Safe Speed Forums

This is a selfish thread, in that I'm basically wanting to listen to people's advice to improve my own driving (i.e. this is definitely not a quiz). But I hope that it can be of use to anyone that replies for making them think about it hard.

For some reason, you are about to crash (feel free to come up with a situation if you like), despite all your advanced driver training, all planning on escape routes, anticipation, etc.

What are your priorities? In order of preference, where should you put the car? How should you crash into things? What should you crash into? What should you definitely not do? Is there a better way to be seated to reduce the damage caused by the crash?

Most people freeze in the run up to a crash. If someone pulls out in front and there's no time to stop, the most common reaction is to apply max brakes and stare at the expected point of collision. You might hold on tight, but little in the way of avoiding or minimising action takes place.

If you can learn to habitually look for an escape route you have a far better chance of minimising the impact. I've been doing this for 20 years (at least), but I can't tell you that it works because I've not got into that sort of position.

There's a certain truth in the saying: "you go where you look". So the first battle is looking for an escape route.

After that you're looking for a miss, and that can't be achieved then you're loking for the gentlest impact or the most glancing impact.

As far as looking for a miss is concerned, it's good to remember that roads are wider than you think. A standard motorway lane, for example, is 12 feet wide - room for two cars side by side. We're not used to accepting a 6 foot gap at 70mph, but if you've got one, it's a free ticket to avoid crashing altogether.

See the Safe Speed page on braking: http://www.safespeed.org.uk/braking.html and note this graph:



See how the fatality risk at 60mph halves in the first quarter second of braking? This leads us to the certain conclusion that we want to brake first and brake hard in an emergency. Assuming we haven't planned one already, the best time to plan an escape is while we're losing speed. If we decide to steer to safety at some point during the braking, at least we'll have dumped as much energy as possible and have earned ourselves a few more precious milliseconds.

The Roadcraft fans will have been taught to always consider "position" before "speed" but in a full blown emergency they are wrong.

Accidents often go on longer than you might think. Suppose you've just managed to brake and skid to a stop on a motorway. You're not safe yet. Traffic behind may well not be able to stop either. Let's hope you kept the engine running (see "Two Foot Panic" on http://www.safespeed.org.uk/braking.html ) - if you did, and you're not too busy breathing sighs of relief, you may still have time to drive to safety.

[just a brief short stab at a vast subject - I hope it helps.]

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

From my rallying experiences, some things to bear in mind if a collision becomes inevitable...

1. Try to keep the car pointing forwards. Cars don't have crumple zones in the sides, so that's not where you want to take an impact.
2. Don't hit something narrow. A lamp post or tree is pretty much the worst thing you can ever hit, as it concentrates all the impact at one point in the car and intrudes badly, defeating the crumple zones.
3. Look for the soft option. Running up a verge, clouting a stone wall and rolling 4 times is infinitely more survivable than a head-on with the overtaking car you unexpectedly met. Surprisingly, dry stone walls form excellent crumple zones!

At first glance it seems ridiculous to try and impose this sort of thinking - you will say that there isn't time to consider options like these - "accidents happen too fast". But my experiences in rallying suggest otherwise - my belief is that if you actively consider these sort of options and ask yourself questions such as "if it all went suddenly wrong now where would I head?", then when a crisis does occur you've sort of already made the decision a thousand times before, and your subconscious mind will kick in and make the right reaction.

As an example, when you drive down the motorway have a think from time to time about what your escape route (or damage limitation reaction) would be at any one instant if something totally unexpected happened.

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It's obvious I know but for the sake of completeness we should list pedestrians, cyclists, motorbiker riders and equestrians as the worst things to hit.

Next worst are oncoming vehicles, lorries, trees and lamp-posts.

Ditches can be REALLY bad.

Armco should be pretty friendly, but the ends of Armco can act as launch ramps.

We definitely don't want to drive into water or over a cliff.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Ah! But when you are rallying - you have a different frame of mind. And the hazards are not the same as on public road. But admit - you adopt some of the tactics subconsciously as well.



Think all in this family (right across it) will queue in L1 - ready to hop into hard shoulder if necessary after Wildy's experience.

But - one does have a little think as we all know the numpties are everywhere - but kid playing chicken as occurred on M61 last year is a bit difficult to have contingency plan for. Could have been us - we passed that site minutes before the daft lass did this stupid act.

But in terms of reducing likelihood of a crunch ... think the COAST helps, and certainly the O and the A might have given you the means to the "escape hatch" should the worst happen.

Hazard awareness should be key in all of your driving, this allows maximum time to react to the problem.

Time available to look for an escape is dependant on how much you have been concentrating or whether it was possible to see the hazard prior to impact, which is not always within your control.

Always look for an escape, kurbs are very handy, but pointless if you run over an innocent pedestrian on it

If you are unsure of an escape, just keep the vehicle straight, pointless jumping out of the frying pan into the fire

Seating position, ensure your head restraint is correctly adjusted before making your trip.

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Steve

Thanks for the replies so far, but if I didn't make it clear, I'm talking about a situation where you've been incompetent, or something that you couldn't possibly have forseen has occurred, and you are definitely going to crash, having not planned for it at all.

The rallying point I find interesting (not just plotting escape routes, but plotting crash routes), I think I'll apply it to road rallying when I get the chance.

I guess the other golden rule is "never stop driving"! In other words, however desperate the situation is, never give up making your best efforts either to prevent an accident or - in extremis - to mitigate its severity.

Here's an interesting story which I think illustrates this point very well. Apologies for the length of it, but here goes...

I was having a similar debate with a chap I go rallying with, and to illustrate the sort of "damage limitation planning" that drivers do he recalled an incident that had happened to him a few years back.

He was out on his motorbike one day, on a typically twisty Cumbrian lane, and as he turned into a fairly tight corner the back wheel suddenly and unexpectedly locked solid.

He described to me how his mind quickly realised that one of two things had happened. Either the engine had seized, or the gearbox had locked up, but at that point he didn't know which. Now as all this happened he had been in the process of downshifting for the corner, so his left fingers were still on the clutch lever anyway, thus it only took a moment for him to sense the wheel locking and disengage the clutch - a fairly automatic reaction in the circumstances - whereupon he instantly regained full control and coasted round the corner without further incident.

Now the interesting bit was his thought processing during the instant between becoming aware of the seizure and releasing the clutch. It would be reasonable to expect that in (say) this half-second his conscious mind would be more or less completely occupied with thinking about the mechanical process of releasing the clutch and recovering the slide, but he said this was not the case.

What he was actually able to accomplish in this fleeting moment was to...

1. Realise that the unexpected seizure could be either engine or gearbox,
2. Consider the prospect that if this was a gearbox fault then releasing the clutch would not help,
3. Realise that if this were the case then his trajectory would take him more or less in a straight line towards the small stone cottage that was on the outside of the bend.
4. Realise that if he followed his normal instincts and "dropped" the bike, he would slide straight into the wall of the cottage, which would probably kill him,
5. Realise that if he could keep the bike upright and also manage to make a minor adjustment to its trajectory then he would be able to steer for the front door of the cottage, which would yield more than the wall, and therefore might just be survivable.

Around about this point he got the clutch in and recovered the slide...

Now in general I would tend to discount a story like this as a bit of "look how clever I am" bravado, but I know the guy very well and this absolutely isn't his style. I've also been in one or two rallying situations with him where his rapid mental agility in awkward situations has amazed me, so I think I can vouch for the authenticity of this anecdote.

The point this illustrates is that the human mind has some pretty amazing defence mechanisms. That in a tiny instant it can switch from a neutral "enjoying the scenery" mode and suddenly perform a hugely complex set of thoughts. In a fraction of a second it can kick into life, project and visualise various scenarios, evaluate the possible outcomes, select the best survival option and put it in place.

Now we all have this ability, I believe that what we need to do to take advantage of it is...

1. Pre-programme it with useful information - which is what I meant earlier about visualising escape routes etc,

2. Trust it to do it's job, in other words "DON'T PANIC"!!!!

Learning not to panic is perhaps the difficult bit. Most of us learn not to panic through experience, which I think is a process that motorsport can usefully accelerate. What would be really helpful would be finding a method by which we can instil the new driver with this mental approach.

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At this point it is too late

Their is no ideal seating position (other than being seated out of the vehicle ), when this happens, as you could never know how the chassis is going to react, which is also affected by the angle the impact.

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Steve

When these critical situations take place, many people report that "time slows down". There's an interesting forum thread here:

http://www2b.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn/ ... 79970.shtm

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Generally, if a person who crashes into someone while not paying attention or speeding or mucking around or overtaking etc. etc., and he hurts innocent strangers who are just passing, then that person is a complete and utter tosser who should be locked up. Someone did that to me last February.

If you are alone and you are the cause of the crash, due to speeding or whatever, you should consider the safety of those you are crashing into first. You should try (at any cost to yourself) to avoid harming innocent people, even if that means you have to steer into an oak tree. Of course, you may have a family dependant on you, but that gives you no right to wreck the lives of others through reckless driving, overtaking, speeding, or other tricks.

If you are not alone and you are mucking around, speeding, overtaking, not paying attention etc. and cause a crash, you will have to try to judge the value of the lives of the innocent people in your car versus the innocent people whose lives you are about to destroy. This is a hard choice that some fools have to sometimes make! I suppose I would not condemn you if you put your own family above another family, although I would condemn you for causing the crash.

If you are alone and you are not the cause of the crash (i.e. not speeding at all and attentive etc.) and there is a family in the other car, I would consider you a saint and I would give a speech at your funeral if you laid down your life for theirs, but I could not condemn you if you put your own life before the lives of those who are crashing into you, because it’s not your fault that you are sharing the roads with morons.

If you are not alone and you are not the cause of the crash, you have to put your own passengers lives first, and do the appropriate thing to ensure, as much as possible, their safety.

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Clearly you're making a heartfelt statement, but the error of responsibility you're worried about takes place long before the moment when the crash is inevitable (which is the subject of this thread).

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I don't know if you do much downhill skiing , but this sequence reminds me of the experience one feels when just about staying in control on a fast, steep black run when trying to slow down on ice just before a line of trees. It is exactly the same run out - go in the trees upright and ski through them, or put all your energy into the manoeuvre. Fast skiing really tightens up those reactions, although the boozing after dulls them again!

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I stole this .sig

I agree but most of the replys were technical - we should also talk about the moral aspects of the effects of driving long before the moment when a crash is inevitable, because seeing the effects might make some people avoid an accident. If you do crash while speeding and you kill someone (even though you believe your speed might have been safe), a moral person might have a nagging doubt - coult I have avoided it if I obeyed the law and stayed within the limit?

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Exactly Basingwerk, Exactly ! Just as fast driving tightens up those reactions too ..............and keeps you out of the trees or out of other kinds of trouble too

I have absolutely no objection at all if (like skiing) you do your sport on a private area (e.g, racetrack), where everybody is having fun and paying the price for that, and knows they are enjoying a risky sport/pastime. I’d even encourage it. I do object if someone uses the roads to do sport – that is wrong, wrong, wrong! Roads are for transport, not motor sport.

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Trying to obfuscate again eh basingwerk ?

The benefit in terms of greater alertness is understood by most of us here. Clearly by your statement you show that you do as well. But reaction times are improved whether you are taking part in a sporting activity such as ski-ing or track or everyday on the road. Same thing

Your predictable attempt to mount your nannying hobby horse impresses no-one.

Conversely driving artificially slowly through compliance with inappropriately low speed limits dulls reactions sometimes with fatal results.

You can improve your reaction times by running up and down your stairs! You'll most likely break your neck, but that's your own look out. If you want to practise driving, find a field or use that deserted stretch down by Shotton Sailing Club - I don't care about that. But public roads are not for speed stunts and thrills. It may look OK on Top Gear, but it's not on, Richard. By the way, do you ever visit Wepre Park - it's really quite nice up there.

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How about sightseeing....your sunday driver!

Also try telling that to marathon runners, or cyclists. They race on them all the time.

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Speed camera policy Kills