Posts Tagged ‘car–bicycle collisions’
“Talk About Cyclists as you would talk about Road users”: Freshest concerns
Posted on: November 21, 2013
“Talk About Cyclists as you would talk about Road users”: Freshest concerns
After cycling deaths and serious accidents it’s common to see people talking about red light jumping, pavement cycling and so on – and yet this rarely happens when pedestrians get knocked over or there are multiple car pile-ups. So we wondered: what would it be like if we talked about everyone else the way we talk about cyclists?
Rachel Holdsworth posted this Nov. 14, 2013 on the Londonist
If We Talked About All Road Users The Way We Talk About Cyclists
“I know the woman crossing the road was in my blind spot, but if she’d been wearing a high-vis jacket I’d have seen her – in my blind spot.”
“I nearly got knocked over by a bus on a zebra crossing once. It was a dual carriageway, the van in the lane nearest to me had stopped but this bus went sailing through and missed me by inches. This actually happened.
I now hate all buses and think they shouldn’t be allowed on the road.”
Photo by Homemade from the Londonist Flickr pool
“If the pushchair didn’t have lights on, then I’m not surprised it got hit. What? Yes, even at 2pm.”
“I’ve got no sympathy for the little old man knocked down at the crossing. If he wasn’t wearing a helmet he should take what’s coming to him.”
“I see buses jump red lights all the time. Just look on YouTube, there’s loads of videos. Therefore all bus accidents are the fault of buses jumping red lights. I bet all the buses that hit people in London (one a day) jumped red lights. Bastards.”
“1.2m drivers don’t have insurance. I think police should wait at big junctions to check all drivers’ documents.”
“Did you hear about that horrific accident? Where the car ended up under a low loader and the driver was killed? Bet he was texting when it happened.”
“Bloody mobility scooter on the pavement! Get on the road where you’re not a danger to pedestrians!”
“Bloody mobility scooter on the road! Get on the pavement where you’re not a danger to motorists!”
It’s almost as if road users are individuals who sometimes do stupid things but can’t be held representative of that entire transport mode. Perhaps we should just concentrate on making infrastructure safer for all vulnerable road users.
Hannah Padgett wrote:
“If you look at taxonomies of car–bicycle collisions or car–motorcycle collisions, which tend to be very similar, you see that the majority of collisions happen in just a few circumstances.
One of the key circumstances is: the rider is going straight along a main road and are hit by a driver turning right (in the UK), either into a side street or out of one.
There’s actually a (very) small psychological literature on this, particularly the ‘looked-but-failed-to-see phenomenon’, which is where the right- turning driver looks at the rider but does not consciously become aware of the hazard.
Unfortunately, this literature is so small it doesn’t provide very hard answers, but it’s likely the problem is drivers’ expectations, making it a top- down processing problem.
The hypothesis is that drivers don’t expect to encounter cyclists at junctions and so their visual search patterns go to the parts of the road where cars and trucks are to be found, skipping the parts of the road where cyclists (and, to an extent, motorcyclists) are found.”
Adonis Diaries 