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‘Sorry mate, I didn’t see you!’ Even if you’ve got away with no or limited injuries, it’s an apology which isn’t appropriate as you survey the wreckage of your bike. Is this a driver being careless and dangerous or did he genuinely not see you?

Andy Goodwin and I were discussing the importance of good observation, and that the better your observation the better rider/driver you were. Andy, as you may remember from the June Newsletter, did some research and sent me a website link directing me to a report by John Sullivan of the RAF.

According to his report, the answer may have important repercussions for the way we train drivers and how as motorcyclists and cyclists we stay safe on the roads. John Sullivan is a Royal Air Force pilot with over 4,000 flight hours in his career, and a keen cyclist. He is a crash investigator and has contributed to multiple reports.

Fighter pilots have to cope with speeds of over 1,000 mph. Any crashes are closely analysed to extract lessons that can be of use.

John asserts our eyes were not designed for driving.  We are the result of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Our eyes, and the way that our brain processes the images that they receive, are very well suited to creeping up on unsuspecting antelopes and spotting threats such as sabre-toothed tigers.

These threats are largely gone and they’ve been replaced by vehicles travelling towards us at high speeds. This, we’ve not yet adapted to deal with. Why? Light enters our eyes and falls upon the retina. It is then converted into electrical impulses that the brain perceives as images. Only a small part of your retina, the centre bit called the fovea, can generate a high-resolution image. This is why we need to look directly at something, to see detail.

The rest of the retina lacks detail but it contributes by adding the peripheral vision. However, a mere 20 degrees away from your sightline, your visual acuity is about 1/10th of what it is at the centre. Try this scary test to see quite how much detail you lose in your peripheral vision:

• Stand 10 metres away from a car.
• Move your eyes and look just one car’s width to the right or left of that car.
• Without moving where your eyes are now looking, try and read the number plate of the car.
• Try the test again from 5m.

The test shows you quite how little detail you are able to truly capture from the side of your eyes. That’s not to say that we cannot see something in our peripheral vision – of course we can. As you approach a roundabout, you would be hard pressed not to see a huge lorry bearing down upon you, even out of the corner of your eye – obviously, the bigger the object, the more likely we are to see it. But would you see a motorbike, or a cyclist?

The report is extensive, and at six pages is too long for the blog, but I’d urge you all to click the link (or type it into your browser) to read the rest of it. It makes for very interesting reading, and there’s another test for you to try as well as advice and guidance in how driver/rider and cycle training should be structured. The report is at http://www.londoncyclist.co.uk/raf-pilot-teach-cyclists/.

On Wednesday 25 May, Group member and observer Victor Crawford gave us an update on the work of the North West Air Ambulance charity (NWAA). Victor is an enthusiastic and very committed Volunteer Presenter for NWAA, and his talk was partly based on NWAA’s ‘official’ presentation, and partly on his own research.

From the original concept of an emergency air ambulance service alone, the Helicopter Emergency Medical Service (HEMS) has developed to fulfil three functions:

• Emergency air ambulance.
• Rapid pre-hospital care: preparing the patient for hospital treatment.
• Emergency medical treatment. Time is often of the essence in enabling a patient to make a good recovery: as well as talking of the ‘golden hour’ in which to get a person to hospital, people now speak of the ‘diamond 10 minutes’ to provide initial treatment.

This can be achieved by the helicopter bringing a doctor to the patient, rather than waiting for the patient to reach the doctor in a hospital. In the USA, some air ambulance units now carry an air-transportable operating theatre. Each NWAA helicopter now carries a pilot, a paramedic who is also the navigator, and a specialist doctor.

The County Air Ambulance Trust, a separate charity from the regional air ambulances, aims to instal a helipad at every hospital in England, to help provide the fastest possible treatment for emergency patients.

NWAA is one of 18 air ambulance charities in the UK. It is entirely funded by sponsors and charitable giving – like the RNLI, it receives no Government funding. It operates three helicopters, which are leased, with their pilots, from Bond Air Services, at £6m a year. Leasing has substantial advantages over purchasing the helicopters: if a leased helicopter goes unserviceable, the lessor, Bond, provides a replacement straight away, instead of the charity having to wait for its own machine to be repaired; likewise, pilot training and checking is dealt with by the lessor, rather than the charity having to provide its own supervisory staff. One helicopter is based at Barton, and two at Blackpool.

NWAA’s ‘parish’ covers the area from Cheshire to south Lakeland, a region of 5,500 square miles, with eight million people, and terrain and infrastructure ranging from cities and motorways to agricultural land and wild countryside.

The latter bring out the advantages of air ambulances over land vehicles: land ambulances are often unable to get quickly to the scene of an emergency on agricultural land or in the wild, especially in wet weather, when even if there is access they may get bogged down. (Road ambulances are now very heavy, because of all the equipment they carry.) Moreover, even if an emergency scene is nominally accessible by road, when traffic congestion holds up surface vehicles a helicopter can jump the queue, and so achieve the critical aim of helping a patient rapidly.

NWAA flies 2,300 missions a year, and the number is increasing. At present they operate in daylight hours only. About one-third of their calls are to road accidents, and about a quarter of these involve motorcyclists. They will normally fly a patient to the hospital providing the most appropriate specialist care, rather than necessarily the nearest one. Wythenshawe Hospital, for example, is a national centre of excellence for treating burns.

Victor showed us some of the places where NWAA helicopters have landed – on a mini-roundabout, with hazardous street furniture all around, or on a motorway, only after both carriageways have been closed to traffic, to avoid opposite traffic having accidents through drivers looking at the helicopter.

If you dial 999, the ambulance controller will first want to know where you are. If you don’t know, and are using a mobile phone, they will ask permission to locate your mobile. Their objective is to get a land ambulance to you in nine minutes in a severe (‘red’) emergency, or in 20 minutes for a less urgent (‘amber’) situation. For a non-critical (‘green’) situation, they will aim to get a doctor to ring you within 60 minutes. The nine-minute objective for severe emergencies is achieved in 75% of cases.

Altogether, Victor gave us an excellent update on NWAA’s work, and the Group will be making a donation to NWAA as an expression of support and our appreciation.

Guess what?

Yes. I’ve done another driving course. This time I was at the Thruxton circuit near Andover in Hampshire. I had booked a session on the new (2014) skid pan.

My first skid pan course was at Thruxton in 1985 on the traditional oil-covered surface, and I went there several times after that. That skid pan closed many years ago, so I was interested to see what the new facilities were like.

The new skid pan comprises 3,200 square metres of polished tarmac lubricated by clean water.

The vehicles are a Toyota GT 86 with rear-wheel drive (RWD) and a Mini Cooper with front-wheel drive. Both vehicles can have traction control and ABS on or off. The Mini was by far the harder of the two cars to control. The instructor was clear that RWD is preferable in difficult conditions.

We were taught in a front-wheel skid to lift off the gas and counter-steer the exact amount you were trying to steer in the first place. So if you were steering 30 degrees to the right and getting no response, lift off and steer 30 degrees to the left. But not for too long. For rear-wheel skids as well as steering into the skid we were advised to use a little accelerator as the car corrects, being very careful not to overdo it or the car would snap into a secondary skid.

I have to say that everywhere I go on skid courses, at racing circuits and with the police, the instruction and advice is different and often contradictory. This is compounded by continual developments in vehicle engineering. With ESP fitted to my own car I should not unsteer an understeering skid because the electronics will recognize the discrepancy between the steering angle and the actual angle of travel and make the necessary corrections. Unsteering defeats the object of the ESP. When I mentioned this to the instructor he told me that if ESP fails I would need to know what to do. Fair enough: but by the time I’ve figured out that ESP is not working as I’m skidding along the road I will have crashed!

While at Thruxton I took advantage of the opportunity to have a high-speed lap as a passenger in a Skoda Octavia vRS (2 litre, 220bhp, 154mph, 0 – 60 in 6.8 seconds). My driver was a ‘tame racing driver’. I’ve been driven round Thruxton quickly many times but this was unbelievably fast and occasionally sideways! Great fun. Great driver. Great car.

 

Recently I had a very good discussion with Andy Goodwin, an associate in the Bike Section who I’m working with, on the correct use of brakes on a bike. He had a different view from the one I was advocating and this set us both reconsidering and rethinking what was considered as ‘gospel’ and advocated in the various motorcycling handbooks and resources we use. Andy has a love of knowing the physics of how something works, and did some internet research and found a very interesting feature on motorcycle braking which poses questions and provides answers on effective braking. For example, the first question posed was ‘Which brake is the most effective?’

The explanation provided was that the front brake is the most effective, giving between 60 and 80% of the bike’s stopping power in hard stops, depending upon surface conditions.  This is because most of the weight of the bike and rider transfers forward on to the front wheel when the brakes are applied. A common example of weight transfer is when you trip on a gutter – your feet stop but momentum keeps the top of you going and you fall flat on your face. The weight transfer that takes place under braking on a motorcycle pushes the front wheel on to the ground and makes it grip very well.

Another question posed was ‘Is braking a natural skill?’ The explanation provided was that braking, as with any riding skill, is a learned skill, not a natural one.

This means you must practice the correct braking skills enough to make them an instinctive reaction before you can be sure that you will do the right things in an emergency. Overseas research has shown that, because of panic overpowering a rider’s conscious reactions, nearly a third of all riders do absolutely nothing in an accident situation: they don’t even apply the brakes! If, however, your high-level braking skills are so well learnt that they are instinctive, you will do it right, no matter what the situation. However, this requires you to do a lot of high-level braking skill practice: the skills will not come with normal everyday riding.

A number of questions are posed in the article, and one which provides most debate is rear brake application. Many bike racers don’t use the rear brake at all, and for others it’s minimal. Lots of road bikers apply that practice to their road riding, thinking that’s how you brake on a bike. If you want to find out what’s said about this and much more, click on this link: www.webbikeworld.com/Motorcycle-Safety/braking-tips.htm or type the link into your internet browser.

My thanks to Andy for finding the article, and I hope it will provide some debate about motorcycle braking.

The joint winners of our Best Rider of the Year award for 2015-16 are Peter Ibbotson, on the left, and Iain Baillie in the centre.

Not only did we have joint winners, but we had joint third place riders as well. They were Julian Liddiard and Daren Cox.

Signing on for the morning session took place from 8.15 am: this was not a problem as my wife, Mary, had located a superb country hotel only three miles from the track.

The briefing covered all the salient points necessary for this type of event, as one would expect, safety and no damage to the cars of course being imperative. There were approximately 24 drivers present, who were allocated to the instructors, two per instructor. Track running time for each run was around 20 minutes, and then the instructor sat with his other driver for their 20 minutes. This was a very good system, as it allowed the drivers time to relax and the cars to cool down before the next session.

There was a diverse array of cars involved – an Astra, a couple of MX-5s, a Honda S2000, Mazda and BMW saloons, a Volvo estate, three Porsches, a Ford hatchback, and others.

In all we completed five 20-minute sessions, with the track open from 9.30 am until 12.30. The track was laid out with cones for the various gear changes, braking points, corner apexes, turning-in points, etc.

During the morning everyone increased their original performance, carrying more speed through and out of the corners on this fairly tight course. At the briefing, the recommended speed down the two 300-400 metre straights was 90 mph. Initially my speed was 80-85 mph. My instructor, Toby, ignored the recommendation, and we finished up at 95-100 mph in my 31-year-old 911.

Skills days allow anyone to experience the potential of their car, and speed is not the ultimate aim. The E-reg Volvo estate was driven by a gentleman in his mid-70s who had never driven on a track before, and despite a couple of ‘offs’ at the hairpin bend, he really enjoyed the experience.

Another skills day at Croft was scheduled for 28 September, but I understand that this has been put on hold due to lack of entries. I feel that this is a shame because so much more awareness for road driving can be learned by taking part. I have an entry at Thruxton (a circuit which I have never driven)on 28 September, so maybe more later.

The Telegraph has recently carried some interesting articles and correspondence about the value or otherwise of traffic lights.

It reports that in the UK there has been a 25% increase in the number of traffic lights since 2000. Some commentators suggest that removing many of our traffic lights would improve road safety by encouraging us to be more wary at the wheel (or handlebars). Although this appears counter-intuitive, the Transport Research Laboratory says ‘It is a myth that signals guarantee safety.’

The idea of reducing road clutter has been extensively tested in Holland, most obviously in the town of Drachten, which removed virtually all its lights at about the same time we started massively increasing ours. The result has been improved traffic flow, fewer accidents and fewer fatalities. Hans Monderman, the man behind the Drachten experiment, compared his philosophy of motoring to an ice rink: ‘Skaters work out things for themselves, and it works wonderfully well. I am not an anarchist, but we only want traffic lights where they are useful and I haven’t found anywhere they are useful yet.’

A study by the British Infrastructure Group of MPs and peers led by the former Cabinet minister Grant Shapps, warned that poorly designed junctions contribute to congestion. It surveyed 85% of local authorities, who are responsible for 93% of the country’s roads, and found that across the UK’s 245,000 miles of roads, there is a ‘controlled junction’ or crossing every 5.7 miles.

The study, backed by the AA, the RAC and senior politicians, called for a ban on the installation of new road controls, and recommended that traffic lights should be switched off and parking restrictions eased, because the ‘anti-car’ attitude of many councils was clogging up the roads. The report recommended that councils should switch off ‘huge numbers’ of traffic lights, take down needless signs and create more open, ‘shared’ road spaces. This would force drivers, cyclists and pedestrians to take more responsibility for their own safety, co-operate with each other and speed up the flow of traffic.

Mr Shapps, the Conservative MP for Welwyn Hatfield, said: ‘Removing many of these controls, particularly traffic lights, would go a long way to making road travel more efficient and better for the economy, and saving individual motorists money.’

The Dutch town of Makkinga removed all signs and other controls with success. In Ashford, Kent, traffic lights were removed in 2008 and the road layout was simplified. Accident rates fell by 41%, with evidence that congestion has eased, despite a rise in the number of road users.

It is estimated that delayed journeys caused by too many traffic controls costs the economy £16 billion a year, the equivalent of £514 for every registered car in the country. Here are some comments in letters to the Editor of The Telegraph:

‘After many years in the heavy commercial vehicle industry, I have been aghast to see the continuous move toward the installation of more and more unnecessary traffic lights, most of which significantly slow down journey times. A 44-ton truck grinding to a stop at a formerly free-flowing roundabout is an insult to the intelligence. The cost, not least to the environment, is appalling.’

‘The Peahen junction in St Albans is classic in this regard. When the lights work, there is chaos on every approach. When the lights are broken everything runs smoothly.’

A driver in Epperstone, Nottinghamshire, thought some water on the road was just an overflowing drain, and tried to drive through it. But it turned out to be running into a sinkhole: ‘All of a sudden the car was sucked across the road and I ended up in the hole in the road. The water came flooding in over my knees and eventually it was above the dashboard. It was fairly hard to escape… the car kept locking and unlocking itself so I had to get out of the passenger side, which was difficult.’

At least it says something for how well Honda lights keep going in wet conditions.

       

(Copyright of pictures not known, but acknowledged.)

‘Keyless’ car operation, where a car can be opened and driven without operating a key as a remote control or putting it into a lock, provided that the user has the key on their person, seemed to be one more modern electronic convenience. At present, 95% of European car makers offer keyless systems.

Unfortunately, the German ADAC has created two radio devices, an amplifier that must be positioned near the victim’s key, and a receiver that should be placed near the car, which enable a thief to unlock and steal the victim’s car without access to the key. They have been able to open and drive away a wide range of popular models, and believe CCTV footage shows thieves already using similar equipment.

Car manufacturers have not yet come up with an answer. Suggestions for keeping your car safe include keeping your keys in the freezer or a Farady cage, a device that blocks radio signals.

It is reported that the SNP-controlled Perth and Kinross Council has changed its definition of a pothole so that it can save money by not repairing so many. It has decided that potholes have to be at least 60 mm, nearly two and a half inches, deep before it will consider filling them. The previous minimum depth for repair was 40mm.

The council hopes to save £120,000 a year on pothole repairs, but has already been paying out an average of £16,000 a year on pothole-compensation claims.

An RAC spokesman commented that ‘The larger a pothole becomes, the greater risk it represents to road users and the more costly it becomes to repair. Hitting a large pothole has the potential to cause serious problems, from damaged shock absorbers and distorted wheels to broken suspension. In the worst cases, a pothole could cause a driver to lose control of their vehicle.

‘While in the short term the council might save money by repairing only larger potholes, it is saving up an expensive problem for further down the line.’