Near miss of the day?

It is weird how to some drivers the fact that they "didn't see the cyclist" is the perfect and entirely reasonable excuse for their awful driving, not as part of the problem and a symptom of their awful driving.

I'm sure you're familiar with Bez' excellent point on this in "The Incompetence Paradox"

I do miss Bez.

He did act as a blogger on single-track for a while.

There was a very good article in the Institute of Advanced Motorists magazine written by a fighter pilot explaining how they are trained in observation.

The flippant summary is that the brain is ax liar and pretends it can see when it can't.

When you move your eyes, the brain switches off vision but you are unaware of this as your mind fabricates a view. Similarly, you can see in detail an area about the size of a 50p piece held at arm's length, anything else you see is a fabrication extrapolated from a much less detailed view. The illusion though is you have a wide angle of detailed view. Peripheral vision responds to movement, but not shape recognition.

So atypical junction requires scanning from side to side. If you simply glance from side to side, a significant portion of your viewing time is ineffective. You need to fix on a point, look, fix on the next point and look and so on. Add in a cycle at the side of the road tends to be approaching at a narrow angle, there is less apparent movement to trigger the movement sending aspect of vision, compared with a car, of larger volume further out in the road.

So "I didn't see you" is quite likely to be an honest response, as is the retort "but you didn't look" (properly).

Fighter pilots get training on how to look because lives depend on it. Yet road users do not, most are not aware of the strange cheats our brains make to cope with a task that after thousands of man years of development and custom made computer chips of phenomenal processing power a Tesla cannot get close to achieving for one small aspect that we use vision for.

Driving style also has an effect. Advanced motorists are trained to approach junctions at low speed, allowing time to assess the road and maintain momentum through a junction where appropriate by matching speed to other road users, anticipating gaps and obstructions. A typical driver instead tends to aim their braking point to bring them to a halt at a give way, then go through an observation process. The harsh braking requires more judgement and observation of the road itself rather than leaving the capacity to start assessing the road conditions, so for example a slow moving cycle will have moved less during the hard stopper's reduced observation time, so the brain will be less likely to be triggered that there is a moving object and less likely to be able to calculate it's approach correctly.

that fighter pilot thing gets used alot and sure its an interesting analysis on the way the human brain works, but the reality in a motoring situation is you dont have to be trained to have fighter pilot skills, you need to just look, and move your head to look.

I wouldnt call this incident I had this week a near miss as I spotted the danger and was prepared for what was to happen so could avoid any danger to myself, but I saw the front of  car edging out from a drive way ahead of me on my left on this country lane in a quiet village, the view towards the direction I was coming from was being partially obscured by a fence, and as more of the car edged out it was clear the driver was solely fixated looking the other way as they were going to turn right out of their drive, and  satisfied there was nothing coming from that direction they pulled out directly into my path, at which point they had to do an emergency stop, Id already taken it upon myself to slow enough I could have stopped if the car hadnt, so we wouldnt have collided, and I just glared at the driver as I had to ride around them rather than make a big thing out of it.

But that situation didnt come about because that drivers brain isnt upto fighter pilot levels, it came about because he never looked in my direction once, till the moment he had already commited to pulling out of his drive, at which point its too late and maybe a less experienced rider who hadnt spotted the signs, or maybe if Id been a few seconds further along, there would have been a collision and Ive no doubt the first thing he'd have said would have been I didnt see you, you came out of nowhere, not I never looked to see if you were there.

Awavey wrote:

that fighter pilot thing gets used alot and sure its an interesting analysis on the way the human brain works, but the reality in a motoring situation is you dont have to be trained to have fighter pilot skills, you need to just look, and move your head to look.

I wouldnt call this incident I had this week a near miss as I spotted the danger and was prepared for what was to happen so could avoid any danger to myself, but I saw the front of  car edging out from a drive way ahead of me on my left on this country lane in a quiet village, the view towards the direction I was coming from was being partially obscured by a fence, and as more of the car edged out it was clear the driver was solely fixated looking the other way as they were going to turn right out of their drive, and  satisfied there was nothing coming from that direction they pulled out directly into my path, at which point they had to do an emergency stop, Id already taken it upon myself to slow enough I could have stopped if the car hadnt, so we wouldnt have collided, and I just glared at the driver as I had to ride around them rather than make a big thing out of it.

But that situation didnt come about because that drivers brain isnt upto fighter pilot levels, it came about because he never looked in my direction once, till the moment he had already commited to pulling out of his drive, at which point its too late and maybe a less experienced rider who hadnt spotted the signs, or maybe if Id been a few seconds further along, there would have been a collision and Ive no doubt the first thing he'd have said would have been I didnt see you, you came out of nowhere, not I never looked to see if you were there.

You were very "soft" on that driver.  I'd have been screaming at him to "Look both ways".  His driving is below the acceptable level I would say. 

I save my ire for the really dangerous drivers, this one I'd hope had learned from the way they stopped, to look both ways in future

 "didn't see the cyclist" is the perfect and entirely reasonable excuse for their awful driving

You omitted the additional one which will almost always get you off with no difficulty: I didn't mean to do it. This assists the police with their trump card which could work for any traffic offence if the police are idle or bent enough: only a momentary loss of concentration (in this case, of course, WYP are excused, along with the legendary Inspector Kevin Smith of Sheffield and ally Dame Sarah Storey)

wtjs wrote:

 I didn't mean to do it.

As we all know in the UK we just accept "accidents happen" on the roads - with more or less awareness of our own fallibility. So if the driver didn't mean it there can be no blame, they maybe just had a bad moment (as we all do) - you cannot punish them for that!

Or even - "it's just as likely the cyclist wobbled / swerved / fell off. They shouldn't really be on the road. They don't even need to be there. Bloody cyclists!"