Collision course

It’s the excuse we often hear when motorists pull out in front of us: ‘Sorry mate, I didn’t see you.’ But is that actually true? And how might pilot training help cyclists avoid those situations?

Windscreen pillars offer an unfortunate hiding place for cyclists coming from a 45° angle, a view known to pilots as ‘quartering’

Picture it: you’re riding fast along a familiar country lane, towards a crossroads where you have priority.

There are no obvious threats; the road is straight and dry. Your attention is drawn subconsciously to your left. Unobstructed over clipped hedges you see a truck approaching from a similar distance at similar speed. You continue – as does the truck – resulting in your closest near miss yet. How do such circumstances conspire to make you strangely invisible?

I’m a commercial pilot of 14 years and a keen rider. Pilots are trained in ‘human factors’ – awareness of the limitations of our highly evolved biology – and threat mitigation. An event similar to the one I’ve just described happened to me (in pilot terms an ‘airprox’), where the driver later admitted not seeing me. Which led me to wonder if I couldn’t use my pilot’s knowledge to help riders stay a bit safer on the roads…

Eyes of a hunter

The Wright Brothers made their first controlled, powered flight in

1903. It’s little known that, prior to being aviation pioneers, they were bicycle manufacturers, their practical appreciation of the forces acting on a moving vehicle forever linking wheels and wings. Both have been revolutionised over the intervening

119 years, but the operator still works on evolutionary terms. Key is that the ‘mark one eyeball’ was optimised for spotting sabre-tooth tigers, not descending the Stelvio, particularly when other road users introduce unexpected human elements.

‘This presents us with some shortcomings now we routinely climb into metal boxes and hurtle towards each other,’ says fighter pilot and cyclist

John Sullivan. ‘Our world has changed far faster than our bodies can adapt.’

Part of the problem is relativity.

When maintaining a constant relative bearing to a driver, you appear stationary in their windscreen and less likely to register in peripheral vision.

‘Whether on the road or in the air, vehicles traveling at a constant speed will stay in the same position relative to each other as they approach a point of collision,’ explains Sullivan.

Like public roads, uncontrolled airspace relies upon ‘see and be seen’ for collision avoidance. Student pilots are drilled in a vital ‘lookout scan’ against the collision risk of the unseen aircraft on a constant, converging course – until its huge increase in size very late on. A colleague once described this as ‘like a Klingon battle cruiser de-cloaking in front of you’.

At my crossroads, I had hovered in the corner of the driver’s vision, a white helmet against a green hedge, beneath any recognition threshold. Circumstances conspired to make me effectively invisible – critical given that I would lose the fight regardless of who had priority.

Now consider the junction’s angle. The windscreen pillars in cars offer an unfortunate hiding place for cyclists coming from a 45° angle, a view known to pilots as ‘quartering’.

‘Not only do the pillars represent a physical blindspot, but our eyes tend not to fixate near to them – called windscreen zoning,’ says Sullivan.

These reasons begin to explain how SMIDSY (‘Sorry mate, I didn’t see you’) is not just the result of inattention, but can occur due to evolution and the way our eyes work in the real world.

Looking versus seeing

Only the eye’s central core, the fovea, can resolve objects in highest resolution. Details quickly attenuate in peripheral vision; try reading a car number plate by focussing on the bumper – it can’t be done. Instead, peripheral vision detects movement, alerting the brain to redirect the fovea.

Balancing these two types of camera allows us to make effective use of our vision. Sullivan reveals that sound also directs the eye: ‘In our metal cocoons with the radio playing, this is yet another cue we are denied.’

Another evolutionary feature is that the eye constantly scans in rapid jumps called saccades – a 19th century French term, translating as ‘jerk’. These jerks can happen subconsciously hundreds of times a second, separated by brief pauses (fixations) as the eye assimilates detail. Look rapidly eye-to-eye in a mirror and you cannot see your own eyes moving, but others will. The brain filters eye movement (saccades included) and any subsequent blur to maintain a complete, yet potentially deceptive, visual field, a process known as ‘saccadic masking’.

Could a cyclist fall within a saccade and not be seen? Sullivan has studied the effect and believes so.

A classic scenario is approaching a junction with priority over waiting traffic. To drivers, an oncoming rider appears as a single point with little sideways (again, relative) movement. The eye easily tracks moving objects but must acquire them first.

‘Not only are you more vulnerable,’ says Sullivan, ‘but the narrow profile of a bicycle makes it far more likely that you can fall into a saccade.’

Make yourself safe

How might we as cyclists avoid these evolutionary pitfalls? If, as I approached my crossroads, I slowed my pace, that would change my relative position, helping to make me more visible and avoiding arriving at the junction at the same time as the truck. If in doubt, a

sweeping wave of a hand perpendicular to my riding direction might also register peripherally with the driver.

Beware low contrast, with your back to a low sun. ‘Fighter pilots attack from out of the sun,’ says Sullivan, observing how long shadows can also completely conceal cyclists. The effect is similar against highly reflective (wet, in bright conditions) road surfaces.

‘Tip the odds in your favour. LED lights create contrast and the flashing attracts peripheral vision,’ he suggests.

Another key to avoiding crashes is to assume that drivers haven’t seen you and look for evidence to disprove it. Try to make eye contact – the eye is naturally drawn to others, and even through cycling glasses you can recognise when you’re being watched.

‘The head of the driver will naturally stop and centre upon you if you’ve been seen,’ says Sullivan. If they instead scan past without pausing briefly, it could signal that they haven’t seen you, and you may have to take action to permit a margin for their incorrect pull-out.

When driving, you can do your bit to protect cyclists by slowly and constantly moving your head using a deliberate three-step fore, mid and background scan to maximise foveal detail and peripheral sensitivity.

‘Fighter pilots say, “Move your head or you’re dead”,’ says Sullivan, who warns of dirty or cluttered windscreens. ‘You never see a jet with a dirty canopy.’

There are other human elements that, even at cycle rather than jet speeds, are impossible to quantify. Ageing eyes become less able to pick out detail in darkness, plus humans are liable to distraction and habit.

‘Your brain is less likely to recognise something you’re not expecting to see,’ reveals Sullivan of those familiar, rural junctions – the ones that are quiet until the day they aren’t.

Be seeing you…

There is no real excuse for SMIDSY, but there are some scientific explanations for its frequency. Drivers really aren’t deliberately out to mow us down, but evolution and circumstances can begin to stack against them – and therefore us. Highly evolved optics won’t compensate for negligence, but some understanding helps us use them effectively. Where road safety is concerned, surely the slightest rebalancing of defences is anything but a marginal gain.