Target fixation is very real and extremely strange. After it happens, you can’t quite figure it out. You think to yourself “How did I hit that / run over that / not make that turn? I know I steered away from it.” Then you realize that while you felt like you were making steering inputs to the the handlebars, you were so focused on your target that the inputs weren’t sufficient to change direction. Even the act of braking gets screwed up, where if you’re focused on something hard enough, you might actually ride into / over it, instead of stopping before it. Again afterwards, it will seem a bit surreal because you could swear you were braking hard enough to stop in time.
For an observer, it looks crazy. The rider obviously saw those bicycles. Why didn’t he stop, or steer away from them? They weren’t in his lane and he could have easily made that turn at that speed if they weren’t there. In the video, you can see the exact moment that the bicycles come into the rider’s vision. From that moment on, they’re all he sees and I bet even now he can’t understand quite why it happened.
I’ve logged around 50k miles on motorcycles and I still actively remind myself “go where you look” when TF situations arise.
Last fall, I started work at 5:00 am and here in southeastern Michigan there are tons of deer in the roads. One morning a pretty big buck jumped right into the center of my lane just at the lead edge of my headlight’s area of effect. I distinctly remember forcing my gaze away from the big fucking animal and to the area I wanted to go. “Go where you look!” I avoided him by maybe six inches. I could have smacked him on the ass if I hadn’t been otherwise occupied. I’m pretty sure that a large percentage of novice riders would had fixed on the deer and ran right into him, while feeling like they did everything in their power to avoid him.
