It’s almost thirty years since I trained up as a CBT instructor. As part of the second ‘classroom’ session – officially known as ‘Element D: on-road preparation’ – we had to attempt to prepare our novice riders to cope with the on-road element…
…all in about 30 to 40 minutes.
One issue we had to cover was to explain that motorcyclists run a significant risk of not being seen by other road users. The ‘looked but failed to see’ error is so common it has its own abbreviation in research literature (LBFTS). I’m sure it’s old hat to regular readers of my pages, but for a new riders it can be hard to comprehend.
The original ‘Think Bike’ film
So what was the DVSA’s guidance to us instructors? ? Essentially, we were supposed to tell trainees that they were to make themselves easier to be seen; we had to explain the use of conspicuity aids, the differences between daytime fluorescent clothing and night-time reflective kit, and why they should use dipped (low beam) headlights in day time (day-riding lights).
It all began with the first ‘Ride Bright’ campaigns in London in the mid-70s. Many riders voluntarily adopted hi-vis clothing – I was one. Most turned their lights on too – me included when I graduated to a bike with a decent alternator. In fact, motorcycles have had their headlights wired permanently on for over fifteen years.
Just one problem. There is no evidence of positive results.
Drivers turning at junctions still look, then fail to spot an approaching motorcycle. And the ‘Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You’ collision with another vehicle at an intersection remains the most common crash involving a motorcyclist. The photo is clipped from the mid-70s ‘Think Once, Think Twice, Think BIKE!’ public information film, incidentally.
Why?
Here’s my guess. There’s an unintentional subtext to all the ‘Think Bike’ campaigns that we have been having since the mid 1970s. In telling new riders to “make yourself easier to see”, the subtext is this – when we encounter another vehicle at a junction ‘the other fellow’ is RESPONSIBLE for LOOKING FOR US.
And if they don’t see us and a collision occurs?
Then they ARE NOT DOING THEIR job – they must be incompetent or inattentive.
Worse, thanks to the ‘make yourself conspicuous’ messaging, riders come to believe that if they use conspicuity aids, they WILL be seen. Believing that, they don’t pay attention to the potential crash that’s being set up for them. Then when a driver commits the ‘looked but failed to see’ error and turns into the path of the approaching motorcycle, the rider sees what’s happening too late and is caught by SURPRISE! And thus riders fail to get out of collisions that could have been avoidable if only the rider had sounded the horn, then braked or swerved, promptly.
“The driver should have seen me” is all too common as a post-crash refrain.
As I’ve been saying for more than two decades – based on my own decade and a half of dodging vans and taxis in London – telling the driver to look out for bikers is only one-half of the story; far more often than not, the rider sees the turning vehicle – or at least the point at which it will appear – well BEFORE the collision becomes inevitable.
It’s this awareness of the need to search out the potential for a SMIDSY collision before it happens, and to understand what to do to stay out of trouble is what underpins the ‘No Surprise? No Accident!’ concept.
That’s why back in 2012 I delivered the very first Science Of Being Seen (SOBS) presentation at the pilot Biker Down course in Kent. Rather than say “wear hi-vis and ride with your lights on so drivers see you”, SOBS took a rather different look at conspicuity aids – explaining why sometimes they DON’T work:
:: looked but COULD NOT see – the bike wasn’t where the driver was able to see it (accounts for around 1 in 5 collisions) :: looked but FAILED TO see – the bike was visible but due to issues such as motion camouflage, saccadic masking and ineffective conspicuity strategies, the driver failed to detect it (the cause of around 1 in 3 collisions) :: looked, SAW AND MISJUDGED – the bike was visible but drivers find it hard to accurately calculate ‘time to collision’ particularly on quicker roads (setting up another 1 in 3 collisions)
When we know WHY the collisions happen (and incidentally, distracted driving accounts for less than one in ten of the total, using a mobile at the wheel is about as likely to cause a SMIDSY as a medical emergency at the wheel), we can suggest some defensive measures.
The first is simple enough – ride where we can be seen, and be alert to moments we CANNOT be seen. We need to be aware of the effect of ‘Vision Blockers’ between our position and someone looking for us and to understand the driver blind spot issues caused by the vehicle structure itself. If we can’t be seen, no conspicuity aid will work.
Then and only then should we consider improved conspicuity strategies – I have suggested swapping Saturn yellow (the most common shade of hi-vis but a colour that’s a poor contrast with foliage in rural areas) with Pink for rural daytime use.
And finally I promote the use of proactive responses to a POTENTIAL threat from a vehicle that COULD be about to turn across the rider’s path including sounding the horn, slowing down, changing position and setting up the brakes. It’s not difficult – after all, there are only two things that a vehicle intending to turn into our path can do – wait till we’ve passed by. Or pull out.
So has this ‘protect yourself’ approach filtered down to other road safety campaigns?
Well, there are finally signs that just possibly it has. Back at the beginning of the month, Warwickshire Police announced their usual enforcement campaign, but also mention a new ‘Ride Craft Hub’ which:
“…will help riders identify a SMIDSY situation and protect themselves”.
And last week whilst searching for something else, I found that a couple of years back I’d reported on a story from Tasmania that shows another small but significant indication that the official attitude to rider training is slowly beginning to change.
Stating that the rate of motorcycle accidents in Tasmania had become too high, Infrastructure minister Rene Hidding said that initially the state rolled out more mandatory training “just as had been done in so many other places”.
But Ms Hidding continued:
”It became obvious that people in the industry knew [the process] was wrong.”
A Victoria-based trainer, Duncan McRae, was called in to create a new curriculum which he said was “built around educating riders about those five common crash types that we see most often”.
Does that sound like something you might have heard here?
So, small beginnings, but I believe we’re seeing indications of a shift towards the ‘No Surprise’ approach to riding.
I’m not saying we should stop telling drivers to ‘Think Bike’ as some seem to have assumed, but we should certainly start encouraging a ‘Biker THINK!’ mindset.
I do apologise if I seem to be banging the same drum, but until riders really do accept that SMIDSYs aren’t an automatic consequence of riding a bike, someone has to. And I’ll see what I can dig up on the background to the Tasmanian curriculum change. Watch out for that soon.
*** SCIENCE OF BEING SEEN *** Moving from ‘Think Bike’ to ‘Biker THINK!’ Ten days ago on my Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/survivalskills, I posted an article about the lack of imagination in Police Scotland’s response to motorcycle crashes – basically, it was more enforcement. At the same time, what caught my eye was the goal that the Scottish ‘Road Safety Framework’ is aiming for is a 30% reduction in motorcyclist KSIs by 2030.
Suggesting that some new ideas were needed, I promptly got a response from an accident claims firm in Scotland telling me about their campaign aimed at drivers called ‘Take Another Look’:
“We are calling for a new campaign to ‘#takeanotherlook’ at junctions…”
On the face of it, that seems like a good idea. Nationwide data from the Department for Transport shows that in 2021, intersections – whether they are T, Y or staggered junctions – are the most common locations of motorcyclist casualties. Collisions at junctions represent no less than 34.7% of combined fatalities and injuries – one-in-three.
The ‘Take Another Look’ people offer an answer as they say their ‘new’ campaign is “…echoing the ‘Think Bike’ initiative of the 1970s that was aimed at increasing motorists’ awareness of motorcycles and reducing accidents caused by failure to spot them in time.”
Just one problem. Whilst calling for a 30% drop in motorcycle casualties by 2030, that same Scottish Road Safety Framework document made this telling statement:
“With regards to longer-term trend of motorcycle fatalities since 1994, there have been many peaks and troughs, and we are still in the same position we were in thirty years ago.”
On the one hand, we have a freshly-minted safety campaign simply repeating what we have been trying for the last fifty.
On the other, we have a statement of fact telling us that thirty years of Scottish motorcycle safety campaigns haven’t changed anything in thirty years.
Shouldn’t that be telling us something? Why are we expecting something that hasn’t worked for half a century to suddenly start working now?
Even if the people putting these campaigns together can’t see it, can’t we motorcyclists see that it’s time to move on from expecting drivers to keep us safe by ‘Thinking Bike’? Isn’t it time to adopt a fresh approach where we learn more about just why drivers don’t see motorcycles, to adopt a proactive approach where we stop relying on others, and crucially to learn to look for ways to avoid being caught up in what needn’t actually be a collision?
Biker, THINK!
================================= WHAT IS SCIENCE OF BEING SEEN? (SOBS) SOBS is my in-depth investigation into the ‘Sorry Mate, I Didn’t See You (SMIDSY) collision between motorcycles and other vehicles. Created for the fire services ‘Biker Down’ course, it’s based on science, not speculation. I aim to quash some persistent myths about how and why junction collisions happen, and show how motorcyclists can employ simple techniques to stay out of trouble! FIND OUT MORE – http://www.scienceofbeingseen.org BUY THE SOBS e-book – https://ko-fi.com/s/88fbc15a82 WATCH OUT FOR LIVE ONLINE TALKS
I was recently sent a screenshot from a video which included the expression “science of why we’re not seen on the road as motorcyclists”. It was shown on YouTube and featured an interview with Steve Reed of Biker Down North America at the Toronto Motorcycle Show earlier this month.
You’re probably aware if you’re a regular on my pages that I created a presentation called ‘Science Of Being Seen’ (SOBS) as a module of the award-winning ‘Biker Down’ course originally pioneered by Kent Fire and Rescue Service (KFRS).
As Biker Down was picked up nationwide, I made the background information my presentation was based on freely available to all fire services to use, requiring only a simple attribution to myself as the creator of the work. And I personally delivered the SOBS presentation until lockdown in 2020. Then in 2021, I was told that that SOBS was no longer going to be used and that it would be replaced by a brand-new ‘Thinking Biker’ video to be created in Canada. At the same time my personal connection with KFRS was to severed.
Since I was never officially connected with KFRS, the fact is I retain copyright on the Science Of Being Seen presentation and I continue to research the topic and deliver talks online and in person to motorcycle groups today.
So, as you might expect, I watched the video with interest to see the context in which that form of words was used.
Steve starts off by explaining how Biker Down came about:
“Biker Down was started over 10 years ago in the UK by UK Fire and Rescue and the premise was pretty simple… often times motorcyclists are riding together in groups or we’re riding the same great roads and so it’s sort of a natural thing that often times the first person upon a scene of a motorcycle accident could be a fellow rider. And so the the founder of Biker Down UK Jim Sanderson sort of had an epiphany moment when he was riding with a group and he came to decide that hey what we do actually isn’t that difficult we could teach it to the average rider and so that was sort of the genesis for Biker Down.”
Well, not quite.
This is going to be a very long post which I doubt that many people will be that interested in but I think it’s important to document exactly how the Biker Down course came into being, just what my connection with the course actually was, my involvement with Steve Reed and Thinking Biker, as well as how my time with Biker Down came to an abrupt end.
It true that it all started in 2011. It’s true that Jim Sanderson came up with the idea for Biker Down. Jim is a firefighter at Kent Fire and Rescue Service (KFRS) and he was out on a group ride when a rider came off on a fast dual carriageway. He had to go into professional mode to control the accident scene to protect the downed biker, and to organise emergency services to attend. He realised that he was the only one there that had much idea what to do. It’s also true that he realised that what he was doing wasn’t actually “that difficult” and that he could teach those crash management skills “to the average rider”.
So Jim set to and put together that accident scene management module. For the second module, covering emergency first aid, Jim enlisted the fire service’s in-house paramedics. Along with advice on emergency first aid, they also brought in the then-revolutionary idea that two people working together and using the correct technique could safely remove the helmet of an unconscious rider in order to clear the airway to assist with breathing, and also in the case that CPR was needed.
So far, so good.
But Jim also realised that to ‘sell’ the new safety intervention to the higher-ups at KFRS, a crash PREVENTION module would also be needed. And that’s where I got involved.
Jim and I had been knocking ideas back and forth across the internet for a couple of years by this point, discussing various safety issues such as the ‘Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You’ SMIDSY collision and group riding crashes. As he used to say later when introducing me at Biker Down events in Kent; “we didn’t always agree but when we didn’t and discussed it the bugger always seemed to be right”. Suffice to say, I changed Jim’s mind on several aspects of crashing!
So Jim messaged me about his planned course, and we had a back-and-forth discussion about what might work for this crash prevention module. I came up with several ideas.
With my suggestions in hand, Jim put the outline concept of Biker Down to his bosses and got permission to run three pilot courses on site at Ashford Fire Station, just so long as it was in his own time and run entirely by volunteers.
The first of the courses was delivered to members from the bike forum where we’d met. It was in the autumn, and as they were keen on group rides, I developed and delivered a talk on group riding techniques for them.
The very first Biker Down course
It included a demo of what often goes wrong on a group ride as the leader speeds up and everyone behind races to catch up. I used a piece of elastic, with cut-out cardboard bikes on it, stretched it out to represent the increase in speed, then let one end go – all the ‘bikes’ crashed into each other. I also got the attendees walking around the room to see how two different ‘marking systems’ worked – the ‘leapfrog’ (where a marker sits tight as everyone in the group goes past, until the backmarker arrives) and the ‘caterpillar’ system I learned on my training with the National Motorcycle Escort Group (where each rider waits only for the bike behind, whereupon they swap places).
Feedback was good enough to go ahead with the second pilot a few weeks later.
A still from the original ‘Think once, think twice, THINK BIKE’ public information film
This time, I delivered a very different presentation – it was all about the reasons for collisions involving motorcycles and drivers at junctions (intersections). The key point was that rather than say “drivers don’t look properly”, I explained that almost all drivers DO look, but all too frequently, they fail to see the motorcycle. There’s a difference. I explained issues such as motion camouflage and looming, peripheral blindness and saccadic masking.
I also discussed the lack of practical evidence for any positive effect from day-riding lights and hi-vis clothing – there’s been no obvious reduction in the proportion of collisions happening at junctions. I pointed to research from the 70s that found that a dipped headlight made for a poor daytime light because the beam is focused below eye level of anyone looking at it, so a more diffuse light source was needed. And I also made the suggestion that it was likely that in daytime conditions in a rural environment, the best-contrasting colour for hi-vis was likely to be pink!
Jim was happier with this presentation and decided to adopt it for the third pilot, which ran a few weeks after the second. I gave it a few more tweaks, and when Biker Down was properly launched in the spring of 2012, it was this talk which was included.
It quickly became known as the ‘Science Of Being Seen’, and usually concluded the three-hour course. Jim got some funding from the road safety account too, for publicity, expenses for volunteers, and also to provide free first aid kits to attendees.
Kevin trainer and SOBS – Jim firefighter and crash scene management – Andy first responder and first aid
Jim had always wanted Biker Down to be ‘open access’ enabling any FRS in the UK to roll out the course, and by March, he’d created a Biker Down UK Facebook page to put the word out about what we were doing in Kent. I don’t know how many Biker Down courses we delivered at Ashford that year, but at one point, we were running one every couple of weeks and as well as the interest from bikers, it wasn’t long before other Fire and Rescue Services (FRSs) were sending representatives to see what it was all about.
Later in 2012, Biker Down was nominated for a Prince Michael of Kent International Road Safety Award. At the end of the year, we all made the trip to the Savoy in London for the awards ceremony, and we were very pleased to be one of the winners in the motorcycle category.
At the Savoy for the Prince Michael of Kent award ceremony
There was just one slight hitch – my status and connection with the fire service.
In-house fire service rules prohibit any activities that might seem to be promoting a commercial business. Since I run Survival Skills with an eye to eating and paying my bills, it might reasonably have been argued that even though I was giving my time for free, my relationship with KFRS was in violation of those rules.
Almost certainly because of that, there was a suggestion to bring me ‘on board’ by becoming an official volunteer, but I quickly realised that there was a big issue for me to consider. By becoming a volunteer my SOBS presentation would likely end up becoming the property of KFRS. I’d actually be handing over the rights to the talk. Not only could I potentially lose control over the content, but all I would be getting in return for my hundreds of hours of personal research would be expenses for attending and delivering the talk.
I mulled it over, and decided I needed to retain rights over my ‘intellectual property’ by not signing up as an official volunteer and thus continuing to provide the talk and my time for free. All my time was given gratis, free and for nothing. The only income I ever received was from selling books to attendees.
In the event, nothing more was said so I guess an official ‘blind eye’ was turned my way. Looking back, the only hint that there might have been an issue was that Jim created his OWN version of Science Of Being Seen for the ‘open access’ pack that he produced to be handed out to other FRSs. He said it was ‘dumbed down’ to allow any firefighter to deliver it. Retrospectively, it may have been a move to get around the intellectual property issue.
Over the next few years, I continued delivering SOBS at Biker Down events in Kent on a monthly basis.
We also ran courses at MCN’s offices up in Peterborough, and I went with the Thames Valley team to Honda’s Bracknell headquarters to deliver SOBS there.
Yes, that is Danny John-Jules – he came along to the Honda Biker Down event
There were a couple of other events, details of which I can’t immediately recall. And in 2014, I was also invited to get involved in the KFRS ‘Ride Skills’ events at Brands Hatch too.
Back in 2012, the content of SOBS was far from universally accepted. Thanks to some searching questions – including a few hostile ones – I decided to create a more in-depth explanation of each element of the presentation with credits to the original research on which I had based each segment of SOBS.
The banner with the Science Of Being Seen website
The obvious place to put this in-depth background information was online. It can be found at www.scienceofbeingseen.org and I included the link at the end of all my presentations, thus enabling anyone to access it and research the original sources themselves if they felt the need. I’m still updating the site regularly with newly-discovered research, by the way. I also summarised the presentation in a slim paperback to enable attendees to take away a ‘aide memoire’.
And that brings us to 2020. We had time for just one Biker Down event, right at the beginning of March 2020 before we went into lockdown.
Kevin at the Rochester Road Safety Experience, March 2020
That was to be the last course I delivered for KFRS.
Now I need to backtrack to September 2018.
Jim announced that a Canadian company called Medical Data Carriers (MDC) was about to supply Biker Down with free sticky contact data cards to replace the ‘green dot’ cards that had been previously handed out with the first aid kit but were costing too much.
This is where the Steve Reed mentioned above comes into the story. It transpired that Steve was keen to set up Biker Down North America and in January 2021, Jim announced:
“Over the last 2 years I have been working closely with Steve Reed from MDC and we are now proud to hear that the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) has approved Biker Down North America.”
At this point, internal discussions about how to relaunch Biker Down were underway, and I believe it was at Jim’s suggestion that I made contact with Steve in February and asked if he was familiar with SOBS. I sent him some background to explain why SOBS was part of Biker Down, and mentioned that SOBS had also been used by the New Zealand Transport Agency and their Accident Compensation Corporation on the Shiny Side Up rider safety interventions in 2018 and 2019. On February 20, Steve responded:
“I have been thinking about how best to deliver that 3rd module” and said ” I do see the value in your SOBS content and it would be very unique here in America.” He asked if the material and content could be “tuned easily for North America”.
I replied that I didn’t see any issue with that, as the same crash mechanisms apply, just in mirror image. We swapped a few more questions and answers, and Steve requested a video of me delivering the presentation and speaker notes. I duly provided those on March 10. On May 6, Steve asked for an ‘about you’ resume and photo, which I also sent over.
It was around six weeks later, on June 25, that I discovered my SOBS module was being replaced by a new ‘Thinking Biker’ video. This would be shown to promote a new discussion session as the final module of Biker Down, and it would be adopted right across the UK. I hadn’t heard a word about this previously, and at much the same time, I got a letter from the KFRS assistant manager for buildings and works to tell me that I was no longer allowed on fire service property. It appeared both SOBS and myself had been well and truly dumped without ceremony.
I’ll admit I’m speculating but I believe this is what probably happened. Whilst things were at a stand during lockdown, seeing that well over half of the county’s FRSs were running Biker Down courses at a local level, the National Fire Chiefs Council – the top body of the fire service – decided to adopt Biker Down as a national fire service initiative. At any event, Biker Down is now a module in the re-launched Enhanced Rider Course being offered by the DVSA. But whatever the facts, I won’t go into that any further.
It didn’t take long to discover that ‘Thinking Biker’ was being made in Canada, by Steve Reed. I sent Steve a message asking if he could: “update me on ‘The Thinking Biker’ and where – IF – SOBS fits in with this?”
Back came his reply.
“My IP lawyer found that we could not publicly use SOBS title for the module because someone had a trademark that had similarities in training here in North America. With that news and considering that there are several safety messages that we want to include in the module and that we may want to add more later, a more all encompassing name was selected that we could use. We are also making his [Jim’s] module in video to reduce staff costs. I am writing script now and it is going to be in the spirit of a Fort nine video. 8-10 minutes. So no we won’t be using your presentation for this.”
I ran Google searches on the ‘science of being seen’ term and drew a blank. As far as I can see, the only references are to SOBS as part of Biker Down, to my own website work, and as a presentation being delivered by myself. I’m guessing the issue was that the term ‘science of being seen’ was associated with myself and my Survival Skills training school.
Copyright – it’s on my SOBS work
Later that year, I attended a Biker Down course for myself in West London, hoping to see the Thinking Biker video. The presenter actually delivered a badly-mangled version of SOBS. When I mentioned I was the original author of SOBS and asked why we hadn’t been shown Thinking Biker, he told me it wasn’t quite ready for use.
Some months later, a contact at another FRS did send me a copy of Thinking Biker, so naturally I watched it. What was rather a surprise was to hear the presenter say at just 30 seconds into the video:
“Today, we’re taking a deep dive into the art and SCIENCE OF BEING SEEN on motorcycles.”
My capitals, by the way. So they couldn’t CALL the video ‘Science Of Being Seen’, but they could TALK about the science of being seen. Hmm.
================================= WHAT IS SCIENCE OF BEING SEEN? (SOBS)
SOBS is my in-depth investigation into the ‘Sorry Mate, I Didn’t See You (SMIDSY) collision between motorcycles and other vehicles.
Created for the fire services ‘Biker Down’ course, it’s based on science, not speculation.
I aim to quash some persistent myths about how and why junction collisions happen, and show how motorcyclists can employ simple techniques to stay out of trouble!
So what does Thinking Biker cover? What are all the new safety messages that are included that weren’t in SOBS?
The first explanation is of foveal vision, an optical phenomenon I mention in SOBS.
Then comes the issue of saccadic masking during eye movements which shuts down the visual feed to prevent motion blur, plus the fixations which are the brief moments we actually gain visual data. That’s in SOBS. Moreover, Thinking Biker using the very same ‘vertical blinds’ metaphor I use in SOBS which I admit to having pinched myself from a very good video by the Association of British Drivers – they get a credit on the website and in the book. The only difference with the Thinking Biker explanation is that it uses a short video segment rather than a still picture. Oh, and the steering wheel’s on the other side of the car and traffic on the ‘wrong’ side of the road.
Next, we get a short clip of a driver looking but failing to see a motorcycle from one of the UK’s ‘Think Bike’ videos – I’ve used stills from the exact same video.
Following that is a very clever video of a horse galloping across a prairie amongst stationary grazing cows to flag up the effect of lateral motion on detection. This is a concept I was introduced to by Malcolm Palmer, another UK instructor at the time. Years back, Malc talked about a double ‘back and forth’ movement across the lane he called the ‘Z Line’ and proposed it would attract attention. I always credited Malc for that element of SOBS. But if an object is rapidly approaching against a static point background…” – as you probably guessed, it’s the concept of motion camouflage. I use a video clip of a Spitfire flying straight at the camera and being almost impossible to spot until it’s almost on top of the camera.
We’re then told that a driver devotes about 0.5 second to scanning an intersection; a figure that just happens to be in the SOBS presentation.
And then there’s a mention of visual obstructions caused by the windscreen pillars and blocked lines-of-sight because the motorcycle is behind another vehicle. Guess what? SOBS covers that too, using the ‘beam blindness’ term I picked up in a FortNine video.
What follows next is a rather confused segment where the presenter appears to recommend hi-vis in what they call ‘Neon green’ – we call it ‘Saturn yellow’. The argument is that this works because “humans are most sensitive to light at a wavelength of 555 nanometers”. That IS fresh info but having talked about the value of ‘Neon green’ as a hi-vis colour, the video actually shows a rider wearing a mixed yellow / orange sleeveless vest! It’s also very hard to see she is actually wearing hi-vis from the three-quarter ahead angle the video clip is filmed from – that’s the very reason I recommend hi-vis with sleeves, something that doesn’t get a mention.
Next item. “While Neon green may stand out against dull concrete jungles, it might blend in nicely in lush green environments.” Ah, right back to the SOBS script.
I’ve been using this wonderful photo to illustrate the relationship between foreground and background colours, and conspicuity.
However, for some reason, the production team decided that using a photo of cannabis leaves was the right image for their ‘lush green environment’. Oh dear.
“As thinking bikers, we need to have multiple strategies at hand”. Our presenter is now shown holding an orange hi-vis in one hand, and a pink one in the other.
Pink with sleeves – as recommended by SOBS
As far as I am aware, SOBS on Biker Down was first safety intervention to suggest that pink hi-vis is probably the most conspicuous in a rural environment – it’s less the sensitivity of the eye that matters, much more the contrast between the hi-vis and the background colours. As the humble colourwheel used for picking paint combos for home decorating shows, the colour that contrasts most strongly with yellow / green foliage is pink.
There’s one more element still to come – camouflage. And the example just happens to be the very same one that I use for SOBS – the tiger. Even though the tiger is hi-vis orange, the stripes disrupt the silhouette of the animal and help it to blend in with the environment. “If you use the right colour then use patterns to confuse the eye, you’re practically invisible”. Exactly as SOBS explains.
The tiger graphic from my SOBS presentations
Dazzle camouflage – also using an illustration that I’ve used myself – is also mentioned, but in a confusing segment that suggests that it means that “big blocks of contrasting colour make you stand out” rather than break up your outline. Unfortunately, once again, the presenter is wearing a sleeveless, two-colour vest. That’s very much the opposite of what SOBS suggests. Sticking to a single colour, even when it’s black, presents a coherent silhouette in a way that stripy, multi-colour vests don’t.
Struggling to see any new safety messages, I am reasonably certain that an impartial observer would also see that Thinking Biker covers much of the same ground as SOBS.
Since Thinking Biker largely parallels SOBS, I would say that it offers reasonably accurate information but there are some buts.
For starters, it’s not so logically ordered. I put a lot of thought into how to construct the talk so that ideas flow.
Second, Thinking Biker gets delivered in seven minutes. In such a short time there’s nothing like the depth of explanation I achieve with my presentations.
Third, there is that clear misunderstanding of the role of dazzle camouflage.
Fourth, there is the issue of discussing ‘Neon green’ whilst showing a very different dual-colour vest in the clip. SOBS talks about the role of a single colour – ANY colour – in creating the recognisable silhouette of bike and rider.
Fifth – and here my advice in SOBS diverges completely from Thinking Biker – there’s no mention of full sleeved hi-vis, only vests. It’s ironic that the video clip used to show the hi-vis vest in action amply illustrates my point – the dual-colour tabard is almost invisible from the chosen camera angle because most of it is obscured by the bike’s screen and the rider’s black leather sleeves. SOBS actively promotes the choice of a full-sleeved hi-vis jacket and emphasises the role of the rider’s arms in enhancing conspicuity.
Sixth – what’s missing? There’s nothing the issue of ‘saw, looked and misjudged speed and distance’. There’s nothing about day-riding lights or night-time conspicuity.
And seventh and pretty crucially in my opinion, there’s no mention of the need for a genuinely proactive approach to riding defensively. The biggest weakness of conspicuity aids is that they are entirely ‘passive protection’ and rely 100% on the driver of the other vehicle taking notice of the rider’s hi-vis and DRLs.
I use the final element of SOBS to emphasise the importance of taking proactive steps; changing position to ‘see and be seen’, applying the Australian technique of ‘setting up the brakes’ to reduce reaction times, the use of the horn as a warning when we think a driver might be about to move into our path, the surprising effect of reduce speed to cut stopping distances (halve speed, and stopping distance drops to one quarter), and the need to practice swerves and hard stops to keep them fresh.
Taking SOBS online to New Zealand audiences for Shiny Side up in Feb 2021
And then we roll to the end, and to the credits. We see: “Producer and writer – Steve Reed” then “Producer and writer – Jim Sanderson”.
Not a mention of my delivery of SOBS for the third module of Biker Down, no mention of me sending an annotated copy of the SOBS presentation plus background information to Steve, and no hint that the SOBS presentation might have been any kind of inspiration for the content of Thinking Biker.
Let’s return to the interview with Steve Reed at the Toronto Motorcycle show earlier this month. Steve says:
“Fast forward 10 years later, the UK has seen their motorcycle fatalities reduce by 30%. We like to attribute a lot of that to Biker Down and some other great programs there.”
A 30% reduction in motorcycle fatalities since Biker Down started? That’s a claim that I cannot see supported with any crash statistics I am aware of over the period from 2012 to 2022. Exclude the COVID year of 2020 when motorcycle and car use was down significantly on a normal year and crashes were down, the best you can say is that the figure has flat-lined.
And then he moves on to talk about the three modules. About the third module, Steve says that it is:
“…little bit of a proactive segment so in that we’re teaching a little bit of the science of why we’re not seen on the road as motorcyclists.”
Science of Why We’re Not Seen? Hmm.
He continues:
“So we’re talking about saccadic masking and looming and some other sciency stuff that really will make sense to us as motorcycle riders but also as car drivers to be better and more aware of our surroundings and especially motorcycle riders and some of the other things we touch upon in there is also conspicuity strategy so what should I be wearing in the urban environment what should I maybe be wearing when I’m outside of the urban environment and really helping people be prepared in that respect.”
I’ve seen comments to the effect that I don’t ‘own’ the science. That’s true, and I have never claimed to. One of the reasons for producing the SOBS website was to ensure that the authors of the original research WERE credited, something I never have time to do during the live presentation.
Nor did I perform the original research. I certainly didn’t discover motion camouflage or the phenomenon of looming, I don’t claim any discovery of saccadic masking, nor was I the first to suggest dazzle camouflage – though I did manage to describe it correctly.
What I believe was unique about SOBS back in 2012 was that for the very first time all the disparate elements behind the ‘Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You’ SMIDSY crash were brought together:
SOBS brought in the three mechanisms that cause collisions at junctions; looked and COULD NOT see, looked but FAILED to see, looked, saw but MISJUDGED speed and distance.
SOBS looked at how the structure of the vehicle and roadside obstacles obscured views for drivers and made motorcycles difficult to see.
SOBS introduced riders to the science of visual perception in order to explain just how and why drivers can look but fail to see motorcycles at intersections or misjudge their speed and distance.
SOBS looked at the science behind conspicuity aids to explain their strengths and weaknesses, and why riders should not assume that their use will ensure they are seen.
SOBS made a big point of emphasising the crucial role to be played by a genuinely proactive approach to identifying the threat, assessing the risk and proactively managing those risks.
By pulling these threads together, SOBS was able to tell a coherent story about the SMIDSY to motorcyclists for the first time.
The business card with the essentials of SOBS given to Biker Down attendees by me
It IS possible that Steve Reed employed people to perform a literature survey of the research into the SMIDSY collision, which duly came up with more or less the exact-same conclusions I had previous reached. After all, the background science is unchanged.
So I leave you to draw your own conclusions about Thinking Biker and where the source material most likely came from.
I mentioned intellectual copyright. Had the idea for the Science Of Being Seen come from inside KFRS, and had I developed SOBS under their instruction, then I think it almost certain that my contributions to Biker Down would been legitimately regarded as the property of KFRS. In that case, KFRS could have passed that information on to Steve Reed.
But the facts are these; I was asked to develop a suitable module for Biker Down and went on to create SOBS from scratch. As I’ve also pointed out, SOBS was the second presentation created. I’d argue this means I was in the role of an outside ‘consultant’ being brought in to develop and deliver a suitable course, and since the choice of content was left to me, I would argue the concept and content of SOBS remains my intellectual property.
Having said that, the intent was always to share the fruits of my research freely to ALL motorcyclists to help improve understanding of the SMIDSY crash, just as I have done for years via my posts on forums and on Facebook. For that reason, the SOBS website and all the content in it is provided under a Creative Commons Licence. The sole requirement is that anyone using my research in their own work attributes it to me.
I neither asked for, nor took, a penny from KFRS or any of the FRSs for developing the presentation or for my time spent delivering it. Nor did I ask for payment from Biker Down North America when recording and annotating the video for them. I placed one and only one condition on using the content of SOBS, whether by the UK FRSs or by Biker Down North America – if my information was used, I asked to be credited with the original idea for the presentation.
That’s all I requested, and I know that many of the UK FRSs delivering SOBS as part of Biker Down have scrupulously referenced my contribution at the end of their own presentations. The credit requested is conspicuous by its absence.
This isn’t ‘sour grapes’. I will always be thankful to Jim for that initial invite to become involved, even if the parting of the ways in 2021 could have been handled with more sensitivity. I’m very proud of what Biker Down has achieved, both in terms of the awards and developing from a local rider safety initiative to something that’s been recognised as of national significance. And I’m still happy to support Biker Down whenever I can – I will still talk up the course and I have stickers in the car and on the bike.
But I am left with a degree of frustration about what has happened subsequently, after after I sent Steve Reed the SOBS video, transcript and speaker notes in good faith, and how my input appears to being written out of the official story.
The most recent SOBS graphic
Anyway, done is done, and I will leave it at that, having explained my perspective. Thanks for reading, and I hope you know have a better understanding of the relationship between myself, KFRS and Biker Down, and the new ‘Thinking Biker’ video.
================================ PLEASE SUPPORT ‘SCIENCE OF BEING SEEN’
The ‘Science Of Being Seen’ project (SOBS) is FUNDED ENTIRELY BY MYSELF and I need YOUR SUPPORT to continue my research.
The SOBS project is FREELY AVAILABLE to all motorcyclists and aims to help improve our understanding of the ‘Sorry Mate, I Didn’t See You’ SMIDSY collision.
*** SCIENCE OF BEING SEEN *** Is the retinal blind spot a problem? Each of our eyes has a blind spot. This is where, as I’m sure most of you will know, visual information is not detected. These blind areas are due to lack of the specialised photoreceptor rods and cones responsible for capturing light and transmitting visual signals to the brain. The optic nerve carries visual information from the eye to the brain, and the blind spot is caused by the optic nerve’s attachment to the retina where it exits the eye.
The retinal blind spot is a natural feature of the human visual system and covers somewhere between 15 and 20 degrees of our vision in each eye. The diagram shows the approximate location of the blind spot in a healthy left eye. The right eye would be a mirror image.
Recently, I’ve seen a number of articles suggesting that the blind spot is a factor in ‘looked but failed to see’ crashes – or at least, one of the reasons.
One article claimed that cars could go missing in the driver’s retinal blind spot, another suggested that drivers would fail to spot cycles as they approach a junction where the driver is about to turn:
“This blind spot can automatically create problems when driving. If you are not looking and actually moving your head when at junctions for example, you stand the risk of not seeing a narrow object such as a cyclist, because they could be in your blind spot, or even something larger at times.”
The article went on to suggest that “the brain makes up, or fills in what it believes to be there!”
And of course, motorcyclists have read these articles and started reporting on the internet that the retinal blind spots is to blame for collisions where drivers don’t spot motorcycles.
So is the retinal blind spot really a problem?
Almost certainly not. It’s pretty obvious that we don’t have a pair of gaping holes in our visual field, and until we actually try to find them we’re not actually conscious of the presence of the retinal blind spots.
That’s because unless we have lost the sight in one eye, we have binocular vision. That is, the field of vision of each eye overlaps. That means anything in the blind spot of one eye is always going to be within the visual field of the other eye.
As part of the normal processing of visual data, the brain takes the detail and information from both eyes and interpolates – fuses – the images from both eyes into one coherent view.
This means the missing visual data created by the retinal blind spot in one eye is filled in by the brain by using visual data from the other. It’s the same reason we don’t have ‘pigeon vision’ as claimed in a recent FortNine video, and this is why we don’t see our own nose.
Similarly the retinal blind spot is simply not perceived under normal circumstances. In fact, to find the blind spot in one eye, we usually have to cover up the other.
================================= WHAT IS SCIENCE OF BEING SEEN? (SOBS) SOBS is my in-depth investigation into the ‘Sorry Mate, I Didn’t See You (SMIDSY) collision between motorcycles and other vehicles. It’s based firmly on science, not speculation and aims to quash some persistent myths about just why junction collisions happen, and show motorcyclists there are straightforward techniques we can employ to stay out of trouble! FIND OUT MORE – http://www.scienceofbeingseen.org WATCH OUT FOR LIVE ONLINE TALKS
The second point to make is that to make a detail scan of any particular area, we have to look directly at it, to bring it into the narrow cone of clearly focused, colour vision which is right in the centre of the visual field, and just 5 degrees across.
If we look along a road towards oncoming traffic, we examine the scene with our foveal vision. Even if our brain failed to perceive a motorcycle that was in the blind spot of one eye, it would be visible in the other eye since the two retinal blind spots are offset to opposite side.
And it’s even unlikely that the approaching motorcycle would be in the blind spot since, it’s offset to one side and mostly below the ‘horizon’ created by our foveal zone.
So, I’d suggest that for normally sighted people with binocular vision, the retinal blind spot is not a problem.
However, there are a number of diseases and conditions that can cause blind spots or scotomas in the eyes. These blind spots can be temporary or permanent, and they may affect a small portion of the visual field or a larger area, depending on the underlying cause. Some common conditions that can lead to blind spots include:
Glaucoma
Macular degeneration
Optic neuritis
Retinal detachment
In short, regular eye tests are essential for detecting eye problems early, even if you don’t currently have any noticeable symptoms. And should you experience any sudden or persistent vision changes, including the appearance of blind spots, you should seek immediate medical attention.
That’s far better advice than telling motorcyclists drivers don’t see them because of retinal blind spots.
IF YOU THINK THIS POST HIT THE SPOT please pay it forward to other bikers!
I’ve commented often enough on how the emergency services have done a lot of research into what’s best at transforming a visible vehicle (ie, one that is in your line of sight and capable of being seen) into a conspicuous vehicle (ie, one that stands out against the background). And if you’ve taken a ‘Biker Down’ course you may well have heard my ‘Science of Being Seen’ presentation delivered to you.
So what you’re looking at are two machines from Ambulance Victoria’s paramedic motorcycle unit in Australia. After a three year trial found motorcycle paramedics have a better response time than traditional ambulances, they’ve been added permanently to the strength.
The BMW F700GS motorcycles are specifically designed for emergency services, and come factory fitted with warning devices, better braking systems, satellite navigation, upgraded suspension, dual batteries, and wiring already in place for all communications equipment. They carry a smaller version of defibrillators, trauma kits and medications used by other paramedics.
The bikes responded to almost 3000 cases last and move through “…heavy traffic… through traffic jams to get to accident scenes quickly… and access Melbourne’s bike paths and walking tracks”.
So that’s their function and given what they do, it’s a bit of a puzzle the way these bikes are dressed up.
The multiple colours and broken patterns are a pretty good imitation of a disruptive camouflage pattern – specifically designed to make objects harder to see!
(Originally published on FB 25 March 2019, mildly edited)
What about headlight modulators?
Headlight modulators have been the subject of investigations on a number of occasions, and some US-based riders swear by them. So I was interested to be sent the link to this particular promotional video.
The video starts with a demo of the rear modulator…
…unfortunately, I didn’t even SEE it first time the video ran, which should tell you something.
I know the bike’s not going very fast, but arguably, by the time it comes on it’s too late – the bike’s already slowing. Given that the usual cause of a rear-ender is being tailgated by a vehicle that’s too close to slow down when the bike ahead decelerates, what’s needed is a ‘pre-braking’ warning, not something that comes on at the exact same moment. How you achieve that, I’m not sure.
And there’s a more serious issue. The flashing light around the index plate is actually pulling your eyes AWAY from the important signal, which is the brake light. I can conceive of a situation where the driver’s eyes are pulled down to the flashing lights and fails to react to the brake light. After all, flashing lights around the index plate are usually there for decorative purposes rather than any function.
So what about the front modulator?
You can certainly see it but it’s a bit irritating, to say the least. Can you imagine driving against a long line of bikes, all flickering away on high beam?
In any case, the result of US research seems to be that it enhances DETECTION at long distances – we’re talking hundreds of metres away. So maybe a less irritating modulator may have some benefit on the kind of fast, flat and straight roads they have in parts of the US or perhaps Australia. I can see one use being to alert drivers who might consider overtaking towards the motorcycle.
However, as an anti-SMIDSY device in urban areas, my impression is that modulators appear ineffective, and as far as I can tell from research, the modulator doesn’t appear to have any significant conspicuity benefit when the range is twenty metres or less.
Why is this distance important?
Because in an urban context it’s the crucial distance at which you MUST be seen. Collision dynamics in slower-moving, denser in-town traffic – the circumstances in which most SMIDSY-style crashes occur – clearly indicate that at the moment the the driver makes the final and crucial ‘looked but failed to see’ (LBFTS) error, the bike must be with twenty metres, and probably within a dozen metres or so.
It doesn’t actually matter if we’re spotted 500 metres away or fifty metres away – the ‘Last Chance Saloon’ for the rider is the last check the driver makes before turning into the bike’s path. Why? Two reasons. If the bike is further off when the error happens, either the emerging car will clear the bike’s path and it will be a near-miss, or the rider has sufficient space to hit the brakes hard and stop which means it’s another near-miss.
So the implication is that the bike actually has to be much closer than most riders realise before the LBFTS error will inevitably result in a collision.
What’s clear from looking at the crash stats is that neither hi-vis nor DRLs seem to have made any difference to the overall pattern of crashes, and so the ‘Sorry Mate’ collisions at junctions remain as frequent as ever, despite significant numbers of riders in hi-vis riding kit and virtually every bike in the UK now using lights in daytime.
I doubt we’d see any difference if modulators were legalised for use in the UK either.
Of course, the counter-argument is that modulators will help drivers see you further off, then they will remember you’re there, but I’m not convinced. There’s no evidence that it works for ordinary lights despite trials suggesting bikes with lights are seen at greater distances than bikes with no lights.
So, from a personal perspective, just as I don’t rely on DRLs or hi-vis clothing, I’d rather back my ability to see the driver and anticipate the error than put my faith in a modulator.
Does the way pigeons see the world explain some motorcycle crashes?
Ryan over at FortNine recently put up a video entitled ‘how pigeons explain a common motorcycle crash. The presentation says that pigeons “suck at assessing how fast a particular vehicle is closing on them”. And he points to some research that shows that in a particular speed zone, they take off at the same distance from a car no matter what the speed the car approaches at. He says that the pigeons learn the typical speed of cars in their zone. Ryan then says this is because pigeons lack ‘binocular disparity’ and the ability to judge approach speed.
What’s binocular disparity? Because we have two eyes which both offer a view of a particular object, each eye gets a slightly different flat 2-D image from the light that falls on to each retina.
Imagine a tree behind a car. The view of eye is at a slightly different angle, which means each eye will show the tree at a slightly different position relative to the car. The brain can uses these different images to extract depth information. This is binocular disparity.
Ryan then says that we can use binocular disparity “to judge how fast an object is closing on us”, and explains that this is known as ‘stereopsis’ and that “within thirty metres it’s the main method of gauging the speed of other vehicles”.
“Unless” he adds…
…”you’re a pigeon” because pigeons have their eyes on either side of their head.
And he then explains that as we’re sitting at a junction, we only have one eye turned towards the junction:
“Same handicap, see? Only one eye is looking because the other is blocked by my nose”.
He then says that this isn’t so much of a problem when tracking cars because “one eye can still track using the apparent change in size to gauge closing speed”. The problem with motorcycles is that because they are “skinny”, they “don’t show much enlargement” until the bike’s on top of the observer.
Same angle, same distances… the car appears to ‘grow’ more than the bike
This is actually the phenomenon known as looming, and it’s well-known that it is easier to judge speed and distance for cars than bikes – for some reason, our brain measures the lateral growth of a car better than the vertical growth of a bike.
OK, so that’s the basis for the video. It’s plausible-sounding, particularly as it’s well-known that the brain ‘edits out’ the fact that our nose is actually visible in both eyes but I’d say there are significant flaws in the reasoning.
PIGEONS DO HAVE BINOCULAR VISION – Despite having eyes on either side of their head, and though they may turn their heads to scan you with one eye, even for pigeons the fields of view of their two eyes do overlap. Not by much, but pigeons WILL look straight at you and when they do that they are seeing you with both eyes. See the photo.
And although I have no proof, I’d suggest they DO need good depth perception – if they didn’t, they’d never manage to land on a narrow branch. They look directly ahead of them when landing.
HUMANS HAVE A WIDE FIELD OF BINOCULAR VISION – For human vision, the overlap is around 120° – that means we have monocular vision ONLY for around 40° at each side of our field of view. Yes, the bridge of the nose occludes part of each eye’s visual field, but nothing like the extent of a pigeon.
PERIPHERAL VISION DETECTS MOVEMENT AND LIGHT – The pigeon’s eyes are on either side of its head because it’s a prey animal. The eyes give a ‘wrap-around’ field of view with only a very small blind spot directly behind its head. Humans do have a bigger blind spot, but even staring directly ahead, our eyes are sensitive to movement and lights at 90 degrees since that angle falls within our peripheral vision. And once something is detected, our instinct is to turn our head to look straight at it.
The nose restricts around 40° of our total vision either side, but when we want to ‘look’ at something we turn our heads to focus both eyes…
‘USEFUL’ AND FOCUSED VISION IS MORE RESTRICTED – Within that binocular field, the so-called ‘useful’ field of vision – the visual area from which information can be extracted in a single glance without eye or head movements – is restricted to around 10° either side of our line of sight.
Even more crucially, if we want to extract detail information, then we have to aim our gaze and use ‘foveal’ vision. This is where we get the clear, colour and focused image of the world. The bad news is that it’s a tiny cone, just 5° across at the point our gaze is focused. This is down to the construction of the human eye.
TO SEE DETAIL WE TURN OUR HEADS – It’s simply not possible to gain full situational awareness by relying entirely on the peripheral vision. If we want to look at something in detail, we have to bring it into the centre of our visual field, into our gaze. Mostly, this is a function of the anatomy of the eye; the fovea, the central portion of the retina, has the highest density of photo receptors. It’s also connected to a much larger part of the visual cortex in the brain, where the visual data is processed.
Whilst peripheral vision can provide useful information to fill out situation awareness, for a detailed study of a particular object we need to turn our eyes onto it.
So when we want to see something in detail – including the involuntary response that happens when we detect movement or light in peripheral vision – we do the same ‘eyes front’ thing that the pigeon does when it needs to land. At junctions we don’t stare straight out of the windscreen, trying to work out what’s coming from each direction via peripheral vision from both eyes simultaneously; we turn our heads to search in each direction in turn, in order to point these foveal cones of vision towards the specific area we’re searching.
Tracking, we’re keeping the bike firmly in the middle of our visual field… Image taken from ‘Look harder for bikes’ road safety video
Ryan talks about the issue of ‘tracking’ vehicles. The fact is we achieve this by looking directly at them. That implies we’ve already seen them and we’re not attempting to detect them. The difficulty of judging speed and distance occurs when we’re already looking at them.
DRIVERS TURNING INTO SIDE ROADS MISS BIKES TOO – If the pigeon vision issue really was a thing, how can we explain the fact that there are TWO collision types at junctions?
Whilst the collision with the driver who emerges from the turning on the nearside is the more common, a significant number of crashes involve an oncoming driver turning INTO the side road and across the driver’s path.
If the ‘looked but failed to see’ issue was really down to a chunk of the visual field being viewed only through one eye, these collisions shouldn’t happen – they’d be ideal circumstances for full binocular vision to detect the bike, then judge its speed to a nicety.
FAILED TO SEE ERRORS HAPPEN CLOSE UP – Ryan says that stereopsis is “the main method of gauging the speed of other vehicles… within thirty metres. I’ve no reason to argue with that, but let’s actually think about the collision dynamics.
30 mph is 13.4 metres per second. So thirty metres is something over two seconds away. Research into collisions suggests that the safe ‘cut-off’ when a rider is almost certain to avoid a collision is three seconds out from the crash – so something under fifty metres away at 30 mph. But at 60 mph, it’s getting on for one hundred metres away.
If Ryan’s figures are right, at rural road speeds the error happens well outside the limits of stereopsis. Even at urban speeds, the error in spotting the bike could happen right at the limits.
But even if the error did happen within the zone covered by stereopsis, there’s a second consideration. Even a rider who’s taken by SURPRISE! should be able to stop fairly comfortably within twenty five metres. I can – and have – stopped in about ten metres from 30 mph.
The three main reasons for collisions and junctions; the driver looked but COULD NOT see… the driver looked but FAILED to see… the driver looked, saw but MISJUDGED speed or distance…
So if the bike actually HITS the car, the error MUST have happened closer. A LOT closer. If a driver somehow fails to detect a motorcycle less than twenty five metres away, I don’t think it’s a speed / distance misjudgement (with one exception – see below). It’s far more likely the driver simply didn’t SEE the bike.
And that can happen because either the bike wasn’t VISIBLE when the driver looked (one in five of collisions) or the perception error was caused by one of the many PERCEPTUAL issues that fall under the ‘looked but failed to see’ umbrella (one in three collisions).
The bulk of ‘looked, saw but misjudged speed and distance’ errors (one in three collisions) seem to happen on faster roads where the bike is beyond the range of stereopsis, and we use the rate of change in size to judge approach speed – and now the difficulty in judging the lateral growth of a motorcycle most likely becomes crucial. The size of the machine only grows by a quarter, despite the distance halving.
(And dismiss the ‘driver didn’t look’ theory too – the proportion of collisions where the driver was distracted is tiny. If drivers genuinely ‘didn’t look’, they’d be bouncing off pedestrians, bikes, and buses – as well as other cars – every few seconds.)
OR THE RIDER WAS SPEEDING – Oddly enough, that researcher who found the pigeons scattered at the same distance from the car no matter what speed he approached at found something in common with drivers. We too gain a sense of how much time we have to turn at junctions based on the TYPICAL speed of vehicles.
So if ANY vehicle – not just a motorcycle – is travelling significantly quicker than average, that vehicle is far more likely to have a collision. It’s not the speed that caused it per se, although more speed means more difficulty stopping and a bigger impact if the rider hits something, other road users simply aren’t expecting the vehicle to be travelling at the excess speed, so don’t detect the anomaly easily and thus are more likely to turn across the rider’s path.
The horizontal line represents the speed limit, the vertical bars of the same colour represents the speed of the rider estimated by police
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that in a study of fatal bike crashes in the London area a few years ago, the majority of the deaths in the lower speed limits involved riders who were exceeding the limit. The horizontal lines in the chart represent the speed limit. The vertical bars are the estimated speeds of the riders who died.
AND DRIVERS COLLIDE WITH CARS TOO – Research from the Netherlands a few years ago looked at car-motorcycle and car-car detection errors, and adjusted the rates for EXPOSURE – that it, how many bikes and how many cars a driver would encounter in the same time frame. And what they found was that far from picking out bikes to collide with, drivers actually made the ‘looked but failed to see’ error in front of another car just as often as they made the error in front of a two-wheeler.
We always have to be a little careful about taking data from one country and exporting it to ‘fit’ our own roads and in this case the Netherlands has many more mopeds on the roads than the UK so there’s the possibility that drivers were more ‘bike-aware’. But there’s other evidence that hints that in countries where most vehicles are two-wheelers, bikers crash into bikers at much the same rate as car drivers.
We also have to remember that our own PERSONAL stories are looking through the opposite end of the lens. We may think that drivers are more likely to make a mistake in front of us on our bike than other riders, but the fact is we’ll encounter many more cars than bikes on a ride.
AND A FINAL NAIL – I didn’t even mention the fact that a substantial minority of the population have various eye issues which makes stereopsis impossible, yet manage to drive successfully.
CONCLUSION – The FortNine videos that Ryan fronts are often informative as well as entertaining to watch. But in this particular instance, I think the reasoning he uses is flawed. And hopefully I’ve explained this clearly enough that you can follow my own arguments. I’d be interested in your comments too, of course.
BUT HERE’S WHERE I DO AGREE – If there’s one bit of the video that I absolutely concur with, it’s Ryan’s comment after showing the old mid-70s ‘Think ONCE, think TWICE, think BIKE’ TV advert. I wonder where he found that?
Made in the mid-1970s, it’s still one of the best ‘think bike’ ads
He says about ‘think bike’, “he’s not wrong, but it’s not useful either. If we’re dealing with a sensory problem then imploring drivers to see better is like imploring a deaf person to listen up. I’d rather take my own responsibility…”
Spot on. Be proactive. Don’t wait to be seen. Assume you won’t be detected and ride with that in mind.
You can watch the FortNine video here:
You can find out more about the Science Of Being Seen project here:
I’m available to deliver the Science Of Being Seen (SOBS) presentation to clubs and groups around the UK IN PERSON, or anywhere in the WORLD via a WEBCAST, and at reasonable cost too.
Here’s a snippet from an article on an online motorcycle magazine site, in a series about how to avoid common crashes. Not surprisingly it’s starts with the SMIDSY collision with a vehicle turning at a junction.
This particular statement leapt out at me:
“The number of drivers who have pulled out on while I’ve been maintaining eye contact with them while wearing a clear visor is very worrying. The shock in the face of the driver is the scariest thing to me, it means that person looked to the right, made full eye contact me and still pulled out while I was sounding my horn and taking evasive action! Frightening stuff.”
Now, just think about that for a moment.
Looking our way? The best we can say is “they MIGHT see us”
The writer says that enough drivers have pulled out whilst he’s been maintaining eye contact for it to be ‘very worrying’.
Does that suggest anything to you?
Might it be that if drivers continue to pull out whilst ‘making eye contact’ than in fact they AREN’T actually seeing the bike?
And the writer has actually spotted this, but hasn’t actually realised that the ‘shock in the face of the driver’ is a big clue.
That ‘shock’ is the moment the driver actually SPOTS the bike. The shock is the result of the SURPRISE! at seeing it.
Take a bit of time to watch drivers at junctions. Watch HOW they look in our direction. You’ll often see a snap of the head . That’s the moment we’re detected. You’ll often see the driver then track us by moving his or her head.
That’s when the driver really does look at us, rather than in our direction.
I say ‘really does look at us’ because eye contact is an entirely faulty concept.
The eye’s foveal zone – the part of the visual field that gives us clear and sharply focused colour vision – is just a few degrees across. Anything out of this zone is fuzzy.
WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT SCIENCE OF BEING SEEN? catch the regular LIVE ONLINE TALK SERIES events – next dates:
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You can test this easily by holding your arm out, sticking your thumb up in the air then looking at the thumb nail. Now look at the top knuckle on your thumb. Even though it’s just a centimetre or so below your nail you MUST move your eyes and refocus.
And remember too, that the eye has a depth of field just like a camera. Think how hard it is to focus on an object if there are other things in the same direction but at a different distance. We can have the same problem with a camera, trying to focus on a small object when there are other things in front of it and behind it.
In the case of a bike, it’s entirely possible that the driver we were so busily trying to make eye contact with was actually looking at and focused on the car ten metres behind us.
So that’s another reason why trying to make eye contact is pretty much a waste of time – the driver can appear to be looking straight at us whilst focused on a car behind us. The motorcycle ahead of it never registers in the driver’s consciousness. It’s not ‘carelessness’ or ‘not looking properly’, it’s just how our eyes work.
So here’s a question for you. If the writer keeps ‘making eye contact’ yet it clearly doesn’t work, why keep trying to make something of it?
My advice? Forget it and assume we’ve not been seen. We’ll be far better prepared when the driver does make the ‘looked but failed to see’ error and pulls into our path!
WANT TO IMPROVE YOUR PRACTICAL RIDING SKILLS? Head to www.survivalskillsridertraining.co.uk to find out how I can help you develop a genuinely defensive mindset when riding!
*** 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.
Over on the Survival Skills Facebook page I’ve spent the last few Fridays looking at an unusual court case where a judge withdrew the case from the jury, after rejecting the prosecution’s case that a rider involved in a fatal collision with a pedestrian had to time react when the pedestrian stopped unexpectedly.
The incident reminded me of the words of Chesley Sullenberger – the Miracle on the Hudson pilot – “the startle factor is real, and it’s huge”. He was talking to a US Congressional hearing into the two aviation accidents involving Boeing’s 737 Max, and refuting claims that an alert and properly trained pilot could have dealt with the issues the plane was throwing at them.
Sound familiar?
Think bike? Think again!
Now, take a look at the photo. You may remember it as one of the long-running series of ‘Think Bike’ products, aimed at the driver.
The idea is, given the target, to try to make a driver aware of just how hard a bike can be to spot.
As soon as I saw it, my thought was that the message should be ‘Biker, Think’. And that’s because it’s a perfect illustration of the point that I regularly make when discussing the Science Of Being Seen (#SOBS); the effect of any CONSPICUITY AID – in this case, the bike’s headlight – depends entirely on WHAT’S BEHIND the rider.
It’s not the lightness of clothing, or – as in this case – the brightness of the headlight, it’s the CONTRAST against the BACKGROUND.
And that’s the message that is so difficult to get over to riders, despite my best efforts and the inclusion of SOBS as a module of the Biker Down courses that have been run by so many fire services in the years since this campaign. When the photo reappeared the other day, the riders’ responses were predictable:
:: drivers don’t look hard enough for bikes
:: the rider should be wearing hi-vis clothing
They both miss the point.
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Drivers fail to spot motorcycles for well-documented reasons – in this case, it’s the camouflage effect of the bike lights against the wintery background behind the rider.
And the belief that conspicuity aids stop ‘looked but failed to see’ incidents is mistaken. There’s little compelling evidence from crash statistics – junction collisions are as common as they ever were. It’s easy to check.
So we end up with a double whammy…
a driver who either never sees the bike before pulling out – or possibly spots it halfway through pulling out and SURPRISED! stops dead, blocking the rider’s path…
and a rider who expects to be seen (“because I had my lights on and drivers are more likely to see bikes with lights”) and caught by SURPRISE! only reacts at the very last second when he / she realises the car’s pulling into the bike’s path.
Only by understanding BOTH the Science Of Being Seen AND the No Surprise? No Accident! approach to riding do we get a full understanding of the issues thrown up by this simple photograph of a bike blending into the background.
And we’ll only begin to reduce junction collisions by understanding BOTH sides of the collision – why the driver makes the error that puts the biker at risk, and why the biker fails to predict a highly predictable error. This is what’s known as ‘INSIGHT’ – seeking to offer understanding of the relationship between a specific cause and effect within a particular context.
It’s a type of learning that revolves around problem-solving through understanding the relationships between our own abilities (self-awareness) and the ‘system’ in which we’re operating. Insight is the basis for all my training, incidentally.
If we focus on simplistic and reductionist explanations alone, we may know WHAT went wrong, but without looking for embracing, holistic explanations we’ll never know WHY it went wrong.
The very first Biker Down course
A still from the original ‘Think once, think twice, THINK BIKE’ public information film
Kevin trainer and SOBS – Jim firefighter and crash scene management – Andy first responder and first aid 
At the Savoy for the Prince Michael of Kent award ceremony
Yes, that is Danny John-Jules – he came along to the Honda Biker Down event
The banner with the Science Of Being Seen website
Kevin at the Rochester Road Safety Experience, March 2020
I’ve been using this wonderful photo to illustrate the relationship between foreground and background colours, and conspicuity. 
Pink with sleeves – as recommended by SOBS
The tiger graphic from my SOBS presentations
Taking SOBS online to New Zealand audiences for Shiny Side up in Feb 2021
The business card with the essentials of SOBS given to Biker Down attendees by me
The most recent SOBS graphic
Science Of Being Seen 