patrick_g
Elite Member
Alan, I quit riding on the road, twice. The second time it "took." Reserved my biking for off road fun instead of transportation that pits probability of death against a little less gas and a little more fun.
The basic concepts that "cured" me were:
1. No matter how aware and heads up you are or even if you are partially psychic and almost always know what a car is going to do before the driver knows there is always that little incident that would have been a minor fender bender (if you were in a car) that hospitalizes or buries you because you were on a bike. No fault of yours, but dead is dead or worse yet a vegetable.
2. It is a fact of life, just the way people's eyes and brains work and nothing much you can do about it but virtually all drivers of automobiles and trucks see many many more cars and trucks on the road than murdercycles. As a result these drivers learn to judge distances to an oncoming vehicle based on their majority experience (cars and trucks.) It is a plain fact of the physiology and physics of vision and the interpretation of visual information that gets bikers in trouble with cars and trucks. Be advised that even folks with GOOD depth perception can only accurately perceive distance to 25-40 feet. This is a function of the parallax angle of your eyes. You learn to judge distance by how much the eye muscles move to "cross" your eyes and aim them both at something. Due to the narrow baseline (interpupillary) distance and accuracy of your angular measurement you just can't do it more than about 25-40 feet (and lots of folks aren't able to do it that well.)
How do we judge the distance of an approaching vehicle on a side street when we are at a stop sign waiting to cross? We have learned to note how fast the vehicle is passing objects of familiar size AND we have learned (subconsciously) to judge distance and closing rate by the image size on the retina and the rate of change of that image size. That is the PROBLEM. Many drivers have seen few murdercycles approaching them. THEY DO SEE the murdercycle coming on the cross street but their brain, trained on much larger cars and trucks, tells them the bike is farther away and traveling slower and that it is safe to pull out.
This is the actual cause of many murdercycles T-boning cars when the car seems to pull out in front of the bike at the last moment. The biker did absolutely NOTHING wrong (except ride on the street), violated no speed laws, and was the paragon of cycling virtue but gets a trip in the meat wagon to the ER, the morgue, or both.
This later thing is one of the FACTS that motivated me to give up the street riding. Well, that and an unintended right turn into a church parking lot when a car in the left lane made a right turn without signaling and took me along plastered on the side of her Caddy. She then rolled down her power window and cussed me out for hitting her. I guess she really did need to visit the church but maybe more safely. I didn't flip her off or kick in her door just reveled in still being alive, right side up, and not bleeding (minor bruises were acceptable.) Somehow I don't think any amount of noise would have helped.
Noise to make the car driver hear you coming will not make his act of seeing you but misinterpreting the information with disastrous results, less likely.
Of course there is always the guy eating a bowl of cereal and milk while driving and talking on the cell phone, reading a magazine, or so zoned out to his tunes he wouldn't know if it was Thursday or Philadelphia. I especially like the ladies doing their eye makeup with the misaligned rear view mirror at 80 and on the cell drifting slowly back and forth half a lane out of THEIR lane and then back across to the other side and flipping youji off if you touch your horn to wake them up long enough to safely pass.
Pat
The basic concepts that "cured" me were:
1. No matter how aware and heads up you are or even if you are partially psychic and almost always know what a car is going to do before the driver knows there is always that little incident that would have been a minor fender bender (if you were in a car) that hospitalizes or buries you because you were on a bike. No fault of yours, but dead is dead or worse yet a vegetable.
2. It is a fact of life, just the way people's eyes and brains work and nothing much you can do about it but virtually all drivers of automobiles and trucks see many many more cars and trucks on the road than murdercycles. As a result these drivers learn to judge distances to an oncoming vehicle based on their majority experience (cars and trucks.) It is a plain fact of the physiology and physics of vision and the interpretation of visual information that gets bikers in trouble with cars and trucks. Be advised that even folks with GOOD depth perception can only accurately perceive distance to 25-40 feet. This is a function of the parallax angle of your eyes. You learn to judge distance by how much the eye muscles move to "cross" your eyes and aim them both at something. Due to the narrow baseline (interpupillary) distance and accuracy of your angular measurement you just can't do it more than about 25-40 feet (and lots of folks aren't able to do it that well.)
How do we judge the distance of an approaching vehicle on a side street when we are at a stop sign waiting to cross? We have learned to note how fast the vehicle is passing objects of familiar size AND we have learned (subconsciously) to judge distance and closing rate by the image size on the retina and the rate of change of that image size. That is the PROBLEM. Many drivers have seen few murdercycles approaching them. THEY DO SEE the murdercycle coming on the cross street but their brain, trained on much larger cars and trucks, tells them the bike is farther away and traveling slower and that it is safe to pull out.
This is the actual cause of many murdercycles T-boning cars when the car seems to pull out in front of the bike at the last moment. The biker did absolutely NOTHING wrong (except ride on the street), violated no speed laws, and was the paragon of cycling virtue but gets a trip in the meat wagon to the ER, the morgue, or both.
This later thing is one of the FACTS that motivated me to give up the street riding. Well, that and an unintended right turn into a church parking lot when a car in the left lane made a right turn without signaling and took me along plastered on the side of her Caddy. She then rolled down her power window and cussed me out for hitting her. I guess she really did need to visit the church but maybe more safely. I didn't flip her off or kick in her door just reveled in still being alive, right side up, and not bleeding (minor bruises were acceptable.) Somehow I don't think any amount of noise would have helped.
Noise to make the car driver hear you coming will not make his act of seeing you but misinterpreting the information with disastrous results, less likely.
Of course there is always the guy eating a bowl of cereal and milk while driving and talking on the cell phone, reading a magazine, or so zoned out to his tunes he wouldn't know if it was Thursday or Philadelphia. I especially like the ladies doing their eye makeup with the misaligned rear view mirror at 80 and on the cell drifting slowly back and forth half a lane out of THEIR lane and then back across to the other side and flipping youji off if you touch your horn to wake them up long enough to safely pass.
Pat
But, there is still one thing that drives me nuts.
