Tag: perception

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65. Seven reasons SMIDSYs happen

This is another early article which seeks to understand the ‘Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You’ SMIDSY collision between a motorcycle and a car, and to go beyond the simplistic “the driver didn’t look / didn’t look properly” ‘explanation’ relied on by road safety. SMIDSYs remain the leading cause of motorcycle crashes at junctions. The focus on human perception limits, positioning, and proactive riding is fully consistent with modern collision research and advanced rider training. A few years back I gave it a mild re-write to make it a little clearer, fixed some typos and added some extra comments based on my more recent investigations on motion camouflage, peripheral blindness, saccadic masking, size-arrival effect, and workload. The analysis remains accurate and supported by contemporary cognitive science and traffic psychology. As I explained in the earlier article, it’s important for us motorcyclists to realise that the SMIDSY is a ‘Two to Tangle’ collision. That is, if the driver SETS UP the conditions in which a crash CAN happen, the motorcyclist still has to RIDE INTO IT to complete it. That means most junction collisions are avoidable.

Seven reasons SMIDSYs happen

Another day, another ‘biker down’ forum thread. What happened? The rider is minding his own business on a main road, a car pulls out from left, the rider doesn’t manage to take evasive action and takes a trip to hospital in the back of an ambulance. It’s so common, it’s something that virtually all riders are aware of.

Unfortunately, along with the ‘get well soon’ messages, it also generated the usual non-thinking “drivers kill bikers” responses. So, let’s drag ourselves out of the blame culture the entire country seems to be slipping into, and see if we can work out why the “Sorry Mate, I Didn’t See You” SMIDSY crash is still happening, one hundred years after the first intrepid riders powered off on two wheels.

One of the common factors revealed by accident analyses by expert collision investigators is that many of these crashes COULD be avoided IF the rider:

  • saw it coming

  • responded in time

But looking at crash stats we’re no better at avoiding them than motorcyclists back in the 1950s. Collisions at junctions remain the most common collision between a car and a bike. So here are SEVEN REASONS SMIDSYs HAPPEN.

There are some pretty well-documented problems.

1 – the ‘See and Be Seen’ issue – we have to be where the driver can physically see us for him to have a chance.

This is still one of the toughest concepts for riders to get their heads round, not least because so many safety campaigns are aimed at drivers and telling them to ‘look twice’ or ‘look harder’ for bikes. But it’s no good the driver looking harder if we’re in the wrong place. If the driver’s to have a chance of making the right decision, we have to open up a line of sight to the driver’s eyes. Before anything else, we need to do is to LOOK for places where vehicles pull out. If we do that, then we can work out what the driver can and can’t see, and POSITION our bikes where the driver has a chance of seeing it. It’s no good knowing the junction is there if we’re in the wrong place; unless Superman is driving we’re invisible.

[Recent stats suggest that around 1 in 5 junction collisions happen when the rider isn’t where the driver could see the bike. It’s not just roadside furniture but also the internal structures of the car too. We NEED that line of sight to the driver.]

2 – the ‘camouflage’ effects of lights and multi-coloured bike/clothing – riding lights, hi-vis and bright clothing don’t necessarily help you be seen.

Ever since the 1970s, it’s been assumed that if bikes are hard to see, then using day riding lights (DRLs) and hi-vis or light-colour clothing would drivers spot them. Early laboratory research appeared to support that theory. In fact, when we look at accident statistics, there’s little evidence for a significant change – we have just as many ‘looked but failed to see’ collisions at junctions as we ever did.

First of all, hi-vis clothing depends on making a contrast with the background. Ever looked at a yellow hi-vis vest against spring foliage? Almost the same colour. An orange bib will be invisible if you happen to be outlined against autumn leaves or an RAC van. Oddly enough, the colour that probably stands out best is pink – ask yourself how often do you see something pink as you ride? Nothing in nature and few buildings or vehicles!

Meanwhile, Multicolour clothing and paint schemes tend to break up the solid shape that the brain detects as ‘bike and rider’. It’s known as dazzle camouflage and has been used to hide targets by disguising their outline. The visual recognition system in the brain works by recognising shapes the brain has memorised and ‘flagging’ them for more attention (think vintage car owners waving at each other!). Break up the outline and there’s a risk that the a bike doesn’t leap out amongst other traffic and shout “BIKE”, and you can vanish from the driver’s perception. I well remember a tale told by a friend of jumping out of her skin when confronted with two ghosts in the local churchyard, one with no legs, the other headless. It was only when they greeted her that she realized it was two locals from the village. The woman’s shock of grey hair vanished against the grey stonework of the church and the man was wearing dark grey trousers that were invisible against the sloping path behind them. There’s also evidence that lights can actually hide the bike behind them, particularly if you are one of those riders who ride on main beam. The blur of light makes it difficult to pick out size (and thus distance) and speed.

3 – the difficulty of picking up an object headed directly towards us – a motorcycle approaching a driver at a junction isn’t moving across the background because it’s on a near-collision course until the last couple of seconds. ‘Motion camouflage’ – our difficulty in detecting something that is moving straight towards us – and the consequent ‘peripheral blindness’ were known about decades ago in the biological sciences and are behind the hunting patterns of many animals. But only recently has the issue been recognised as applying to humans attempting to detect other vehicles. The suggestion about a positive change of line came originally from an instructor buddy of mine. The eye IS sensitive to lateral movement in peripheral vision, and he develop the idea further into the Z Line, which I talk about in my Science Of Being Seen (SOBS) presentations, and also on the SOBS blog at http://scienceofbeingseen.wordpress.com

And that assumes we’re looking in the right place. The eye only has a very narrow cone of clear focus. The rest is blurry peripheral vision. When searching around a scene, we aim this focused vision at specific points which attract attention (see the comment on shapes above). By jumping from point to point, these ‘fixations’ create a picture of what’s around us. But not everything attracts attention. So our bike could be missed as we move our eyes and fall into a ‘saccade’. It’s known as saccadic masking.

4 – experienced drivers fail to scan the whole distance between where they are and the gap they are about to emerge into – it appears they subconsciously assess the kind of road they are emerging onto and look straight into the distance – a bike CLOSER than that gap will be out of the central focus and thus will be invisible until the movement across the background is noticed in peripheral vision which will only happen when the bike is right on top of the viewer (see 3)

This is a learned ‘energy-saving’ phenomenon. The brain consumes huge amounts of the body’s energy supplies so it employs techniques that reduce energy consumption, and one of those techniques is learning short-cuts that have the same effect. We’re taught to look for vehicles when we are waiting to emerge at junctions, but it’s not a very effective strategy on a busy road, because what we need to spot are the gaps! Research initially suggested this was a problem for experienced car drivers who learned by experience, but other studies have suggested ALL road users – motorcyclists included – learn very rapidly indeed that a strategy of ‘looking for other vehicles’ fails at busy junctions, so that we switch to searching for gaps. In nearly every case, it works (if it didn’t, every single junction would be littered with smashed cars) but occasionally it doesn’t. The risk now is that a vehicle close up to us goes missing because we’ve focused behind it on the gap. And we pull out, unaware there is a vehicle between us and the gap. It’s often a motorcycle but whilst some research suggests that whilst drivers make just as many SMIDSY errors in front of other cars (which we might expect), other research indicates that – adjusted for exposure – motorcyclists also pull out in front of other motorcyclists almost as often.

5 – the emerging driver has to look two ways at once… this automatically much more than halves the amount of time he has to see you (think about it – he has to turn his head then refocus in your direction!). Just because you’ve had the driver in clear sight for 10 seconds and thus have had plenty of time YOURSELF to identify and assess the risk, doesn’t mean the driver has had more than a couple of seconds to spot you – and if he looked in the wrong place….

This comment highlights the ‘Two to Tangle’ issue – the rider caught out by the SMIDSY crash can normally see it coming for several seconds before things start to go wrong, but doesn’t use this time effective to prepare. It also hinted at the driver’s problem of ‘saccadic masking’, which is an effect where our vision shuts down when we’re turning our heads quickly – it’s to help preserve balance and prevent the nausea caused by the background rushing past our eyes – think travel sickness. The very latest research – in September 2019 – also suggests that when traffic gets heavy, drivers don’t just lose track of motorcycles, they forgot they saw one. It’s another weakess of the brain – it has a limited ‘buffer’ in which these short-term visial memories can be held ready for processing.

6 – the effect of size – Even when we do spot a motorcycle approaching, it’s difficult to judge speed and distance correctly when it’s heading straightwards us. Viewers overestimate distance and underestimate speed of small objects. Drivers have trouble spotting bikes, and then even more trouble working out where they are and how much time the driver has to make the manoeuvre. Known as the size-arrival effect, which leads to drivers under-estimating speed and over-estimating distance of bikes compared with cars and vans.

7 – the emerging driver has a very complex set of tasks – they have to engage the right gear/slow/stop/steer on the final approach, check both ways, make sense of the information being gathered and plan their own manoeuvre.

By comparison, the approaching rider has a much more simple set of tasks – spot the vehicle at the junction, decide if they can be seen/have good clearance/are on a good bit of surface, decide if they need to slow. This led me to look more indepth at the concept known as ‘workload’, which I’ve talked about in another article. It’s significant – the driver looking to turn out of a junction has a LOT more to monitor than the rider approaching the junction.

FINALLY…

Whatever the reason for a SMIDSY, it makes sense to be proactive – to make preparations for things going wrong – check behind, cover the brakes (possibly even set them up by applying them lightly) and prepare to brake or swerve. Then we’re much less likely to be taken by SURPRISE! and require our own ambulance trip to hospital.

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61. Before you overtake, do you…?

The central lesson — never assume left-hand junctions are clear when overtaking — is often overlooked, even by experienced motorcyclists. The scenarios you describe illustrate a classic cognitive trap: tunnel vision on the manoeuvre past the target vehicle while failing to account for other hazards.

Before you overtake, do you…?

…check for junctions on the left?

Whenever I’m giving one of my Survival Skills presentations about avoiding overtaking collisions, it takes a few minutes to work through all the places we have to look out for. Most riders are aware of the hazards posed by junctions and other openings to the right, where the vehicle we’re overtaking might turn right, or another in the side turning might emerge from. But way down the list is the fact that a junction or driveway on the left is just as much of a hazard. Why?

Here’s what often happens. We see a vehicle ahead slow, and indicate left. “Good, that’ll make it easier to pass” we think. And so we do all our other checks, swing wide and commit to the pass.

But as always with the Survival Skills approach to advanced riding, let’s not assume things will go right, but think about what might go wrong.

What if the driver swings out to the right to make the turn easy? It’s highly likely if the vehicle we’re trying to pass is an articulated lorry or a bus, but cars do it too, and not always because the driver’s being lazy, as we’re all too quick to assume. The manoeuvre might be very awkward, maybe because the entrance is narrow or because it turns right back on itself.

What if there’s a second vehicle actually in the side turning waiting to turn right? What’s the driver of that vehicle likely to do as he sees the approaching car slowing with the left indicator on? There’s a significant risk he will pull out, straight into our path and now we’re set up for a head-on collision. Why does the driver go? Because he’s seen the same as us, that there’s nothing coming from his left (that’s why we’re overtaking), but he also thinks it’s clear from his right, because of our position. Wide out to the right, we’re blindsided by the car we’re moving out to pass. We might well be able to see over the roof of the slowing car, but from where the driver is sat, all that’s likely to be visible is the top of our helmet.

Or maybe that second vehicle plans on turning left. Exactly the same line-of-sight problem applies, only this time the driver pulls out and turns in the same direction we’re headed. And maybe that takes away the gap we were planning on moving back into before encountering oncoming traffic.

So even if we back out of the overtake, what if the driver turning left cannot complete the turn? What if he’s turning into a single track road and there’s a vehicle coming the other way? Will the turning vehicle have to stop? And can we stop before we run into the back of it? A surprising number of crashes at junctions on fast roads happen when motorcycles collide with the back of vehicles that have slowed or stopped to make a turn.

And of course, there may be more than one vehicle involved. We may look at a pair of cars travelling relatively slowly, and decide we can hop into the gap between them. And then we realise the leading vehicle is slowing to turning left (or right). What will the vehicle we are passing do? The chances are the driver will be braking but aiming to slow or halt just behind the turning vehicle, bunching up close together. Where is our ‘out’ from the overtake now? It’s probably vanished.

All these scenarios we should be able to spot developing, even if we haven’t spotted where the vehicle will turn. We should see slowing vehicles, brake lights and probably indicators. We should be able to put two and two together and figure out what’s happening.

But there’s a final Worst Case Scenario which is not nearly so easy to detect. And that’s when the vehicle we’re about to overtake is NOT turning left but going straight on, but there’s also a second vehicle waiting in the junction ahead, intending to turn right. Here’s what happens. The driver looks left, sees the road is clear (our ahead – which is why we’re about to overtake too), and pulls out across the vehicle we’re just moving out to pass, straight into our path. The problem is that the emerging car doesn’t need a big gap – the driver just needs enough space to get across the centre line and into the other lane.

That led to one of the very few genuine brown trouser moments I’ve had on a training course. The trainee set up an overtake past an HGV well. He’s spotted we were about to exit a left-hand bend onto a long clear straight, moved wide to take a final check ahead, then started to accelerate…

…just as a Ferrari pulled out from the left, right in front of the truck and nailed it towards him. Fortunately, he wasn’t totally committed and was able to hit the brakes and bail out of the overtake. But it was a scary moment.

Of course, it’s not always easy to spot junctions and entrances on the left, but sometimes it’s a simple failure of observation. One of the problems with overtaking is that it’s such a complex speed / distance computation that we can get fixated on whether the road ahead is clear, and totally forget the job of scanning laterally for hazards. I’ve made this mistake myself, most recently on a BikeSafe assessment – I only spotted the entranceway after moving wide.

But very often, the most dangerous locations are flagged up good and early for us, but we still miss the warnings; a hazard line, triangular warning signs, road direction signs, finger posts, traffic islands and cross-hatched right-turn refuges, white paint in the throat of the junction, dropped kerbs, openings in hedges, gaps in lines of parked cars, even the roof of a cottage visible over the hedge – it WILL have a drive.

[A few days after I originally wrote this article, I added the following first-hand experience.]

Well… deja vu moment or what…

Having written this, there I was, zipping down a nice bit of road, slower car ahead, good straight coming up just around the next right-hand corner… I open up the view, it’s clear… but…

I catch a glimpse of something silver to the left just as I move out to start the pass… and abort…

Just as well, because right in front of the car I was about to pass, out pulls a driver in a powerful Mercedes from a well-hedged driveway. He turns right and accelerates hard into what would have been my path had I continued with the manoeuvre.

I’m glad I was out of the way!

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60. Sit back, close your eyes, relax… and hope for the best

I still remember that drive, and how the roundabout incident was followed almost immediately by the petrol station event. The lesson is simple but crucial: never assume other road users will do what you expect. Right-of-way is a legal concept, not a guarantee of safety, and mistakes on both sides — the driver failing to see the bike, the rider failing to anticipate “what happens next” — continue to have serious consequences for the rider. Junction collisions and overtaking errors are still among the most common causes of motorcycle accidents, and rider behaviour that overestimates their own skill or underestimates risk continues to be a major factor.

Sit back, close your eyes, relax… and hope for the best

“We can learn a lot by watching other riders”. Someone told me that a few years back, whilst suggesting that we don’t really need rider coaches like me, nor programmes like my Survival Skills advanced training courses. All we have to do, he told me, is watch how other riders deal with situations and then copy them. Unfortunately, there’s a major assumption built into that particular plan; that the rider we’re watching is actually a role model from whom we should actually be learning.

It was a lovely warm evening in early April, so I took the (t)rusty old Nissan Serena people-carrier down to Eastbourne to watch the Eagles take on the Poole Pirates at speedway. There were plenty of riders out taking advantage of the warm evening sunshine too.

And plenty of examples of poor riding.

Poor positioning on right handers, hugging the white line through a curve so I had to keep moving left to avoid decapitating oncoming riders was a favourite, as were the obligatory duff overtakes.

I saw plenty of the latter, but one in particular was a cracker. Rider 1 begins to overtake and Rider 2 follows. But Rider 1 decides NOT to go for the two car pass that Rider 2 is clearly expecting and slides into a one bike-sized gap between the vehicles. Rider 2 is of course left hung out to dry. Fortunately, there was plenty of room for rider 2 to complete the overtake. Except Rider 2 didn’t, and decided to try to squeeze into the same gap.

But we should know that junction collisions are the most common crash of all, and it was two incidents at junctions that particularly stuck out.

Here’s the first. I’m in the Serena, waiting to turn right at a mini-roundabout, with a stream of traffic approaching from the left who would have to give way to me when I move forward. Unfortunately, the view to my right – the direction where I have to give way to traffic – is partially obscured.

Now, put your biking hat on, and imagine you’re approaching from that direction, where I’m searching for vehicles to my right. So my Serena is ahead and sitting on your left.

Here’s the problem. You’re approaching the junction around a bit of a kink which means your view only opens up quite late. And what you see is my Serena, and a big gap in that stream of traffic that’s been coming the other way.

Let’s hit PAUSE.

What could we anticipate? Firstly, as our machine’s appeared around that kink, does the driver of the Serena know what’s approaching from his right? If he didn’t spot us on his last check to the right, what’s likely to happen?

It’s not difficult, is it? With nothing apparently coming from his right, he can pull out, but now the Serena driver’s attention is almost certainly to his left, to make sure that vehicles approaching from THAT direction give way to him.

So back on the bike, what can we do?

Slowing down would be a good starting point. Covering the brakes would be a second. Watching the vehicle to see if it begins to move would be a third. Being prepared to sound the horn and hit the brakes hard would be a fourth and fifth.

Fortunately I DID spot the bike just as I was about to pull out, and I watched him as he approached and passed through the junction. He did none of these things. In fact, he approached (I guess) at around 10 mph over the 30 speed limit, and straight-lined the mini-roundabout riding straight over the paint blob. He didn’t slow, he didn’t look once in my direction, and I could see he wasn’t covering the brakes or the horn.

Not only would he have been in big trouble had I emerged, but had the last car in the opposing stream turned right across his path, he would have been hard-pressed to avoid a collision. This guy was oblivious to the very real danger posed by the road layout. Why? Lack of knowledge? Or an assumption that he had right-of-way and that other drivers should signal their turns? My guess is the latter.

Two lessons. Just because an oncoming vehicle isn’t signalling to turn right doesn’t mean it won’t turn right across your path. Just because you have right of way over a vehicle on the left, it doesn’t mean a driver won’t pull out across your path. Don’t assume!

Just a mile up the road, I had to fill up before heading to Eastbourne. The filling station is on the other side of the road, so it meant that I had to turn turning right to get back onto the road – that direction happens to be to the west, and we’ll see why that’s important in just a moment.

Once gain, there’s a slight kink just where the filling station is, so now I can’t see left OR right. So like most drivers, I wait for a nice big gap in the traffic stream coming from my right. And when I get one, I pull forward to the centre line, and wait till a gap or some kind soul lets me complete my turn. Predictably, after I’ve sat there for a couple of seconds, a car driver hangs back and flashes me out.

Fortunately for Larry Lackwit on the bike approaching from my right, I’ve already clocked him at a distance, and double-check back to my right to see where he is before acting on the headlight flash.

Because Larry decides that he can make a point about him having right-of-way by aiming his bike for the metre-wide gap in front of my Serena.

If I’d just started to move as I double-checked, I would have punted him straight into the front of the car that had stopped to let me out, and we’d have been calling the emergency services. If I’d already gone without looking, he’d would have buried himself in my driver’s door at 30 mph. He probably wouldn’t have needed an ambulance.

Doubly-fortunate for him, the reason I knew he was there was because I’d been double-checking back to the right even when sat blocking the lane. And I’d looked VERY CAREFULLY because the light of the setting sun was right behind him. Even with his headlight on, he wasn’t easy to spot.

Lesson? Another simple one about being impatient. Why put ourselves into dangerous situations simply to show off our right-of-way? It wouldn’t have saved more than ten seconds – he could have just rolled off the gas, waited for me to complete the manoeuvre, and been on his way with barely a moment lost.

And remember, if the sun is behind us, we have a lovely clear view ahead with everything picked out in the evening light. Check the angle of shadows of the bike. If we’re running over our own shadow, the driver ahead is looking straight into the sun.

Final point… neither of these incidents took place on the local roads where I know riders go hooning on summer evenings. The chances are both riders were locals, and almost certainly know that the mini-roundabout and the petrol station were there. My feeling was that both were making a very deliberate choice to enforce their own right-of-way, and would blame the other road user if things went wrong.

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52. The Lurker, the Drifter and the Trimmer

These three road users have not disappeared, even in an era of driver-assist technology. Modern cars may have cameras, sensors and warning systems, but they do not change human behaviour, and in some cases they encourage complacency. The key lesson remains the same: it is not the vehicle that creates risk, but predictable patterns of human behaviour. If there was a major omission, it was that I failed to acknowledge that these behaviours are not confined to car drivers. Motorcyclists can lurk in blind spots, drift between lanes without clear signals, or trim corners and roundabouts just as readily. Recognising these traits in ourselves is as important as spotting them in others, because the habits we tolerate in our own riding are often the ones that place us at greatest risk.

The Lurker, the Drifter and the Trimmer

Every now and again someone sets me a challenge. On this occasion it was to find three types of driver that riders need to keep their eyes open for. Of course, the article actually focuses on three drivers OR riders to on the be alert for. Yes, bikers are just as guilty of these thoughtless bits of riding as car drivers!

The Lurker finds places to hide, concealed spots from which he can leap out and surprise us. If there’s a truck coming the other way is there a lurker behind it? He’ll be right up the tailgate where we can’t see him, and he’ll pop out like a Jack-in-the-box. Our response? Move left, gain some buffer space and a better view. What about that side turning? The Lurker will sit too far back where we can’t see him and he can’t see us, and he’ll lunge forward. Move away, to the right, to gain clearance and a better view. If there are bends ahead with blind areas, then the Lurker will hug the hedge and appear just when we think the road is clear.

The Drifter is a different animal. He expects us to devine his intentions by telepathy. On a multiple lane road, he’ll change lanes by sliding slowly from one to the other, oblivious of traffic, no looks, no signals. Avoid the Drifter by sitting staggered in the adjacent lane, rather than alongside the other vehicle. Keep an eye open for movement, and we mustn’t for a moment assume that the Drifter knows we’re there. The Drifter is a hazard at side roads. He’ll turn across our path oh so slowly. And if he’s going our way, then having blocked our path, he slowly accumulate pace rather than accelerate to match the speed of the traffic flow. Back off and be prepared to match to his. Watch out for the Drifter behind. Keep an eye on the mirrors if he’s following. When we ride into a lower limit and decelerate, the Drifter won’t change his speed, not until he’s trying to ride pillion. Use the brakes to slow so there’s a warning light, and use them very lightly too – that way we’ll only slow down gradually.

The Trimmer thinks that using a bit of our side of the road is perfectly fine because it makes life a bit easier for him, it cuts down the effort needed to steer accurately around bends, roundabouts and into and out of junctions. Watch for the Trimmer coming the other way on left-handers. He’ll cut across the central line so we have to be prepared to tighten our own line by moving to the nearside. Faced with a left-turn into a side road, the Trimmer will swing wide to the right to make the manoeuvre easy, even though we’re coming the other way. If we’re in the side turning, the Trimmer will take a lazy line turning in on our side of the road by cutting across the centre line. The Trimmer will straight-line roundabouts. Even when traffic is busy, he’ll take the straight-line short cut when going straight ahead. Our defence is not to try to overtake across the island.

If you want to learn more about understanding how to manage the risks of riding on the road, why not check out the website and find out about Survival Skills advanced motorcycle training courses?

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51. Target Fixation – Question and Answer

Although this article was first written back in the early 2000s, the underlying problem it describes has not gone away. Modern explanations would frame this as stress physiology rather than evolutionary mismatch. Target fixation is now better understood as a stress-driven narrowing of attention that degrades both decision-making and fine motor control, rather than a simple bad habit. Modern bikes with ABS and traction control reduce the consequences of panic inputs, but they do not prevent the psychological trigger that causes riders to freeze, stare, and steer poorly. The solutions remain fundamentally the same: earlier anticipation to avoid surprise, deliberate visual strategies to direct the bike where you want it to go, and sufficient confidence in braking and steering to prevent fear from taking over. Modern coaching combines teaching riders to notice physiological cues (holding breath, locked arms, fixed gaze) with a more deliberate visual drill that replaces simply “looking away” with a more proactive visual targeting to focus on the exit.

Target Fixation – Question and Answer

If you’ve read Keith Code’s ‘Twist of the Wrist’ books, you may recall he talked about ‘Survival Reactions’. He described these as the unwanted but instinctive attempts to preserve us from harm, that work against our learned responses. For example, we may have spent hours working on a nice progressive squeeze when practicing emergency stops, but in a real-life crisis, it’s hard not to revert to a sudden grab and stamp on the brakes. I crashed precisely this way several times till I got the hang of it. It’s not an accident modern machines are fitted with ABS. Panic grabs can be worked on, but rather more subtle is another of Code’s Survival Reactions. It’s called ‘target fixation’. If you want to know more, read on.

Q I’ve heard quite a lot about something called target fixation, but I don’t know what it is?

A Target fixation is the state we find ourselves in when we can’t drag our attention away from a hazard on the road. It nearly always occurs when the there’s a threat of personal harm, maybe from hitting something hard like a car, from running out of road in a corner or because we’ve just spotted a patch of diesel – because it’s a threat, we look at it.

Q But it seems obvious to me that if there is something dangerous in front of you, you ought to look at it?

A Obvious – but wrong! Right from basic training we tell trainees “you go where you look” because that’s how we get there. It works… except in an emergency.

Q Alright, so the basic theory is to look where you want to go, but why does this work? We can’t steer the bike with our eyes so what do you mean?

A Given half a chance, any hazard will grab the whole of our attention, and instead of finding a way out of trouble we freeze and go deeper into it. Essentially this is a passive reaction to a hazard. We need to find a safe route past the threat so instead of having our attention drawn towards what we don’t want to do (hitting the car, running out of road mid-corner or losing control on the diesel) we need to snap our focus to the way OUT of trouble instead. Is there a route past the car? Can we look around the bend and lean over more to get there? Is there clear tarmac past the diesel? We need to recognise the threat of target fixation if we to find a way out of trouble.

Q I still don’t get this. Surely it’s easy to avoid a hazard?

A That’s the theory in a lot of road safety literature. In practice it ignores the way the brain works under stress. As I mentioned, Code identified target fixation as an instinctive reaction to danger which overwhelms rational decision-making. After the event – usually when we’ve got over the adrenalin of the scare – it’s blindingly obvious we were target-fixated, but mid-emergency it’s incredibly difficult to overcome because the brain is hardwired to avoid danger. Unfortunately, these reactions evolved several million years before anyone invented a motorcycle. That’s why they are completely inappropriate.

Q OK, so I know I shouldn’t, but I still can’t seem to do anything else but look at what I’m going to hit?

A Whilst advice to look away from the hazard is valid, we actually need to prevent the instinctive target fixation in the first place. And to do that we need to understand something about the trigger – ie. what state of mind sets off the survival reaction in the first place. At the most basic level it’s fear of being hurt. So the moment we start to think that our space is being squeezed by other road users, that we’re running out of room in the corner, or that we can’t avoid the slippery surface, we’re setting up the conditions in which survival reactions and target fixation will kick in.

Q So I need to improve my observation?

A Sort of… because the earlier we see a hazards, the less that can take us by SURPRISE! And it turns out that it’s SURPRISE! that’s the trigger for these survival reactions. As soon as the situation ahead develops in a way that we weren’t expecting, SURPRISE! kicks in, and then we’re at risk of triggering the survival reactions.

So observation is part of it – we need to be aware of what’s around us – road layout, road surface, other vehicles and so on – but we also need to know what we CAN’T SEE. And then we need to ask the “What if…?” question to anticipate what might happen next. Motorcycle Roadcraft says we need to consider “what we can reasonably expect to happen”. In fact this isn’t enough. We need to expect the UNREASONABLE. If we only ever expect what usually happens, we’ll be caught out by what doesn’t normally happen. It’s too late to think when the car pulls out, because we will trip those survival reactions. We have to be holding in our heads a plan to deal with that car long before it starts to move. Similarly, we need to anticipate that the easy-looking corner ahead will tighten up or that the far side of the roundabout has a diesel slick over it. It’s running through “What if…?” scenarios before they become real that prevents SURPRISE!

Q So I’m scanning and planning. But running into corners I still freeze on occasion. What else can help?

A A bit of lateral thinking. You wouldn’t be freezing if you were confident in your abilities to get out of trouble. So going back to basics, everything we do on a bike involves either a change of speed or a change of direction. If we aren’t confident with steering, braking and to a lesser extent accelerating, any threatening situation that relies on these skills to get out of trouble is going to scare us. For example, on my Survival Skills Performance courses I am regularly helping riders who find themselves struggling with cornering. What I usually find is either a lack of confidence with the steering or a lack of confidence with the brakes. Sometimes both.

Q So how does that cause me to freeze?

A Simple. On the courses I run, it turns out that the rider isn’t really going too fast, but just thinks he/she is! And because the rider thinks “I’m going too fast” it kicks off the target fixation and frozen steering which is another survival reaction. So having scared themselves, on the next bend not only are they very slow, but they turn into the corner far too early, which leads them to run wide on the exit to the bend, setting off target fixation. So it all becomes a bit of a vicious circle. It goes wrong because you expect it to go wrong.

Q OK, I believe you. So what can I do to improve my cornering now?

A Not surprisingly my first suggestion would be get some training. On my cornering courses, as soon as we work on more positive use of the brakes and steering to get the speed off quickly and to change direction rapidly, the problem usually vanishes. Knowing that the bike can be slowed and steered around the bend removes the trigger for the target fixation.

If you can’t get yourself onto a Survival Skills training course, then my advice would be to work on braking. You should know how to do a decent emergency stop. Practice that skills off-road till you can do really good ones, and then just apply the same basic approach (without pulling up quite so hard) on the road. Learning to sort your approach speed on corners is the only way you’ll learn how to judge your braking. You don’t have to brake harshly, just avoid rolling off and coasting into the bend. Get moderately competent at that and itt’ll take away the fear of running in too fast. Next learn all about counter-steering, then go and practice quick steering exercises. Start off-road with some swerves, then take what you’ve learned out on the road and get confident at making rapid changes of direction in bends. In both cases, start slow and cautiously, then build up the speed as your control gets better. But if you really don’t know how to do a safe emergency stop, get some professional help!

And if you really want to fix cornering, find out about the Survival Skills ‘Point and Squirt’ approach to cornering, which is all about going in deep, and making a slower but more rapid change of direction when we can see where the road goes next, before accelerating upright out of the corner. Having the reference points that I teach – ‘landmarks’ if you like – means you always know exactly what you’ve going to be doing and where you’ve going to do it. So it’s a positive approach, where we ‘seize the corner by the scruff of the neck and shake it out the way we want to to go’ approach, rather than a passive, “where is the corner taking me?” response.

Q How do I know I’m getting it right?

A Simple – apart from not scaring yourself so often, you’ll find you’re more relaxed on the bike.

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47. Sorry Mate, I didn’t see you – an analysis of SMIDSY accidents

The first version of this article was written over two decades ago, but has its roots back in the mid-90s when I first got online, and discovered that the SMIDSY was far from unique to the UK. That was very relevant when, in 1995, I first got involved in rider training back in 1995 and discovered the sum of advice to new riders was to wear hi-vis and ride with their lights on “so drivers would see them”. What my research showed was that SMIDSY collisions are primarily not a driver ‘failure to look’, and much more of a human visual-perception problem. Whilst I found that research into these collisions had been going on since the 1960s and really took off in the 70s, not much of the science had made its way into road safety or motorcycle safety. When I first delivered the ‘Science Of Being Seen’ presentation in 2012, it was met with a lot of scepticism. But since then, much of what I describe here has since been validated time and again by academics and by independent commentators including FortNine.

The conceptual framework — looked but could not see, looked but failed to see, and looked, saw and misjudged — remains one of the clearest and most practically useful ways of understanding junction collisions. The explanations of motion camouflage, contrast issues, saccadic masking, workload, and size-arrival effect are all still scientifically sound and are now increasingly accepted within professional driver and rider training, and these terms are now being referred to by ordinary riders on a regular basis. The article has not been undermined by time; rather, the rest of the motorcycling world has been slowly catching up with it.

Sorry Mate, I didn’t see you – an analysis of SMIDSY accidents

When I updated these articles in the summer and autumn of 2019, I realised that in some ways, this article is probably the most important I’ve ever written. It was written in response to the frequent and strident claims that ‘drivers don’t look properly for bikes’. And it was in this very article – written in the early 2000s – that for the first time I put down in reasonably clear terms an explanation of the need for riders to understand the visual perception issues behind the ‘Sorry Mate, I Didn’t See You’ collision. Historically, the rider has always blamed the driver for not looking properly, but my background of SMIDSY-dodging as a London-based courier plus my increasing experience as an instructor made me wonder why the advice to drivers to “look harder for bikes” and the advice to bikers to “make yourself more conspicuous” wasn’t working. The failure of the ‘Think Bike’ and ‘Ride Bright’ advice – which dates back to the mid-1970s – became very evident when I began to investigate collision statistics – the proportion of junction collisions had remained unchanged from the early 70s (when no-one used day riding lights or hi-vis clothing) to the time when I wrote the article in 2003.

I’d already read a lot of research papers as a way of developing my training courses and had discovered quite a lot about motorcycle conspicuity and the reasons for car / bike collisions when I was invited to work with Kent Fire and Rescue Service on the ‘Biker Down’ course.

So when, in 2011-12, I created the ‘Science Of Being Seen’ presentation (or SOBS for short) it was this research which formed the basis of the presentation. Perhaps not surprisingly given that motorcyclists have seen a stream of road safety campaigns all aimed at drivers telling them to ‘look harder’ or ‘look twice’ for bikes, we have tended to believe that the reason for the SMIDSY collision is because “drivers don’t look properly”. SOBS shows that’s not true, and explains the real issues facing the driver – ‘looked but COULD NOT see’, ‘looked but FAILED to see’ and looked, saw and MISJUDGED’ errors – why the conspicuity strategies we motorcyclists have employed – hi-vis clothing and day-riding lights (DRLs) have failed to have any meaningful impact on collision statistics. It’s why I suggest that it’s down to us riders to take responsibility for evading the driver’s error when it happens.

Since then, I’ve continued to investigate the problem of motorcycle perception and visual perception, and the presentation which I continue to deliver at nearly every Biker Down in Kent, has been continually updated with the very latest research. And in terms of collisions, nothing much has changed since, as it happens.

But this article is where it all started, getting on for two decades ago. So although I’ve annotated the article in places, the basic text is left unchanged apart from a couple of minor typos I’ve corrected. And if you want to read the very latest thinking, then head for the SOBS website at www.scienceofbeingseen.wordpress.com.

Most bike riders these days also have a car licence and drive a car, usually as their main means of transport, using the bike for fun or sometimes commuting. Yet to listen to a lot of the discussion that goes on about “witless cagers” you’d be hard-pressed to realise that.

But given that we nearly all drive cars, and our old friend the SMIDSY accident still accounts for the majority of car/bike accidents aren’t we likely at some time or another to have made exactly the mistake that we pillory drivers for? How many of us when on four wheels have done the unthinkable and pulled out on a bike?

As one honest motorcycle forum contributor admitted [after a near-miss in his car]: “Now if I can do this, what chance for the poor booger in his Mondeo who has got no idea of what we are about… what still bugs me is that, if they’d run into me, I’d have heard myself saying, in total honesty, as I helped sweep them to the side of the road: ‘Sorry mate, I didn’t see you'”.

I’ve mentioned before that I nearly took out an R1 when they first came out… poor gloomy light, twin headlights apparently a long way off against a background of trees, me wanting to pull across the path of the oncoming vehicle and turn right, so all I needed was a gap sufficient to make it to the other lane.

Seemed safe enough so I started to go…

…but something wasn’t quite right about the movement of the lights across the dark background and I hit the brakes again, stopping about halfway across the line.

Just as well I did! By the time I’d refocused on the oncoming vehicle, it was obviously a bike, moving at a fair lick, and MUCH, much closer than I had realised.

Two thoughts struck me at the time. The first was that the widely spaced lights on an R1 DO look like a car further off – I went home and even on the GSX-R where they are much closer together, immediately put a different coloured bulb in one headlight – technically illegal but it’s my safety I’m worried about here.

The second was that the rider hadn’t apparently reacted to me at all. He was just going to sail completely oblivious into the accident I was about to cause. Yes, technically my fault, but did he have to have it with me? Could he not have done something positive himself? There was no blast of high beam and/or horn, no anchoring up, no swerve to the other side of the road (it was clear, remember or I wouldn’t have been about to pull out).

[NOTE – “technically my fault, but did he have to have it with me?”… echoes of my very first article for the Motorcycle Action Group newspaper in 2002 – “it takes two to tangle” – the driver may be the one setting up the crash, but the rider still has to ride into it to complete the collision. And, as in the near-miss I had with the R1 rider, the rider can nearly always see it coming.]

OK, so let’s take a reality check.

Cars do pull out on bikes. Fact.

In around 90% of them, the bike is on the priority road, so technically it’s the car driver’s mistake. Fact.

But if we, as bikers, can STILL make that mistake when on four wheels, knowing all we know about car drivers doing it to us when we’re on two, it’s worth looking at in more depth.

I’ve previously suggested proactive strategies for dealing with SMIDSY incidents, but let’s ask some questions about why drivers don’t see bikes. If we can understand why things go wrong, it may make more sense as to why it’s US as riders that have to deal with the situation, rather than use the “it was the other guy’s fault, I had right of way, he should have seen me” excuse.

There are a whole bunch of reasons to worry when you approach a junction:

There is the driver with simple defective eyesight – plenty of them around…

There is the driver who doesn’t look properly – too many in-car distractions, be it children running amok, the mobile phone demanding immediate attention or just singing along with Des O’Connor.

[NOTE – although ‘defective eyesight’, ‘driving distracted’ and generally ‘not looking properly’ seem likely reasons to explain the ‘Looked But Failed To See’ LBFTS error where drivers don’t see approaching bikes, when I began to look into the issue in more depth it occurred to me that the vast majority of drivers DO see the vast majority of bikes. If they didn’t, we’d not make it far past the first junction.

In total, there are around 350 motorcycle fatalities and some 3000 injuries each year, but they are the result of ALL crashes, not just those at junctions – they total around 100 per annum. But what about encounters that DON’T end in crashes? If we think about how many cars there are on the road (around 40 million) and how many bikes there are (between 1 and 2 million), consider how many junctions every biker passes on every ride, then work out how many times bikes pass through junctions where a car could turn, the number of POTENTIAL collisions that never happen is truly enormous – I don’t think anyone has actually attempted to do the sum. The only conclusion we can make is that drivers DO see nearly every bike when it needs to be seen. And if that’s the case, the only rational explanation is that nearly all drivers DO look properly on nearly every occasion. We can lay to bed the ‘not looking properly’ explanation – it’s a handy myth.]

There is the driver who does see you but chooses the wrong course of action – is the driver inexperienced, merely incompetent, or not used to the vehicle being driven? Ever had a car towing a caravan pull out in front of you and wondered why? I never get anywhere near hire vans for the same kind of reason…

There is the experienced and overconfident driver who looks, thinks he has seen everything but “blanked” the bike because he only sees what he expects to see. New drivers and experienced drivers score very differently in hazard perception tests – new drivers check EVERYTHING in sight but cannot prioritise, experienced drivers check SELECTIVELY, prioritise better but often miss the unusual (ie the bike)…

[NOTE – it turns out there’s an explanation for this too. It doesn’t take long for all road users – bikers included – to develop a different strategy for emerging onto busy roads to the one we’re taught. Rather than the search for vehicles (which is what we think we’re doing), we’re actually all searching for the gaps between them. We all do it, drivers and riders alike. Mostly, it works.]

There is the driver who makes a conscious decision to use you as the gap in the traffic, knowing you will give way – “the bike is softer than a 44 tonner” approach…

[NOTE – I looked into that, too. Evidence from insurance statistics – who you might expect to be looking for a reason to pin a collision on the other driver – suggests it’s actually very rare for a driver to pull out deliberately. We riders tend to interpret it that way because we frequently see the driver appearing to look at us – “I made eye contract but he / she still pulled out” is a common post-crash statement. But as you’ll see if you follow up the SOBS website and check out how the eye actually has a tiny zone of clear, colour vision and sharp focus, it’s entirely likely that what we thought was eye contact, was actually the driver was looking in our direction but focused on the vehicle or gap behind us. I mention this below.]

Even given that the driver knows what to look for, is actively looking for it, knows what to do and isn’t a chancer, doesn’t mean he’ll see you coming. There are a number of reasons.

Most modern cars have huge blind spots:
take a look at the size of the A pillar alongside the windscreen on a modern car. They are designed to make the safety cage of the car rigid in an accident and stop the roof from folding up – it’s no coincidence they are the size of girders!
take a look at the pillar behind the driver’s head where the doors come together – again it’s huge
take a look at the pillar behind the rear window – once again it is part of the safety cage
Depending on the angle the car takes up, it’s quite possible the driver cannot see through you one of these obstructions, and there is always roadside furniture like telegraph poles, trees and letter boxes – if you can’t see his eyes, he cannot see you.

[NOTE – and since I wrote this nearly two decades ago, the A and B pillars have got even thicker as a result of new crash protection requirements. It turns out that around one-in-five collisions actually fall into the ‘looked but COULD NOT see’ category. In the run-up to the collision, although the driver was searching for approaching vehicles, the rider simply hadn’t put the bike in a place where the driver could see it.]

But drivers still don’t see you when they are looking straight at you and you are in clear view. Why not? Two possible causes. An accident analysis I saw the other day suggested that a contributory factor was “visual clutter” – there was so much going on in the direction the driver was looking that she simply didn’t see the bike. The brain was incapable of processing all the information being thrown at it in the time available and bits went astray. Unfortunately, amongst that lost info was the bike.

[NOTE – this phenomenon of processing information has been investigated in other fields – notable aviation – and the sum of the tasks that have to be performed is known as ‘workload’. Only recent has research in workload in driving been carried out, and it shows that in typical driving situations, there’s too much for the human brain to process all at once. So we ‘task-shed’ and focus on only part of the driving task. The very latest research (September 2019) suggests the more that’s going on, the more likely drivers are to forget what they saw a moment earlier. Motorcycles seem to be particularly prone to going missing. This is not carelessness or ‘not looking properly’ either. It’s simply the way the human brain evolved which limits our ability to process complex information.]

The second possibility is down to the way the eye and the brain work in tandem to process visual information. It may mean we see things which aren’t there or be blind to things that are. Even a conscientious driver, looking carefully, may misinterpret what he sees.

The central part of the retina is what sees detail in sharp focus – it’s why you have to look directly at a piece of paper to read what is written on it, but both this and the zone outside this is very sensitive to movement. Try this simple experiment – your eyes will have to move word by word to read this sentence, but if you move the mouse you can see it move over the whole of the screen wherever your eyes are focussed.

[NOTE – and there’s a bit more to this than I realised at the time. As our eyes move to points of interest (the words in this case), they move in jumps and pauses – saccades and fixations. The fixations allow us to focus and pick out the detail of the letters so we read the word. What’s not obvious – although we’ve known about it since the 19th century – is that as the eyes move in a saccade, the visual system shuts down. We’re effectively blind as our eyes move between fixations. It’s known as saccadic masking and is now at last being recognised as a real problem when drivers are turning their heads and looking left and right at junctions.]

As you ride, you’ll often spot motion out of the corner of your eye (a plastic bag flapping in a hedge or a car approaching in a side road) whereas the driver looking back at you is using the sharp focus part of the eye and may not see you because you don’t appear to be moving.

[NOTE – the brain is good at picking out movement in peripheral vision – it’s how our visual system is designed – but approaching a junction on the bike, we’re on a near-collision course with the driver looking in our direction. That means we’re virtually motionless with respect to the background scene, and that means we create no lateral movement to trigger the brain’s motion detection system. It’s known as ‘motion camouflage’. Interestingly this phenomenon has been known about for decades by animal scientists, sailors and fighter pilots, but only recently does it seem to have been realised it applies to drivers too.]

How might he miss seeing you? The brain spots familiar objects by using pattern recognition – as social animals we are very good at recognising faces. As drivers/riders we’ve trained our brain to recognise other important shapes – the silhouettes of another vehicle, the outline of a pedestrian, the pattern of a road sign. The problem is that we learn to recognise these patterns as whole – break up the outline and it vanishes – try recognising a face which is missing the eyes or the mouth! One VD contributor posted an excellent picture of a ‘dazzle-camouflaged’ ship painted in bold strips of grey and blue – it was invisible not because it blended into the background but because the strips gave the eye false outlines to try to make sense of, none of which said ‘SHIP’.

[NOTE – once again, this is ‘old news’ in science but the effects of ‘disruptive camouflage’ is only now beginning to be recognised as an issue. It’s particularly a problem for motorcyclists because our bikes and clothing are often multi-coloured. It’s likely it’s a significant factor in ‘looked but FAILED TO SEE’ errors. Even supposedly hi-vis clothing often fails to create a recognisable silhouette for the driver to see, which may well explain why there’s little evidence that hi-vis clothing has had any positive effect in reducing the proportion of junction collisions.]

When approaching a waiting driver, in certain lights conditions or against certain backgrounds, part of your ‘bike plus rider’ outline may vanish – so the shape that reaches the part of the brain busily processing this information doesn’t shout ‘BIKE’ to the driver’s conscious reactions. If you are approaching head on, without adding movement across the background, there is nothing to alert them to the fact they have missed a vital clue until you get very close and the angle of view starts to change.

[NOTE – this problem of foreground and background colours blending is known as ‘contrast camouflage’. Guess what? We’ve known about it and exploited it for military purposes for a couple of centuries. But road safety has focused entirely on the false premise that if riders wear bright colours they’ll be more visible. Put your yellow hi-vis vest on, then stand in front of a field of oil seed rape in flower, or a yellowing autumn hedge, and see if you stand out. Two of the most important pieces of understanding are:

it’s the CONTRAST that matters, not the colour

the background changes moment by moment and so does our conspicuity

If you want a daytime hi-vis colour that works reasonably well in most environments, it’s not Saturn yellow, but pink! I have been suggesting this for well over a decade, so when I took a BikeSafe day with the Met last year, I was mildly amused to the team suggesting pink hi-vis. I wonder where they got that idea?]

And as if all that weren’t enough that could go wrong, even if the driver does spot you, how does he go about judging your speed and distance?

Well, if an object is heading straight at you, it’s very difficult – switch to sport for a moment. If you’ve ever tried to make the high steepling catch where the batsman has hit the ball straight up, you’ll know that it’s not that easy to judge the catch as it comes down again – even the best players make a mess of it. You have to use an estimate of distance based on what your experience tells you about the apparent size of the object, then use the rate of change of the size of that object to determine what speed you think it’s approaching at, and when you need to cushion the catch.

By contrast a straightforward lob to the boundary is relatively easy to catch even if you have to run to meet it because we use the movement of the ball across the background to give us an extra angle to calculate where it is in 3D.

The driver sitting looking at a bike heading towards him is in the motoring equivalent of that up-and-down catch. At the high closing speeds possible on a motorcycle, it becomes almost impossible to judge distance, speed and time at all accurately.

[This is what I’ve called the ‘looked, saw and MISJUDGED’ error. But as well as the technical difficulty of accurately judging speed and distance, there’s an extra problem. Put a bike side-by-side with a car or van at the same distance and travelling at the same speed, and observers will almost always think the van will arrive first. Looking at the bike, they think they have more time, and make the mistake of pulling out. This has become known as the ‘size-arrival effect’.]

And whilst we’re digesting that, another thing to consider… it’s not just driver to your left you have to worry about, what about the driver turning across your path from the opposite direction? You have little time to react and are likely to add the oncoming vehicle’s speed to your own, and the driver has to factor in their own speed and distance to the turning point. That accident accounts for a whopping 21% of Killed and Seriously Injured in London, despite being the minority accident. By contrast, vehicles emerging from the left account for only 7% of KSI.

[This was the big lesson I personally learned from BikeSafe. I had no idea that the oncoming driver turning across the rider’s path was such a big killer. It’s been something I’ve been flagging up ever since.]

Where’s my coat, I’ll think I’ll take the bus instead!

POSTSCRIPT – Of course back in the early 2000s, what I wrote here kicked off a lot of negative feedback and some stinging criticism, typically suggesting I was “absolving the driver of responsibility”, or “making a victim of the rider”. It wasn’t just motorcyclists either – I was even told by a road safety officer that I was undoing all their good work promoting hi-vis clothing. Even in 2012, my presentation was often greeted with polite disbelief and shakes of the head.

But in the eight years since the first talk, other people have picked up the message and begun to run with it. Biker Down itself has gone national, and is delivered by over half of all fire services, many of which use a version of my SOBS presentation. A year or so after the first SOBS presentations on Biker Down, an RAF pilot compiled a very good article for a London cyclists’ magazine – I still reference that article regularly. And more recently, an excellent video has appeared online under the ‘Fortnine’ moniker on YouTube which covers much of what SOBS began explaining in 2012. Somewhat to my surprise, even BikeSafe in London has begun to cover some of the issues explained by SOBS.

As a result, riders are learning terms like ‘motion camouflage’ and ‘saccadic masking’ and the science isn’t quite so much of a mystery any more. The more of us saying the same thing, the more credible the message becomes and I’ve seen that in the response to my presentations, how attitudes have begun to shift.

Perhaps not surprisingly, as more people become familiar with the concepts of visual perception, critics have now started to say that SOBS is nothing new – that we knew all this already. I certainly don’t claim that I have contributed any original research to SOBS, but what is unique is that SOBS is most certainly the FIRST TIME anyone anywhere has attempted to assemble the research and present it ALL TOGETHER and in a form that is COMPREHENSIBLE to the average rider.

I personally have delivered the SOBS presentation to several thousand attendees on Biker Down in Kent, and many of the fire service Biker Down teams deliver a version of SOBS. Outside of Biker Down, I’ve personally taken SOBS to rider groups across the south of England (so drop me a line if you’d like a presentation delivered to your own group).

And in 2018 and 2019, SOBS achieved international recognition as I travelled to the other side of the world, to New Zealand. At the invitation of the NZ Transport Agency, the Ride Forever training scheme and the Accident Compensation Corporation, I was a keynote speaker on the Shiny Side Up roadshow that toured the county in both years, giving my talk to hundreds of Kiwi bikers at over a dozen venues on both trips.