crash stats over the last fifty years of ‘Think Bike’ campaigns fails to turn up any significant change to the frequency of car – bike collisions. And that’s because the human eye and brain were never designed to work at the speed of traffic. The crashes happen because the weaknesses are effectively built-in.
LOOKED BUT COULD NOT SEE: But there’s a third category of error. In around one in five collisions, the rider simply wasn’t where the driver was able to see the bike when the driver looked. The driver ‘looked but COULD NOT SEE’ the bike because it was hidden.
And it’s easier for a bike to go missing than you may realise.
Just watch the video.
Watched it? That was an object the thickness of a PEN blocking our view of the approaching bike.
Now, remember the Constant Bearing issue? Think about what’s happening here. The bike’s not only not moving relative to the background, the fact that it’s on a constant bearing means it’s not moving relative to the vision-blocking pen. And it’s scary how close the bike got before it moved out to where you could see it.
The pen is a Vision Blocker. Think about how many objects there are around us that block lines-of-sight – post boxes, telegraph poles and trees, moving and parked cars, hedges and walls, people walking along the pavement…
…even another motorcycle on a group ride!
Now, I want you to watch the video again. This works best full screen on a PC monitor if you stand about five paces away from the screen. This time stretch your arm out, then hold your hand up vertically with the palm facing away from you, so that you’re looking at the back of your hand. Cover up the policeman and his pen. When do you see the bike now?
Now go sit in your car’s driving set and take a look at the A pillars supporting the front windscreen. If you look at the width of the pillar nearest you, you’ll find it’s about the width of your hand, and it’s about the same distance from your eyes as your hand was when you stretched your arm out.
If you’re still not ‘getting it’, get a friend to walk towards your car whilst trying to hide in the blind spot – they’ll know when they’re in it because they won’t be able to see YOUR eyes. It’s scary just how close they’ll get before you spot them. And a bike’s not much wider than a person.
So now… combine the Constant Bearing problem with the blind spots created by the car itself.
As you approach a vehicle, check where the driver’s head is relative to your line of approach. If their eyes are behind one of the pillars (and the B pillar supporting the doors and the C pillar behind the passenger doors are just as big a problem when approaching from the side or behind), then you’re NOT VISIBLE. You CANNOT BE SEEN.
And we can’t rely on drivers predicting that there MIGHT be a bike they can’t see.
So ask yourself: “how can I bring the driver’s eyes into MY own line-of-sight?”
The answers should be fairly obvious. To ‘break’ motion camouflage and the Constant Bearing problem, all we need to do is change position and speed and thus create some LATERAL movement – hopefully the driver will now see us though a wise rider would still be prepared to take evasive action.
And specifically, we want to identify, then move out from behind, any ‘Vision Blocker’ in order to bring our bike into the driver’s own line-of-sight. That way we ‘uncloak’ our bike, and at least give the driver a CHANCE of seeing us.
Sadly, reading the comments on the FB post where I spotted this video, it’s depressing how many simply missed the point.
There were the usual bunch of “car drivers don’t look properly” or “aren’t paying attention” theorists, though a minor logic check would tell them that if they weren’t ‘paying attention’ they’d be bouncing off everything around them and not just bikes.
Then there were the “car drivers are distracted by their phones” comments. Certainly, you’re at far higher risk of a collision if you are a mobile phone fiddler when driving, but relatively few police investigations into crashes in the UK suggest that the collision can be pinned on mobile phone use as a primary cause. That’s all covered in SOBS.
But my ‘favourite’ comment was probably:
“This just shows that we need to make bikes more visible.”
If you’re in a position where you CAN’T ACTUALLY BE SEEN, how on earth does the writer think that ‘making a bike more visible’ is going to work?
In terms of sage advice, it’s right up there with:
“Drivers, check your blind spots.”
How exactly? They are called blind spots for a reason.
If you want to find out more about the problems of being seen on two wheels, why not sign up for the next presentation of ‘Science Of Being Seen’, on Wednesday evening?
=================================== APRIL’S LIVE EVENT – ‘SOBS – the full presentation’ Science Of Being Seen is a 45 minute talk covering human visual perception and motorcycle conspicuity, and explains why conventional hi-vis clothing and day-riding lights have proven less than successful at preventing junction collisions. Discover how to use Survival Skills ‘proactive measures’ in your own riding. WEDNESDAY 6 APRIL 2022 AT 20:00 Tickets cost £5.
A few years back, Howard Askew attended one of our ‘Biker Down’ courses in Kent – where Biker Down originated as you probably know – and where I was delivering the original ‘SOBS’ presentation.
Some time later later he sent me this comment on the course and SOBS in particular:
“For sure the course was very good about what to do in the event of an accident, but you were the only person who was giving strategic advice on avoiding becoming a casualty and made a Despatch Rider from 1978 to 1985 think outside of the box. It’s all about avoiding those nasty accidents.”
And that absolutely nails the function of SOBS as part of Biker Down.
When Jim Sanderson and I first got involved in discussions about the pilot course of what would become the national Biker Down campaign, we both agreed that there was a need for a pro-active, crash prevention module.
Managing the accident scene and treating casualties are both vital skills.
But it would be better if the rider attending BD didn’t end up needing someone else delivering those skills to the rider.
And so SOBS was born. And as Biker Down was picked up by fire services across the UK, so the majority of those courses delivered a version of SOBS as the third, proactive module.
SOBS was created over the winter of 2011 – 12. I delivered my final presentation for KFRS at Rochester in February 2020, just before we went into lockdown.
For many years individual fire services were pretty much left to run Biker Down in their own time, but it’s finally been acknowledged as a ‘national initiative. And so the fire services have now decided to bring all the modules ‘in-house’.
And that means they have decided to move on from SOBS.
On the one hand, a fresh look can be a good thing.
On the other I’m disappointed because SOBS is a unique safety intervention in that it seeks to give genuinely science-based information to riders and help them make better-informed choices and I think it’s a shame it will no longer be delivered to UK riders.
But with all the work I’ve put into the SOBS project I certainly don’t want to leave it sitting on the shelf, and that’s why I’m running an online webcast every two months, as well as making myself available to clubs and groups for presentations either in person or online.
Make a date here online, or book me for a talk for your group – it’s your choice. But you’ll be giving yourself or your riding buddies a chance to see the presentation which has gone international, being showcased by RoadSafetyGB here in the UK, on the REVVtalks series in the USA and not least as part of the Shiny Side Up rider road shows in New Zealand.
JANUARY’S LIVE EVENT – ‘FILTERING – what’s legal, what’s illegal and what’s plain common sense’ Get tips that work from a sixteen year courier veteran.
[This post was originally written on October 11 2012 – which gives you an indication of just how long I’ve been talking about the problems of visual perception, motorcycle conspicuity in general and lighting issues more specifically. At the time of writing LED headlights were almost unheard of. So the article is about the use of LEDs for add-on auxiliary lighting which was becoming increasingly common at that time, rather than LEDs fitted as main riding lights. It’s been updated a little for clarity.]
At the end of my ‘Science of Being Seen’ conspicuity and collision avoidance presentation last night for ‘Biker Down’, a chap called Nick Ingram approached me to ask my views on LED light bars and how they might help, and he’s just sent me an online discussion, which I duly read.
The short version is that a lot of riders were positive about the current trend for fitting light bars, subscribing to the belief that “if one light is good, more must be better”.
But is that actually true?
As I said on Biker Down, anything that breaks up or distorts the silhouette of a motorcycle / rider means it takes observers longer to recognise that they are looking at a motorcycle, and in some circumstances they may not even recognise that what they are seeing actually IS a bike!
Have a look at the attached photo. Imagine we’re sitting in a side road looking at those lights coming towards us in the midst of a row of cars with headlights on.
We can see the lights, no problem. But WHAT exactly is it? WHERE exactly is it? How FAR away is it – if we don’t know what we’re looking at, we can’t judge distance. How LONG has we got before it gets here – if we can’t judge distance, we can’t make a judgement about speed either. Can we PULL OUT – without accurate speed / distance information, trying to work out ‘time to collision’ and whether we’ve a safe gap to pull out into becomes tricky.
What happens when the bike’s lights confuse the driver’s ‘recognition and range-finding’ system. Is he or she more or less likely to pull out?
The fact is we don’t simply know the answer to that question – it will depend on several issues such as whether the lights actually make us look further away, or whether the confusion delays – but does not CHANGE – the driver’s decision to go. This is the problem with any conspicuity aid – since they rely on the other road user detecting them, they MAY work….
…or they MAY NOT. And you and I will never know whether the driver who just waited for us as we rode by waited because he saw our extra lights… or whether spotted the bike regardless of the lights.
The bad news that we don’t know the effect on an approaching driver, the extra lights will change OUR behaviour. Behind the lights, we’re clearly hoping we reduce the chance of a driver pulling out on us, If we didn’t think that, why would we bother fitting them?
So the moment we fit extra lights “to be seen” – whether that’s for daytime riding or night riding – then we create a risk for ourselves; the BELIEF that the lights make it less likely that a driver will pull out in front of us.
Once we believe we’re easier to see, it’s likely we’ll start relying on those lights to keep us out of trouble. And then we’re more likely to be caught totally cold when the driver DOES pull out, all our lights notwithstanding.
So it would be really useful to know if additional lights worked.
Anecdotally, many riders report that fewer drivers pull out in front of them when using lights or wearing hi-vis. Unfortunately, it’s likely our perceptions are skewed because we’re no objective observers – when we want to see if the lights make a difference we’ll actually pay far more attention to what drivers do than we previously did. In the past, the incidents we’ll have noticed will have been the drivers who DIDN’T see us and pulled out, and not the far more numerous drivers who DID see us. So once we start looking to count ‘drivers who don’t pull out’, we’ll start noticing this far more numerous group than we had done previously.
What about safety studies? Some early studies purport to show riders using lights or hi-vis are involved in fewer accidents, but they are not ‘blind’ studies. They don’t send out random groups of riders who either have or don’t have lights fitted and switched on, but simply look at crashes. If riders who ride with lights on have fewer crashes, it’s entirely likely that the riders using day riding lights were aware of the conspicuity problem and thus more likely to have changed their riding style subtly and unconsciously to compensate for the risk.
So let me go back to a classic piece of work in the USA years ago in 1974 by a chap called Leonard. It was at the time that the debate on daytime lights was just starting. He created three different colour and lighting schemes, then compared the number of drivers who violated his right-of-way on a regular daily journey in which he alternated the use of a ‘control’ motorcycle and two ‘test’ motorcycles as follows:
• ‘Control’ – standard motorcycle with the headlight off • ‘Lights only’ – standard motorcycle with the headlight turned on • ‘Spectacular’ – motorcycle with extensive use of reflective materials, bright colours, lights
In 30 test days each riding the control motorcycle and the motorcycle with the headlight on he experienced respectively 1.9 and 1.8 violations per day, or when riding the control motorcycle and the ‘spectacular’ motorcycle 1.8 and 2.0 violations per day. In other words, the lights and the ‘spectacular’ colours made no difference.
He also tried riding a fake ‘police’ motorcycle to see what would happen. In 15 test days riding the ‘police’ motorcycle, Leonard experienced just one right-of-way violation. Make of that what you will!
[Edit – at time of writing, motorcycles in the UK had only just started to have permanently-on headlights, but it’s become more and more common. Has it made any difference to rider conspicuity? If it had, you’d expect that the proportion of junction collisions – compared with the total number of crashes – would have fallen. Updating this post at the end of 2021, I can’t see any such change in the crash stats.]
My conclusions? Our best defence is not to try to stand out from the crowd, but to ride in a way that not only accepts that drivers WILL make mistakes but to be able to DEAL with the situation WHEN, not if, it happens.
…white lights can be camouflage when everyone around is also using white lights!
I know I keep telling you about Science Of Being Seen (SOBS), and I keep mentioning my live webcasts, but there’s a reason – so many riders seem unaware just how invisible they are on the road.
Bill Robinson – who took one of my ONLINE COACHING courses earlier this month – sent me a short video clip of an incident he’d had when riding his bike. I’ve asked for permission to re-use the clip because I think it’s incredibly informative.
Pending that permission, I’ve snipped a couple of stills and I’ll be talking about the issues of night time visibility later this morning in ELEVENSES – which is, oddly enough, going out LIVE at 11am at http://www.facebook.com/survivalskills.
If you can’t catch it then, I do suggest you find a few minutes to view the section of the show either on FB or over at YouTube:
There’s a scooter in there somewhere… can you see it?
The still photos from the video will help me explain why adding more or brighter WHITE lights isn’t the answer to improving nighttime conspicuity, and why I recommend YELLOW lights not just to differentiate ourselves from other vehicles in daytime against white day running lights but also why they have been shown to be effective at night in built-up areas.
Dare to be different! Yellow headlight covers are an inexpensive way of making a motorcycle stand out in a sea of lights.
So watch ELEVENSES this morning, and then sign up for:
DECEMBER LIVE ONLINE – ‘SCIENCE OF BEING SEEN’ SOBS is a 40 minute talk about the twin issues of human visual perception and motorcycle conspicuity, why conventional hi-vis clothing and day-riding lights have proven less than successful at preventing junction collisions. Discover how to use Survival Skills ‘proactive measures’ into your own riding. WEDNESDAY, 1 DECEMBER 2021 AT 20:00 Tickets cost £5. Book at: http://thq.fyi/se/012097de78a5
As you will undoubtedly have noticed, the long nights are here again and that means many of us will be riding in twilight or even full night conditions, either out on unlit roads or under street lighting. And equally predictably, the annual forum conversations have struck up:
“The lights on my new bike aren’t as good as my old one. What do you recommend to make them brighter?”
And equally inevitably, talk turns to up-rating the main light or adding auxiliary lights.
But for some, the lights aren’t to see where we’re going rather more effectively; “I want brighter lights to be seen better”.
And that’s risky thinking.
Many years ago, I attended an early Met Police Bikesafe day. As well as the observed rides, there was some useful classroom content, including an extremely insightful and brutally no-nonsense analysis of three fatal motorcycle crashes, a part of the course they have now dropped.
Three crashes were explained to us. One involved a relatively inexperienced rider who simply tried to take a corner too fast and struck a lamp post. The second happened to a rider cautiously filtering down the outside of a queue, who was nudged off-balanced by an unexpected movement of the car he was passing – he went under the wheels of an oncoming car.
The third was the most complex and involved lights, lighting and the background.
At first sight, it was a classic ‘SMIDSY’; the bike on a priority road, a driver who didn’t see the bike pulling out from a junction to the rider’s nearside. The car stopped blocking the lane, the rider was unable to take evasive action and was killed.
What was unusual about the crash was that it was at night, and the bike was a Triumph Speed Triple, with big twin headlights. It’s the sort of bike that gut instinct would tell us should be easy to spot after dark and the idea that driver could fail to spot such a bike on a brightly lit road is totally counterintuitive to a lot of riders. Many would jump to the conclusion that: “the driver didn’t look”, or “wasn’t paying attention”, or “needs an eye-test”.
Both lights were still working after the collision so there were no faults with the lights themselves, and the street was well-lit. Too well lit, it turned out.
It was the photo taken from the driver’s perspective that suggested the likely explanation.
As the driver looked to her right, the bike was approaching against a backdrop of bright lights; other vehicles behind the bike, yes. But also illuminated shop windows and signs, illuminated bollards in the centre of the road and even the street lighting, all thanks to that curve and slope.
The police investigation appeared to suggest that either the bright twin lights on the bike appeared to belong to a car further off, or they simply blended in with the brightly lit background.
In either case, the driver never realised she was looking towards a motorcycle until it was too late, hitting the brakes and blocking the road.
So are there any answers?
The first is simple enough. Assume we WON’T be seen by each and every driver rather than the other way round. Expect to have to take evasive action and we’ll be on the alert to do just that with the absolute minimum delay. It may not prevent a collision – but at least we won’t ride into it without reacting.
The second is a little more complex. We need to make ourselves stand out. And in a sea of white lights including increasingly bright CAR lights, we need to understand that adding MORE and BRIGHTER white lights isn’t the answer. With the wrong background, it’s simply more camouflage!
My suggestion? Fit a yellow headlamp cover for night time use in a built-up area. Held on by Velcro, it’s simple enough to remove once out of town. Does it work? Well, hard to say from crash stats as so few riders use yellow lights. But there IS research evidence out there to suggest drivers find bikes sporting coloured lights easier to see.
================================= WHAT IS THE SCIENCE OF BEING SEEN? (SOBS) SOBS is an in-depth look at the ‘Sorry Mate, I Didn’t See You (SMIDSY) collision. Originally created in early 2012 for Kent Fire & Rescue as Module 3 of the pilot Biker Down course. Until 2020, most Biker Down courses across the UK used a ‘slimmed down’ version of SOBS.
SOBS has been recognised internationally. Our KFRS team was awarded a Prince Michael of Kent International Road Safety Award in 2012 and an insurance industry award in 2013. In 2018 & 2019 I took SOBS to New Zealand for the Shiny Side Up roadshow. SOBS featured on the US REVVTalks in 2020, on the RoadSafetyGB PTW safety event in 2021 and was delivered to NZ again via Zoom. SOBS has featured on the Devitt Bike Blog here:
——————————— IF YOU THINK THIS POST HIT THE SPOT Like ✔ Comment ✔ Share ✔ Follow ✔ ANSWERING THE QUESTIONS NO-ONE ELSE ASKS FIND OUT how you can get Survival Skills! visit the website at www.survivalskills.co.uk ———————————
I went on to explain that “the world we see ‘out there’… has been built entirely ‘in here’ inside our brains, and that even when we attend a stage magic show and KNOW we are going to be fooled, we still can’t spot the tricks… when it comes to riding… we have two additional problems:
the motorcyclist’s audience isn’t expecting to be tricked by the biker
the motorcyclist isn’t aware that he / she is a magician and about to fool the audience!
Ever since I started work on the Science Of Being Seen (SOBS) project, I’ve done my best to get over the various issues – the visual perception problems that all road users have when it comes to spotting motorcycles and other two-wheelers in a traffic stream, the reasons why we shouldn’t be relying on hi-vis clothing and day-riding lights, and why we must work on pro-active responses to threats near junctions.
I’ve done my best with limited resources. But here is what can be done when you want to explain those concepts and have a small but professional production facility behind you.
I can’t help but wonder whether my March post inspired this video. I’ve no complaints if it did because I have to admit that the end result is highly impressive as Ryan, the FortNine ‘Science Guy’ presents a quickfire, light-hearted and slightly-offbeat presentation which covers, in short order:
Saccades and saccadic masking – the visual ‘shutdown’ that happens when we turn our heads too quickly. We think we see a smooth-scanning colour video as we look from side to side, but in fact the brain cannot cope with the blurring images. It masks most of the visual feed takes a series of snap-shots called ‘fixations’. Small objects like motorcycles caught in the saccades are left out – masked – when the brain reassembles the snapshots into what we perceive as video. He also makes the same point I do – “the solution is simple. Slow your scan”. The saccades are smaller and we are less likely to miss a motorcycle. selective attention – “just as the brain blocks data it considers blurry, it also blocks what it considers irrelevant.”
He illustrates this by playing a couple of clever visual tricks that show how when we’re focused on one task, we miss other events happening around us. I cover the same ground when I talk about ‘inattentional blindness’ and ‘semantic meaning’.
He explains that danger or sexual signals are picked up very quickly, and that two tonnes of car is far more likely to be detected as a threat than a motorcycle. Using the horn to create a ‘threat’ that attracts attention is something I constantly recommend. About the only point on which I’m not convinced is the suggestion that wearing red creates a more threatening image and acts as an attractant. It will depend on whether that red colour actually creates a contrast against the background and is capable of being detected first of all.
Peripheral blindness – “in just 20% off the line of sight, humans lose 90% of their vision – bad news, you’re legally blind in your periphery”. Once again, it’s a point I make on SOBS and we both explain how the brain plays us a trick. It uses ‘historical information’ from snapshots – remember those fixations – grabbed as our eyes move around the scene to paint what appears to be a current, wide angle colour picture. It’s not, and vital data – like a motorcycle – can be missing.
From there he draws a rather more tenuous – but still relevant link – to collisions that happen on our own doorstep. Close to home, we all mentally switch-off and expect what usually happens – no motorcycle. He argues that in residential areas we riders have to be doubly-alert for the driver who’s relaxed because he’s nearly home.
More importantly, like SOBS, he emphasises the need for movement at intersections to attract attention when we’re likely to be in the driver’s peripheral vision. The use of our arms to creating movement may seem unconventional, but think of it in context of the rider slowing or turning – I often use arm signals to emphasise a signal when I’m about to manoeuvre in an unexpected place.
Motion camouflage and the constant bearing problem – although he doesn’t use those terms, he covers the twin phenomena of ‘motion camouflage’ and what’s known in aviation and boating circles as ‘the constant bearing problem’. “As two vehicles approach the same spot at the same speed before a collision they occupy a constant place in each other’s field of view. There’s no relative movement so YOU need to move.” That’s exactly the point I’ve made on SOBS – be PROACTIVE. Don’t wait for the driver to see the bike – change that constant bearing by changing speed.
Beam blindness – is an excellent term and better than ‘blind spots’ which we are more likely to be familiar with. It’s pretty obvious that the beams (usually known as the A pillars) either side of the windscreen create physical blind spots for all drivers, but Ryan mentions a much less well-known phenomenon – and one I only discovered whilst researching SOBS: “you know those vertical beams either side of your windshield? You don’t see anything near there. The brain gets bored easily so it eliminates stuff that’s constantly in frame.”
Ryan is making the point that the problem goes deeper that the physical blind spots. We’re not even aware that something COULD be hidden by in a blind spot. He uses our own noses as an example – we don’t see it without consciously looking for it. The brain simply wipes it from our visual image because it’s always there. Similarly, the A, B and C pillars are always there in a car, and we tend to forget them without consciously making ourselves aware of these obstructions. So we suffer ‘beam blindness’ where our brains create these mental blind spots.
And in fact, it’s worse than that – it seems that our brain also blanks out some of the VISIBLE background to either side of the pillars. In consequence, the blind area we don’t ‘see’ that’s reated by the pillars is even wider than we think.
What can we do about it? Understand the problem. “The solution, when you ride towards a vehicle at 10 or 2 [o’clock] is to know that you’re probably invisible.” And to remember that we’re also invisible if we’re approaching a vehicle that’s angled so that the driver is looking back over his / her shoulder – the B pillar between the doors will be an obstruction to vision.
Contrast blindness – “the air force has determined that contrast is the greatest factor in the visual acquisition of targets. It turns out they’re primarily concerned with not getting shot but we can take their research and flip it.” First, he makes the excellent point about knowing where your shadow is: “fighter pilots love to attack out of the sun”. That’s a tactic that has been exploited since WW1 and with the sun behind us, we’re harder to spot too. Second Ryan mentions that fighter planes are painted to blend with their background and reduce contrast. He asks – as I have done many times – why is rain gear often black? He recommends – as I do – high contrast gear when it’s raining, not on bright sunny days.
And that’s FortNine’s excellent ‘Invisibility Training for Motorcyclists’ in a nutshell.
Having watched it, doesn’t it make you wonder why it is that MOTORCYCLISTS like Ryan and myself are having to put this kind of primer together for bikers? Why is it that the hugely-funded road safety organisations still seem to be totally oblivious to the need to communicate these issues to motorcyclists? As Ryan and I have both shown in our different ways, the science is out there.
Three years ago, Duncan McKillop wrote this perceptive statement:
“Human beings refuse to believe that their eyes can be fooled yet stage magicians have been fooling people’s eyes for centuries! This is because we do not understand that the world we see ‘out there’ is in fact a construction that has been built entirely ‘in here’ inside our brain.
“The magician knows this and knows how easy it is for us to construct an incorrect model of the world in response to the way he performs his craft. People know that if they go to a night of magic that the magician is going to fool their eyes, but even with that certain knowledge the magician still manages to pull off their tricks.
“If we know we are going to be fooled and still get fooled what does that say about the link between knowledge and perceptual ability?
“In SMIDSY’s and similar collisions it’s the rider that’s taking the place of the magician and fooling their audience into thinking they are not really there.”
Duncan hits the nail on the head.
Understanding that the world ‘out there’ is a construct of our brain is absolutely essential, as is understanding that we need to KNOW we can be fooled.
Unfortunately, when it comes to riding and to SMIDSY-style collisions between cars and bikes, we have two additional problems:
our car-driving audience isn’t aware that they can be tricked by the biker!
the motorcyclist isn’t aware that he / she is a magician and about to fool the audience of drivers!
And that’s why I have spent a lot of time working on my Science of Being Seen (SOBS) project here and over on my www.facebook.com/survivalskills page. It’s time for riders across the world to learn how the magic works!
Kevin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
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.
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.
One of the factors implicated in car / powered two wheeler collisions is that we see what we’re expecting to see – the less frequently we encounter a particular type of vehicle, the more likely that type is to ‘fall off the search radar’. The mere fact that motorcycles are less common than cars on the roads actually makes it harder for drivers to notice them, according to Vanessa Beanland of The Australian National University.
“I didn’t see it, because I wasn’t expecting it there” is an issue I’ve been aware of for some time. There are the insurance stories of drivers who turned into the wrong driveway and “hit a tree that isn’t there”. They may be anecdotal but they illustrate the point that we all tend to see what we expect to see.
So whether this really is the first research team that has actually “published results on how it influences people’s ability to safely perform dynamic tasks, such as driving” as claimed, I don’t know but it certainly highlights something motorcyclists SHOULD be aware of.
It’s an important piece of work on the topic of motorcycle conspicuity because the interesting thing is that they not only show that a small, hard-to-spot object like a motorcycle can be missed by drivers, the paper shows that it’s not just size that matters – road users also take longer to spot something as big as a bus if it’s not something that they see frequently.
This is called the ‘low-prevalence effect’ and it increases the likelihood of collisions as well as degrading a person’s ability to search through static images, such as workers screening airport luggage or biological samples for cell anomalies.
Beanland’s team used a driving simulator experiment involving 40 adult drivers to investigate whether it is easier for drivers to detect and respond to specific types of vehicles when they occur more frequently in surrounding traffic.
The drivers had to detect two types of vehicles: motorcycles and buses.
The researchers varied how frequently these vehicles appeared. Half of the subjects were subjected to a high prevalence of motorcycles and a low number of buses, with the other half experiencing the reverse.
Although participants were explicitly instructed to search for both buses and motorcycles, the researchers found that the attention of the observers was biased toward whichever vehicle occurred more frequently during the simulated detection drive.
This in turn affected the speed at which drivers were able to detect low-prevalence targets. Even an object the size of a bus took longer to spot when they didn’t appear often.
In the simulated test in which motorcycles occurred more frequently, the car drivers were able to detect them on average from 51 meters farther away than in the tests where they occurred less often. In effect, at a driving speed of 60 km/h, this allowed the drivers an extra 3 seconds to respond.
And here’s the really surprising result. Drivers gained an extra 4.4 seconds to react to buses in the simulations where they occurred more frequently.
This is likely to be linked to what’s known as the ‘priming effect’. A ‘seed’ event or image will trigger associative memories relevant to that event or image, speed up retrieval of appropriate responses from memory, and make the processing of that response quicker. A very simple example is how it takes a moment to react to the first motorcycle when we see a group out riding, but when the second, third and subsequent bikes appear, we’re ready for them.
The results suggest that drivers’ inability to always notice motorcyclists is partially due to the fact that motorcycles occur relatively rarely on our roads, and that drivers are simply not on the look-out for them.
“Drivers have more difficulty detecting vehicles and hazards that are rare, compared to objects that they see frequently”, says Beanland, who believes that the ability to accurately perform visual searches is crucial to ensuring safe driving and avoiding collisions.
Unfortunately, training drivers to look for bikes isn’t the answer – there have been education programmes exhorting drivers to ‘Think Bike’ since the mid-1970s! They have limited effect because most of the time, there isn’t a motorcycle in the driver’s field of view that has the potential to be missed in the first place. So such programmes may have some short term effects, but as drivers continue NOT to encounter bikes, the advice to ‘look twice’ or ‘look harder’ is forgotten…
…right up to the moment that the driver DOES miss spotting a bike in traffic.
That being the case, it’s difficult to see how to get drivers to spot motorcycles more effectively, other than by increasing the numbers of bikes on the road, a proposal that has been eagerly put forward by the Motorcycle Industry Association here in the UK.
More realistically, the solution is – much as motorcyclists hate to admit it – down to us. It takes two to tangle; the driver may create the circumstances in which a collision can happen but we should be able to see it coming and stay out of it too.
Reference: Beanland, V. et al. (2014) Safety in numbers: Target prevalence affects the detection of vehicles during simulated driving, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. DOI 10.3758/s13414-013-0603-1
Science Of Being Seen 