So I have to cross a busy road on my commute - its a 60 but cars often do more. A horrible junction (crossing the A27 from Littledene Lane towards Glynde if you are a Lewes local), it has a refuge in the middle and any sane person will always stop there during the crossing. Trouble is I've negotiated this junction over a thousand times and being pretty good at judging the traffic speed I tend to just cruise over 'frogger style'.....
So tonight, as usual there is a car coming from the tiny road opposite and plenty of fast moving traffic in each direction on the main road. The opposite car makes the first lane crossing, stops in the refuge and as there is a fairly sizeable gap in the other lane and being a nice bloke gestures for me to go across first before he joins the traffic. I do, cross into the refuge and clock the car coming towards me in the other lane, judge (correctly) that I have plenty of time to get across and keep rolling.....BEEEEEEEEEEEP, bang on the brakes and see out of the corner of my eye there is ANOTHER car in front of it! A car I'd completely failed to see and which had he not been on the ball and I not stopped on a dime (thanks disc brakes) would have taken me out at 60-70mph and I'd be with the angels right now.
So what happened?
There is perfect visibility - its a long straight so no excuses there. The sun was out but not in my eyes, in fact the light was lovely.
All I can think of is this - both cars were the same colour and the same size travelling at the same speed in the same direction. I think my brain saw them and fused them together into one - It literally blanked out one of them saying ' yeah we got that already, nothing more to do here' and I was only seeing the second one. It didn't help they were both that stupid matt grey colour which is identical to the road surface. Couple that with an incredibly familiar scene my brain has scanned thousands of times before and you truly see how complacency breeds a traffic accident.
So what have I learned from this - well from now on I will never cross both lanes without stopping - doing the double head movement to avoid Saccadic Masking EVERY time.
Pretty scary and very weird.
scary just reading that as I know what you mean. As much as possible I try to avoid any move that requires me to rush across a road as I know it is possible to not see something that is actually there and it's not through not looking, you just don't see it 🙁
Saccadic masking?
Look twice. Buy a lottery ticket?
I'm still not sure this is 100% true but I was listening to Radio 4 last week and they were talking about visual processing time being about 100ms - which is so long that apparently instead of our brains showing us what's there, they instead construct what they think will be there in 100ms, as opposed to the actual truth. And this is how "magic" works.
So if that's the case, if anything appears in less than 100ms which you're not expecting, you won't "see" it because your brain wasn't expecting it. I doubt this mattered when humans evolved to how we are now - but the world was very different 100,000+ years ago.
That isn't a fun junction and that road is so busy at rush hour. We had a nasty T-junction a mile or two from where I grew up, just after a crest on a fast bit of A road that many did 80+ along. Occasionally we'd hear the loud BANG of death... They put average speed cameras along that road about 20 years ago - hopefully it's made a big difference.
Well at least you have the sensible attitude to reflect on the incident and will doubtless be a more considered driver in future. Plenty wouldn't.
I remember reading an article by an RAF pilot on the way eyesight works explaining the effects of the jumps (saccades) on what we think we see.
It was probably posted here at the time.
https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-surviving-on-the-roads/
Fighter Pilots Guide ....... @slugabed - That's a really good article and well worth reading
I remember reading an article by an RAF pilot on the way eyesight works explaining the effects of the jumps (saccades) on what we think we see.
It was probably posted here at the time.
https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-surviving-on-the-roads/
Yep. Excellent. Well worth a read!
Possibly somewhere in the processing your brain predicted that the first car would be past you before you moved so that was then dismissed and it went on to predict that you had enough time to cross before the second one arrived. It's not that you didn't see it it's that you were only aware of the last prediction you made.
It's a horrible road to cross, think heading over it to Glynde I'd probably find myself turning left and going around the Beddingham roundabout. Wouldn't work coming back of course. Have to say if I'm approaching it and there are cars at the junction I'm always very aware of them and that they might not have "seen" me
will doubtless be a more considered driver in future.
I was on my bike for the avoidance of doubt but yes, it will also help with driving and more importantly motorcycling! I feel i've read that article a long time ago but its certainly worth a refresh, thanks.
Ironically I was almost hit on that road a few years ago - there are a set of bike lane traffic lights a km further on at the Firle turn off and an arsehole in a Range Rover with a caravan decided to drive through them on red at full speed. I'd seen him coming assumed that as the lights were now red he be stopping, started to cross. There were two cyclists on the other side and just looking at the horror in their faces I knew - somehow I managed in a split second to turn my wheel and almost trackstand to a stop and the **** missed me by an inch or two. How can anyone simply drive through a red light at 60 with people obviously about to cross on each side?
Learning from that was never cross till the traffic on both sides is at a standstill!
Possibly somewhere in the processing your brain predicted that the first car would be past you before you moved so that was then dismissed and it went on to predict that you had enough time to cross before the second one arrived.
Nah - i really didn't see it. They were quite close together, I'd never have tried to cross in between them.
I couldn't turn left - that would mean cycling on the main road which is suicide - the cycle path is on the other side.
Could it be that the 2nd car had some of those silly bright DLR's but the one at the front didn't,so your brain just focused on the lights? This has nearly caught me out a couple of times in the past, but thankfully not with such fast traffic.
Looking at it from a driver's point of view, this sort of thing might also explain a percentage of SMIDSY accidents,
I've got slightly wonky eyesight (double vision) which means I appreciate a lot of the tricks our brain does to compose the image we think we see. Basically, it doesn't have the processing speed to create the full hd picture we experience and (in my terminology) it swaps in library images a lot.
But in a separate issue - not related to the OP - one of the dangers of older people on the roads is that their (our, gulp) perception of "enough time to make this" actually becomes more risky rather than over cautious. I notice this when crossing a busy A road when riding with younger mates. When they eventually join me at the other side they'll say things like "oof, that was close".
I know what you mean about the familiarity - my incident was on a road I've ridden 1000s of times too. Whizzing down the kerbside of the queueing traffic has always been pretty simple. Add some potholes and some random swerving from the drivers and ...bosh.
It's made me realise that that road is a recipe for disaster - (have had a couple of rages at drivers for nearly taking me out) - so after 30+ years of riding that way I'm going to change my route.. when I get the bike back 🙁
Thankfully, it was nothing like a 60-70mph take out. I don't think you'd survive that.