Chapter 26 – Bicyclists

Publisher Summary The demarcated road system is the heart of one of the major problems faced by bicycling today. Specifically, compared to more popular modes of transport, bicycling is neither one thing nor the other from the perspective of infrastructure provision. Faster than walking, the bicycle does not always sit easily among pedestrian space, often stirring fear and resentment from people on foot; but slower than driving, bicycling does not mix easily with motor traffic either. The involvement of motor vehicles in the more serious bicyclist injuries tends very often to follow a predictable pattern in which the bicycle is struck at an intersection by a turning car that fails to yield priority appropriately. The perceptual and attentional lapses causing drivers to overlook bicyclists near intersections are not well-understood. However, there is good reason to believe that the process involves a substantial top-down processing component in the drivers. “Looked but failed to see” errors, in which a driver fails consciously to perceive another road user despite being in a position to do so, are more common in experienced drivers than in novices. These attentional lapses particularly endanger bicyclists, and because they become more frequent when people are familiar with the driving task, the problem clearly does not simply lie in the bicyclists being difficult to see; if that were the case, it would be the novices who overlooked them more often. A plausible mechanism behind these perceptual failures, which so far appears to be untested, is that drivers often fail to notice bicyclists at intersections because of misplaced expectations about what they will encounter. Another reason to believe that bicycle collisions involve a top-down cognitive process in the driver comes from drawing an analogy with the motorcycling literature.