this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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The only outfit associated with a significant change in mean passing proximities was the **police/video-recording jacket. **

Notably, whilst some outfits seemed to discourage motorists from passing within 1 metre of the rider, approximately 1-2% of overtakes came within 50 cm no matter what outfit was worn. This suggests there is little riders can do, by altering their appearance, to prevent the very closest overtakes

This is quite discouraging, but it seems to ring true in my experience. I've had quite a few drivers, who have come close to hitting me (even while walking at a crosswalk), claim that they "didn't see me" while I wore high-viz everything and had lights to further improve visibility.

How do we, as cyclists, even deal with “driver blindness”?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

It really is about driving culture. It is very obvious that f.e. italians think 30cm distance is plenty. Very different from france or switzerland or everywhere really except croatia where i have ridden. Netherlands is a whole different beast since they really seperated the traffic. Dutch drivers in on holidays abroad are some of the worst offenders though in my experience, which i found surprising, always thought that they are maybe not used to share roads as much, or because they don't know how big their trailers / RV's are.

In germany it is now part of the traffic law since 2020 that you need to keep 1,50m distance in cities and 2,00m in rural areas. There is also the open bike sensor citizen science project which measures distances, so you can show actual data about problematic areas or general (non)compliance, which i think is really cool. Pretty sure the distance kept got bigger in the last years here due to the law and also i think it being in the news with open bike sensor etc helped.

Of course you still have some drivers keeping way too little distance.