TurnerGuy – Member
Is not seeing a cyclist because they are in a saccade a mistake or not ?
Not a mistake. Dangerous driving – you should be driving so you can stop. A saccade is almost instantaneous, and a cyclist is not going to miraculously materialise out of nowhere 5 feet from your bumper.
So you should be driving within your reaction time + whatever period occupied by a saccade.
I might be tempted to agree on the saccade. The mistake is to trust your eyes, trust that quick glance. You need to look twice or three times everywhere, and make sure you’re taking enough time to do so.
I’ve been surprised by cars or cyclists because I’ve missed them the first time but there’s been a second time, because that’s how I try to drive.
The point is that it is possible to do things to avoid missing a cyclist in a saccade, therefore drivers should do them. Like you I now take a second and third look before pulling out of anywhere – we could do with more public information stuff on this.
The point is that it is possible to do things to avoid missing a cyclist in a saccade, therefore drivers should do them. Like you I now take a second and third look before pulling out of anywhere – we could do with more public information stuff on this.
And there’s the rub: we don’t educate people about this when they learn to drive, let alone test them on it. So there’s a limit to how culpable someone can be held when they adhere to what they’ve been told is best practice, but that supposed best practice fails to account for researched and accepted visual and cognitive effects.
(There you go: that’s the next column in a paragraph.)
And there’s the rub: we don’t educate people about this when they learn to drive, let alone test them on it.
this is why I like two flashing lights in opposite sequence, so it looks like something is moving from side to side.
We are evolved to see movement so a driver is more likely to see that – I have had a number of drivers catch-themselves before pulling out on me with lights like that, but not if I only have a single light, or a single solid light.
