'I didn't see the motorcycle.'

Factual Questions
21

The Hurt report is what I came here to mention. It’s the only study I remember reading about this.

Now onto GD territory;

-They are subconsciously trying to kill us out of jealousy because they know we are having more fun on the road then thay are!

-After the accident what do you expect the driver to say? Yeah I saw him but turned anyway?

After years of driving a truck and a taxi I’ve driven tens of thousands of miles. I’ve seen brain dead mistakes before, during and after accidents like you wouldn’t believe. I believe people drive in a mental rut, they use 3/10’s of their brain while doing it. The rest of the brain is listening to the radio, eating, thinking about dinner, the fight with a spouse/kids/boss or the rude comment from a movie ticket seller.

Drivers are conditioned to see what they expect to see or are accustomed to. Bikes have a fraction of the profile of cars, trucks or busses. They really “don’t” see bikes because they are looking for them. As long as there are a small fraction of bikes to cars we will not become automatic in the brain of the fraction of attention most drivers use while going down the road.

I ride with my high beams on during the day and have a tail light modulator on my brake light. I have 3M scotchlight reflectors on me and my bike to help stand out just a little bit more. I love my Triumph because it has a ‘pass to flash’ momentary switch for my lights. If I even think the person in the other lane is going to pull out or make a left at me I toggle the button to break their thousand yard stare where they don’t see me. Every little thing I can do makes me feel better, except for the open-pipes-I-have-a-small-penis-thing that I abhor.

Ride like they are trying to kill you.

22

I have to do the same thing in my Miata when the top is up. It just has a huge blind spot. For that reason, I try not to drive it when I’ll have to keep the top up.

23

When people say that the car turns left in front of the motorcycle, is the motorcycle in another lane, or the same lane? I’m having trouble picturing this because if the lane the car is in is a left turn lane, the lane to the left of it should be too, and if it’s the same lane the motorcycle should be in front of or behind the car, not next to it… OTOH, I’ve done 98% of my driving in New England, which isn’t a place known for following normal traffic patterns anyway.

24

Opposing traffic. You’re northbound on a motorcycle and a car is southbound on the same road. At an intersection the car is going to make a left. Since there is no left-turn arrow, you have the right of way. The car driver ‘doesn’t see you’ and makes his left turn just as you enter the intersection. You die.

25

Oh! That makes sense. I wasn’t thinking that would count as “in front of” but I can totally see what people mean by that now, since from the opposite direction the car would be in front of them too. Thanks.

26

Back in the 70s, my father told me about “studies” which showed that people just didn’t see bikes. IIRC, basically it was one on those show the picture for X seconds and ask to describe what was there. They picked up cars but not motorcycles. One recommendation was to drive with head lights on in order to key into people’s association of lights and vehicles.

27

This works for cars, too. That’s why in Ontario all cars have daytime running lights. In the US, GM sells (or used to, anyway) every, single model of theirs with daytime running lights. In parts of the rural west, you’re encouraged by road signs to turn on your headlights. When I drive in rural Mexico, I’m convinced having my lights on during the day has saved my life multiple times, and that’s while in a car.

Franky, I’m much more attuned to motion than anything else, so I tend to notice motorcycles. I never realized that it was such a big deal for other people. It’s kind of scary, because just by looking at objects and no respect for motion just seems so fsking nuts. On the other hand, they probably don’t get freaked out by the those stupid “spinner” wheel covers. I see them spinning and I flip out for a second, because I’m sure the vehicle is moving into the intersection while I’m trying to do the same thing!

28

The “left hook” is one of the most common types of collisions that street cyclists are involved in as well. I think that it’s a psychological phenomenon. The motorists physically sees the bike (motorcycle or bicycle), but this raw visual information is not processed and presented to the conscious. My (totally WAG) theory is that it has to do with the sheer volume of information that a motorist must deal with at every moment. Even “slow” speeds like 30 mph are pretty much at the upper limit of the what the human brain has evolved to deal with. There is so much data coming in, even when you’re just standing still, that the brain has to pick and choose which data to give attention to, and which data to ignore. This becomes more and more difficult as we move faster and faster. There’s a lot of visual data coming in at 30 miles per hour! So the brain classifies some data as pertinent and important, and basically discards the rest. How many times have you been driving home at night and suddenly noticed a pedestrian only as you were passing them? It’s really frickin’ scary, and it might not be because you’re an inattentive driver at all (though you may be driving too fast). Based on my own personal driving experience, these are my WAGs:

The most important information we get is what we need to direct the vehicle along the road. Dealing with other vehicles comes second. After that is everything else. There are at least two different criteria for identifying vehicles that come to mind: size, which is probably a more general trigger, since big things could be a semi truck or a building in the way, and familiarity. Trucks and cars are immediately identifiable as other vehicles, because we see them all the time. Because we see them all the time, we are easily able to judge their distance and movement. Motorcycles and bicycles, on the other hand, are smaller and less familiar than other motor vehicles. If they are not immediately identified and classified as vehicles by the brain, it may be that they just end up lost amid the clutter of other information needed to drive the vehicle (e.g., there’s my left turn up ahead…). The They are there, and the eye sees them, but the information never reaches the attention of the motorist because the brain didn’t classify them as critical information. I think that the size of the bike probably also plays a role, since it’s harder to tell what it is from the same distance. Bikes are common enough that an attentive driver will usually see them, if they are within her field of vision, but they are much easier to miss than larger motor vehicles due to the combination of small size and less familiarity. Bicycles have it even worse due to still smaller size and usually being positioned at the side of the lane of travel. This, incidentally, is why riding a bicycle on the sidewalk is not just obnoxious but a Very Bad Idea.

Anyway, if a motorists fails to notice an oncoming or overtaking motorcycle, I bet that it usually doesn’t cause a problem, since both vehicles are maintaining their speed and direction of travel. In fact, I suspect that this happens all the time. But if a car and a motorcycle encounter one another in a situation that requires being aware of other traffic, such as a left turn or a lane change, then the consequences of not seeing the bike can be deadly.

29

I don’t think this has been mentioned yet.

Another significant blind spot for a car driver is the pillar on either side of the windscreen. I personally often find that a car can be entirely hidden by this pillar unless I consciously move my head back and forward to ensure that I am seeing everything I need to. The most common example is when (I’ll try and translate into left-hand drive) you are turning left at an intersection and there is a car travelling across from right to left. The car can remain hidden by the right pillar until it is too late.

30

My husband recently worked on a case where the driver made a left, pulling her car out in front of the motorcycle in the process. Killing him. They created an animation, putting in all the trees; duplicating the road conditions and weather; the exact configuration of her car’s windshield, windows, pillars; the exact dimensions of the motorcycle, all that. And then modeled what the driver probably saw and did.

They modeled her as doing this: She looked both left and right. She looked left first, for oncoming traffic coming from that direction, but she looked less closely here because that was the near lane and the one she’d be crossing only briefly. The far lane of traffic was the one she would be turning into, so she was more concerned about that one.

Her quick check leftward didn’t really show the far-off motorcyle because of his narrow profile, so she thought the near lane was clear. When she looked right, there was a oncoming car in the far lane, and she followed it with her eyes & head, moving her head from the right to the center and slightly left (until it was past the intersection). This didn’t take her head far enough over to really look at the left (near) lane, though. She pulled out, and the motorcycle was right there.

What was eerie about this is that when they made the camera move like her head would, showing the viewer what she would have seen, it felt very real and her actions felt reasonable. Your brain didn’t say “wait, wait, move the camera differently, I want to look back the other way, you didn’t look long enough.” It felt natural and comfortable and like she’d done a fairly thorough job checking for traffic. He ran it again and again for me. It was nauseating. What it all hinged on was that the motorcycle was really hard to see, given where it was at the particular moment the camera looked that way. Maybe it’s as others have said–your brain is trained to see big cars. It doesn’t pick out motorcycles in the way it should, and it too quickly says “all clear” when it doesn’t see a car.

The driver was at fault. The motorcycle had the right of way, and she pulled out, and if she’d looked left a second time she would have seen him. He paid for her mistake with his life. If you’d read about this accident or had it demonstrated for you with toy cars, you’d conclude she was completely negligent, careless, and a menace. But this is what made a big impression on me–when you saw it from her point of view, you realized just how easy it would be to make that kind of mistake.

31

So re: my hypothesis. It’s not (as I guessed) that the drivers see the motorcyclists but perceive them, due to their smaller size than a car, to be farther away; but that they don’t see them (i.e., they don’t register in the brain as a vehicle) at all?

32

Let’s face it: most people treat driving as if they’re sitting on the couch wondering if they should have another bag of potato chips. It’s too easy and doesn’t challenge the mind.

Last month or so there was video on all the news channels from hidden cameras installed in cars pointing at the driver. It was a year-long study or something like that, and it showed that in many accidents the person allegedly controlling the vehicle was doing anything but. Changing the radio station, looking around at pretty trees, applying makeup etc…

I think the only way you can figure out if drivers actually aren’t seeing motorcyclists, or if they see them but just don’t realize how close they are, is to break it down on a case by case situation. However I believe that most people in cars aren’t paying attention to what they’re doing at all.

When I was hit on my scoot, it was because the other driver literally did not look in the direction she was going (she was stopped at a light, then decided to back up, and neither looked in her mirror or turned her head as she reversed into my bike). Given that her passenger was yelling loud enough for me and my wife (riding pillion) to hear, she probably wouldn’t have perceived me even if she had bothered to use her eyes.

33

Left Seat Passengers. (Mentioned in previous threads on them.)

A woman in an El Camino backed in to my BRIGHT ORANGE 1966 MGB at a stop sign. People need to look where they’re going.

34

Out of curiosity, CAAOM, had she used her turn signal?

35

I can’t recall (if I even knew). I didn’t sit in on the trial or anything, just got to see the animation.

36

As a motorcylist, this is just one of the things I have to be alert for. This is why I HATE it when drivers “edge” forward 6 inches at a time while waiting for an opening. I have to assume they are about to pull out in front of me, I brake hard, and then THEY have to wait that much longer for me to pass by. Lose-lose.

Those spinning hub caps are not only bling stupid, but they make it harder to tell when a car starts rolling. The wheel/tire turning shows twice the motion of the car itself, and is where my attention is focused.

Dark tinted windows prevent me from telling if the driver is looking my direction or not. Beacause they are looking at me doesn’t mean they see me, but they will probably look away (to thier right) just before/as they pull out.

37

I never rely on where a driver is looking. People look one way and go another all the time. Look at the wheels, they never lie. The car is going to go where the wheels are pointing!

38

I think Grelby has the answer. From studies I have read about, while your eyes may receive the full picture, by the time your brain finishes processing it, a lot of visual information has been edited out as what your brain has classified as background noise, so you don’t “see” it. More of the data is classified as “backgound - ignore” if you are concentrating on your dinner plans or are focused on some specific item in your field of vision.

Another factor I have not seen much reference to is the real blind spot - the poor design element of our eyes which places a blank spot in the middle of our field of vision. Your brain fills in the blind spot with “assumed” information, so that we do not see it and are normally unaware of it. I would not be surprised to find that a motorcycle at a distance is small enough to be completely or mostly hidden in the blind spot if the driver has his head positioned properly. The brain would then present a sight picture in which the motorcycle is absent just at the point when the driver’s viewpoint is passing over that spot.

39

Ok, I’ll try not to make any mistakes while I change all the references in this post (because we drive on the opposite side of the road here and use kilometres.)
They’ve changed the way you can get a Motorcycle license here. It’s not a test. It’s a course on motorcycle safety. I’m not sure if this is motorcycle etiquette in other places, but here you are taught to ride on the left 1 metre of the lane so the car can see you. And if you can’t see the driver in his mirrors, he sure as fuck can’t see you.
I’ve had some close calls but luckily no accidents. I had one guy turn left into me without slowing down or indicating at 60 miles per hour. I got stuck in the left lane when I got about 3/4 up a semi and could finally see that he was tailgating a bus, then realised that I was beiong approached in that left lane by a car at 65 miles/hour.
As you can see, these accidents would’ve been caused not by them having see me at all. Both parties would’ve been doing something illegally, but since I would be dead, the <i>accident would be put down to that the driver didn’t see me. </i> All IMHO.
I did get backed into a lot though.

40

*the accident would be put down to that the driver didn’t see me.

I gotta stop doing that.