I cannot believe intelligent people think riding in black in the winter gloom is fine, maybe you all live in central London but out in the sticks you just blend into the hedgerow on a dull day. You don't need Hi-vis just a brighter colour. Motorist around here are great normally giving you a wide birth but I don't want to be involved in a genuine " I am sorry I didn't see you" incident. Why take the risk.
Colour recognition is extremely low in drivers, and you can test this easily yourself.
The situation a drivers brain faces is thus: There is too much information being recieved, and changing too rapidly to analyse 100% of it.
A brain cannot do the impossible and proces more inforation than it is able to, so unlike a computer, which would continue to try and process 100% of the information - resulting in slower and slower performance, the brain does something very clever indeed.
Drawing on stored data of past experiences, the brain starts to cut out snipets of information deemed less relevent.
It begins with sound. Your brain knows the sound doesn't really matter a damn to your ability to drive. How many people have driven with the stereo on and 'missed' a track or numbers of tracks? Your brain has simply disregarded that information to save processing power.
Colour perception goes next. You will notice that under stress, if you think back really hard, nearly all the cars wll be black or grey. You can remeber the cars as objects, but their colour was disregarded. You simply didn't needed it.
Next to go are things you don't encounter very much. Starting small and working their way up. Birds, writing on the road (not lines), warnig signs you rarely see - they all get disregarded as more and more processing power is devoted to simply interpreting and reacting to what is on the road ahead.
You will have stopped using your mirrors by now, but you would swear blind that you had been.
Peripharel vison is the next thing to close down, this is a sign that you are really beginning to struggle, and worryingly this is the state that a hell of a lot of people drive at along unfamiliar fast roads. These drivers are those who cut close past your shoulder at 40,50,60 mph as they might have seen you ahead, and adjusted course slightly to take ccount of you, but you dissapeared from their interpreted vision at about their 10 o'clock, so they have already started moving back in by the time they pass you.
The next step is your brain will actually disregard the opposite side of the road.
The next stage is either a crash, or the driver is forced to slow for some other reason. Don't think that all this will happen at uber-speed, far from it. It can happen at 30mph. It can happen at 5mph crawling up to a junction. The pressure a driver can feel to get out of a juntion, can be enough to cause them to close their focus enough that they blank out an approacing motorbike, bicycle, or even car. Bus drivers often speak incredulously of the ability of cars to pull out right infornt of a hulking great red painted double decker. The truth is - for the driver concerned, it absolutely was not there. Their brain blanked it out.
A driver under stress is most likely to actively see something that is where they expect to see something. This generally means where they would expect to see another car, and as most drivers track the line of the road using the centreline not the edge, to be spotted, cycling a reasnoable distance from the kerb is the most effecetive way of being seen.
Wearing a particular colour is of limited effectiveness, as colour perception is one of the first areas of 'wasted' processing power a stressed brain shuts down. And a non-stressed brain is more than capable of detecting and recognising a cyclist, no matter what colour their clothing as the first step in visual recognition is matching the shape to a known shape, before the colour is recognised.
This is why Ian Franklin called HiVi tops "Urban Camoflage" as they serve to break up the outline of a cyclist, especially at night time, in the way that camoflage does to a soldier - making the brain disregard the object, as more data flows in.
