Volvo bug reports, issue #1: MGIF driver

Given some of the Volvo self driving car developers are ex colleagues of Bristol Traffic team members, we get to file bug reports. Not some directly accessible issue tracker where you get to file stuff like "XC90 driver nearly killed me" only for tech support to close as a "works as intended", but at least get to give them cues about how their land-barges get used and abused in the field. Here's one of this week's Volvos. Mid-afternoon, not rush hour but within range of school pickup times. Sunny days to treasure before the miserable season settles in.

First: "MGIF" , "Must Get In Front"

Definition: A driver who is focused on overtaking the bike without looking ahead to consider "What happens next?

In AI terminology a "planning horizon of 1", usually loses to any computerised chess/draughts player with a horizon >= 2 unless the latter is awful about assessing the value of all enumerated moves & countermoves.

In this instance,

1. the speed limit of the bridge and the rest of the city for the subsequent 1-2+ miles in any direction is 20 mph. You can see one of the signs at 0:01 in the video
2. the cyclist she chooses to pass is doing 19-20 mph, still accelerating in their underresponsive steel-framed MTB.
3. The car a safe stopping distance in front is also doing 20 mph
4. And it'll have to slow down once it gets to the end of the bridge due to the road there (i.e it's 100% predictable, irrespective of time of day & pedestrian/traffic numbers)
5. the oncoming cyclist is going 15 + mph

Which means that

(a) there's no defensible reason to pass the cyclist "I need to break the law to overtake a bike cycling at the speed limit to get behind the other vehicle going at the same speed before I get into the city proper and really have to slow down".

(b) she's failed to anticipate how long it will take to overtake the bike, even as she speeds up to 25-30.

(c) the closure rate with the oncoming cyclist becomes about 40-45 mph. If the oncoming roadie hadn't been keeping to the far left of the lane, there'd have been a collision.

Looking back at the footage, she's hanging back at the split to two lanes at the tolls to make a late-binding choice of which one to go through -a slight sign of impatience.  She takes the left one; the right hand one is occupied by an SUV whose driver can barely see over the wheel, which is why the cyclist chose to hang back and wait: didn't seem safe to go ahead. As the Volvo comes through fairly rapidly, it's probable she has one of the contactless cards which you top up with prepaid bridge crossing tokens; sign of a regular user. Given time of day, perhaps a resident of N. Somerset doing a late pickup of a child from somewhere in Clifton, someone who cannot afford to be held up by any vehicle doing the speed limit.

Now, what is he dev team planning w.r.t. oncoming collision avoidance, where it assesses oncoming velocity of the approaching vehicle, adds with its own and estimates time-to-impact, so perhaps suggesting some alternate actions? And what to suggest? There's the "massively accelerate, swing in hard and then brake" strategy, which is an extension of this drivers decision (and essentially a reward), the alternative is: brake, swing behind the cyclist they tried to pass, put it off. Which is safer, but not generally that common amongst "legacy" manual-drivers. There's some psychological "we're committed now" decision which interferes with the more rational "braking to survive is a good idea" strategy.

enjoy

P.S. UK DVLA now gives MOT history over time: https://www.check-mot.service.gov.uk ...you can see that GP05RZE used to be a 3K/y child seat equipped barge of Hendon, NW London, then over to bristol to do 15K/y. Where you can see from the repeated warnings "pitted/scored disks, front headlamp deterioration" that the owner doesn't actually do any maintenance. Probably not a good sign. Almost as bad as a MkI Golf GTi with the wheels coming off..

A letter to Smiths of Gloucestershire, re the blind overtake of their van VE08NKX

Hello

I'm the cyclist the driver of your van VE08NKX chose to overtake on a blind corner on Belmont Hill, Somerset, at 15:46 on 25 November.

I'm the cyclist who shouted a warning to your driver that there was an oncoming car —a warning he chose to ignore:

And I'm the cyclist who videoed your van nearly hitting the oncoming car.


That car braked to avoid a collision, incidentally, and we both waved an acknowledgement to each other of how close it had been.

I've not got in touch before; I was waiting to see how Avon and Somerset Police were going to respond to the complaint that I'd filed online with them. As the time limit for them to file a Notice of Impending Prosecution has expired and they are yet to get in touch, the answer is: nothing.

Your driver has to consider themselves lucky to have not only avoided a head-on collision with an oncoming vehicle, but to avoid any form of punishment from the police for nearly doing so. That is despite the irrefutable video evidence showing them ignoring a shouted warning and overtaking where they had no visibility. If A&S Police were to adopt the prosecute-on-video-evidence policy which the Central Midlands Police are now operating, they would now be facing a choice between prosecution to Dangerous Driving or pleading guilty to the lesser offence of Careless Driving.

As it is: no prosecution, no pleading, no penalty, no points on their license, and no insurance premium.

That fact reflects as badly on our local police as it does on your employee.

Given the police's utter inaction, you can report to your driver that this particular near-crash won't result in any prosecution.

However, you do need to consider your brand tainted. It's clear from your website that you take site safety as seriously as it needs to be —but it's also clear from the video that your staff are treating off site safety with utter disdain. This driver endangered other road users in a van with your business name and telephone number painted on three sides of the vehicle, making identifying this employer trivial. The more incidents like this, the more videos of your drivers will go online, the more that safety theme gets devalued.

Please: tell your driver that in a world of helmet cameras and dashcams —the era of "getting away" with dangerous driving is over. If they drive dangerously in their free time, it is only the lives of themselves and others and their own driving license which they endanger. When they do it in company vehicles, it is your vehicles they are also threatening, your insurance premiums they are risking, and your brand that they are destroying,

The Psychology of Overtaking and VE08NXK

There is surprisingly little literature available online on the topic of The Psychology of Overtaking.

One paper you can find dates from 1997, Overtaking Road-accidents: Differences in Manoeuvre as a Function of Driver Age, by Clarke et al, of Nottingham University

Without going into the details, in particular questioning whether there's enough information on the general population of drivers and overtakers to reach conclusions about age, it does contain a good introductory summary of past work.

One quote in particular stands out

Wilson and Greensmith (1983) returned to the theme of the ‘‘inertial driver’’ in their multivariate analysis of drivers’ accident status in relation to observed driving patterns, gender and exposure. They report that accident-involved drivers drive more quickly ‘‘...and move around continually (especially overtaking) in traffic’’. The typical inertial driver differs from his high-exposure accident-free counterpart, in that he seems unwilling to change speeds in response to conditions by using gear changes, deceleration or braking.

This is interesting, as it does document a common behaviour you encounter on a bike: the driver willing to endanger themselves and others rather than tap on the brakes.

Here is a classic example on Belmont Hill, N. Somerset




Although it's a sharp bend, the gradient of the hill means that you can see oncoming traffic, especially when they have their lights on in the late afternoon. Look up to the top right of the picture and you can see a car coming down the hill. Bear in mind, it is still daylight, there may be an unlit vehicle or cyclist, and they would not be visible.

The presence of the car hasn't stopped the van VE08NXK from choosing to overtake precisely at the corner, going round the bend on completely the wrong side of the road. Either they hadn't looked or they didn't care. The driver coming down the hill was distinctly unhappy.

It would be really interesting to see what the reasoning of the driver was here. We cannot but suspect that it would be a "the cyclist forced me to make a dangerous overtake" claim, when really it was a "I was unwilling to adjust my speed in any way". Maybe we shall find out, having just reported them to A&S police as part of "Grass a Driver week".

Police Tactics

Good to see the Police are employing people to help discourage cycling in Bristol. Especially trying to discourage those travelling with children onboard their bicycle for the school run (as was the case in this video submitted by S via our East Bristol franchise). The TSD Fleet Support vehicle WX11EWN is a van that is registered as an Avon and Somerset Police Force vehicle and even shows up as part of proud collection of vehicles on Flickr if you Google "TSD Fleet Support Flickr".

Visit the videos Youtube page for full info at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwpkhDdHOpY

An exchange of views

Another snippet of Taypet21's photostream showing how abusive cyclists can be just because you swerve past them and then in without warning.



Some comments for the elusive Taypet, who, whether they intend it or not, is becoming our Fishponds correspondent.

1. It's not clear that swearing helps you achieve your goal, unless being beaten up is your goal.
2. Yes, you had an exit strategy -and we can see how V484ETF tried to swerve after you, but unless you could be confident that the driver would not catch up with you later, that wasn't a sustainable plan.
3. Lodge Road, eh? You know that Kingswood is getting a bit of a reputation of a place where people on bicycles get beaten up? Just bear that in mind before being quite so abusive. It also doesn't help you if you wish to raise the issue with the polis, as they may have some paperwork for you too.
4. At least he saw you. You weren't going to get Smidsy'd here, and he gave you lots of clearance for the first half of his overtake -right up to the moment he saw the traffic and decided to swing in rather than brake.

As for the driver

1. The emergent ubiquity of cycle cameras means that your actions are more likely to be documented. When at 0:40 you swerved completely into the oncoming lane to pass the (electric) cycle doing approximate 15-20 mph, you should have indicated.
2. Why did you swerve in before you'd actually passed him? There was no oncoming traffic, and if you'd gone past him and then pulled in followed by a full-ABS brake then you'd have stopped before going in to the van (not ours, it is new, clean and has all brake lights lit up), leaving the bicycle to deal with the problem that it was going to have to filter left rather than stop.
3. Finally: why bother, really? You can see the van in front stopped, if your  V-reg doesn't have ABS then your stopping distance on bald tyres isn't going to be great, so look at the speed of the bicycle before trying to pass. 
4. It's not worth the hassle of running them over, especially when the police get called out and those issues about insurance crop up.

We explicitly mention insurance because a quick check of askmid says:

NO V484ETF is NOT showing as insured on the Motor Insurance Database today.

That's despite the fact the DVLA site says the Lexus V484ETF has paid its road tax. 
You need to be glad that Taypet's video has him swearing enough it it that he can't forward it to the police and say "I have evidence that this car is being driven without insurance".

Cliché Touché

Concerned reader "A" has written in to us:

"The driver of the black SUV WP07CCE travelling along Barton Hill Road decided to overtake on the blind corner where it meets Barrow Road while I was cycling to join the Railway Path. This was despite the fact that I had taken the lane to round the corner to discourage such a dangerous manoeuvre. It being a blind corner he couldn't see the cars coming around the corner towards us from Barrow Road and swerved back in towards the curb to avoid them, very narrowly missing crushing me. All this so that he could pull up and wait at the red light around the corner.

As his window was open while he queued at the red light I took the opportunity to very calmly and nicely ask him to please not do that again to anyone as he could very easily kill or injure someone. That is all I wished to say and I started to cycle away.

His response was to shout that I "shouldn't be in the middle of the road" and should "keep to the edge". When I explained that I had moved to the centre of the lane to discourage anyone from overtaking on a dangerous blind corner his reply was that I had to keep to the side unless I was going to "pay tax to use the roads" and that was within his rights to pass so close as he pays to use the road. When I replied that I also own and pay duty on a car (as I think that is what he was suggesting) his reaction was to shout "you're not in it today though are you you f***ing pr**k!" and then put his foot down and ran the red light to get away."

Well A, it's not often that we like to admit to agreeing with anything a cyclist says here at Bristol Traffic, but in this case we feel you have a slightly valid point.

While we don't think it right to criticise the motorists driving skills (as he's really just doing his bit to fight the war on motorists) we do feel that his reasoning needs some working on. As motorists we are finding it increasingly difficult to rely on the old dependable catch phrases of "you don't pay road tax" and "you should be at the side of the road" as unfortunately we have to admit that we do now know that roads are now paid for out of general taxation and council and government endorsed Bikeability lessons do encourage cyclists to take lanes to discourage dangerous manoeuvres from drivers around them. In fact we're actually even slightly disappointed that one of our own fellow drivers is still attempting to employ such over used clichés.

We can however suggest that the best option in this scenario would have been to adopt the new methods of simply pointing out that by choosing to cycle on such car packed roads the cyclist is obviously a freak, probably smells and point out the direction of Glastonbury for him so he can join all the other hippies.

It's probably also best to avoid repeat situations on this particular corner too as there is always the danger that if it happens regularly then the authorities might do something silly like adjust the road layouts or speed limits to calm traffic to protect cyclists. A bit unlikely though. Our research does show though that this isn't the first time that something like this has happened on this corner, although the following footage seems to have been filmed while travelling in the opposite direction around the corner and the car Y117GNY manages to get at least slightly in front of the cyclist and isn't confronted by unexpected traffic coming the other way as he overtakes on the blind corner rather than taking the whole corner directly alongside him and performing the emergency "squash the cyclist to the curb" manoeuvre to avoid unexpected oncoming traffic as WP07CCE allegedly did.

The Must Overtake Syndrome

We've all experienced this one on UK motorways and doubtless it happens all over the world. You're a few hundred metres away from the slip road to leave the motorway when some lunatic overtakes everyone at high speed, only to swerve back from right to left across three lanes of traffic and shoot up the slip road. You always ask yourself this question: Why didn't you just stay in the slow lane for a few seconds more?. The answer is that some drivers are impatient and suffer from MOS or 'Must Overtake Syndrome' which, medically speaking, is an irrational and dangerous desire to get in front of everyone at all costs.

I witnessed it in action yesterday whilst quietly waiting to cross the road near Temple Meads station. A motorcyclist, coming up the far left lane (A4) at speed, swerved wildly across the other lanes to overtake everything before swerving back at the last minute into the A4. In short, there was absolutely no need for him to do this, as it was 10am on a saturday morning and there were no cars in front of him in his original lane!. The picture shows his route in yellow dots - pointless overtaking isn't it?. I'm the red dot, waiting at the crossing. The green dots are the correct route he should have taken. Of particular concern to me, is the red arrow which shows his path swerving back across the lanes. This is the route I normally cycle back home and I shudder to think of being whacked sideways by an aggressive biker hitting me from the right hand side.

Alas, this behaviour is classic MOS, coupled with male bravado and machines with far too much acceleration. Oh yes, before I forget, stupidity as well.