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A comment on In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from left turns. Parent comment

Re:In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from ... by rootusrootus on Monday December 06, 2021 @04:35PM (#29466018)
> In the motorcycling world oncoming left vehicles are basically the "Jesus take the wheel" scenario.

Years ago I nearly creamed a motorcycle after looking pretty much directly at him. The angles we were converging at meant that he basically disappeared into the background because there was no relative motion. Probably scared the crap out of him, and it certainly scared the crap out of me.

That was when I started moving my head back and forth coming up to an intersection where I'm going to turn, because it introduces enough of a perspective change to make a moving motorcycle stick out. It's exactly the situation described in the fighter pilot article. The human brain is amazingly good at stitching together what appears to be a complete scene while actually losing pretty sizable chunks of it all the time.

The other times I have close calls were 100% coincident with having a full car of passengers. I think we only have a certain amount of bandwidth, and taking up a bunch of it with noise reduces what's left to devote to vision. I also turn down the radio when I'm coming up to an unfamiliar area, or a situation that is obviously going to be complex to navigate.

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Re:In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from ... by kibwen on Monday December 06, 2021 @05:28PM (#29466532)
> The angles we were converging at meant that he basically disappeared into the background because there was no relative motion.

This effect is demonstrated in this video about a particularly dangerous crossing in the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYeeTvitvFU

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Re:In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from ... by WillPostForFood on Monday December 06, 2021 @05:43PM (#29466696)
Yikes, just 15 seconds into the video, a car absolutely blows through the stop sign.
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Re:In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from ... by gambiting on Monday December 06, 2021 @07:27PM (#29467669)
I wonder if it's at least partially because in the UK stop signs are pretty much non existent. I have only ever seen a handful in my life and people don't have this ingrained understanding that you absolutely have to stop at them and look around before moving - it's just a weirdly shaped give way sign to them.
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Re:In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from ... by mnw21cam on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @04:26AM (#29470554)
They're typically only used in situations where you actually do need to stop in order to adequately see what's coming. In the last city I lived in, there was one single stop sign, and we used to say that it was there just so that learner drivers could be taken past it and tested on it. Now I live in a small village and there is a genuine blind junction with historic buildings right down to the pavement, and there's a very appropriate stop sign there.
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Re:In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from ... by groundhogday2 on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @01:05AM (#29469502)
It is a test failure if you do not stop the car and put on your handbrake in the UK. It is made quite clear what you are supposed to do.

People just can't be bothered to actually stop.

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Re:In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from ... by gambiting on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @02:13PM (#29476905)
Yes, of course, but I think we have to acknowledge that it's a very uncommon sign in the UK, and the fact that you almost never come across it in your day to day driving might make you numb to it - and in like the car in the video, just blow right past it. Maybe someone who interacts with Stop signs every day and has to obey them on a regular basis wouldn't have done that.

I don't know of course, this is pure speculation

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Re:In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from ... by rkk3 on Monday December 06, 2021 @06:24PM (#29467103)
Yeah its terrifying. As he says "They are reckless & can see the main road is clear", blind spots are scary.
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Re:In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from ... by silisili on Monday December 06, 2021 @06:12PM (#29466981)
Yeah that's terrifying. He didn't mention a roundabout, seems like that would probably be about the best solution there to me.
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Re:In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from ... by kelnos on Monday December 06, 2021 @07:26PM (#29467657)
He mentioned that curving the two sides of the stop-signed road so that they don't meet the main road at the same point anymore is an option, but it would cost £100,000, and there was local conservatism & conservation at play that would nix even that fairly simple idea. A roundabout would cost a lot more and create more change/disruption, so I'm sure that's even less likely to happen, and thus not even worth mentioning.
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Re:In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from ... by bryanlarsen on Monday December 06, 2021 @09:10PM (#29468406)
First comment on the video mentions that the road is gong to be fixed. There are probably a bunch of similar roads with the same problem but not the same publicity that aren't getting fixed though.
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Re:In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from ... by gregors on Monday December 06, 2021 @08:44PM (#29468241)
This also happens in aircraft. Blind spot and the angle caused this 2019 crash in Alaska. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT1omo5jBqs
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Re:In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from ... by foepys on Monday December 06, 2021 @04:59PM (#29466247)
There is also a phenomenon where drivers (car and truck) just forget about motorcycles coming their way. They see it, they register it's there but then just... forget about it.

Imagine a car wants to turn and waits and a line of cars pass with a motorcycle at the end, then it's extremely dangerous for the motorcyclist. Because our brains interpret dangers relative to us, it sometimes just filters out the not-so-dangerous things. The motorcycle is relatively harmless to a car or truck thus drivers sometimes filter it out as if it doesn't exist.

What happens then is the car driver just waits for the cars to pass and then begins to turn while the motorcycle is still coming up, often resulting in a crash.

There is an easy fix, though: just say "motorcycle" out loud when this situation occures. It's really as easy as that.

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