Why this British crossroads was so dangerous

Example of an insideously unsafe intersection that was changed to make it safer (for bike riders): ▶ this video How it was fixed: link

See ▶ this video for an example. One of the advantages of raking the front windshield for aerodynamics is changing the geometry for the A pillar to be more sideways instead of vertical, allowing a bit more hope of seeing something.

this article seems to have some actual pictures: link the previous configuration as shown on the satellite image looks a lot like the intersection Tom Scott made a video about, where the intersecting road is angled to keep cross-traffic hidden behind a car's a-pillar. ▶ this video

Tom Scott has a good video for anyone looking for a visual of this phenomenon: ▶ this video He shows off a rural (and thankfully now fixed) crossroads in the UK with seemingly great visibility and an unusually high rate of cyclist fatalities - the roads are at such an angle that any reckless driving speed can align with a reasonable cycling speed such that the driver's door pillar can block visibility of a cyclist with right of way right up to the point of impact - and it's compounded by the fact that the car is necessarily approaching from behind the cyclist, so a passing cyclist will be unaware of the danger possibly until they get hit. Of course if drivers in the area actually followed the stop signs no one would get hit - but if you watch the video in a five minute period genuinely only about half of the cars passing through actually come to a complete stop at the stop sign. You need more than signage and quietly hoping that people to do the right thing.

The blind spots in the article are from the A pillar, which isn’t addressed by rear view mirrors. The momentum would tend toward this being solved by sensors/computer vision, but maybe chip shortages have curtailed that. Tom Scott presented an interesting example of A pillar blind spots causing problems: ▶ this video

The Wired reporting is based on Bez's article on Singletrack (as stated): link Tom Scott made a good complementary video about this: ▶ this video It's already fixed just last month: link and link

> The angles we were converging at meant that he basically disappeared into the background because there was no relative motion. This effect is demonstrated in this video about a particularly dangerous crossing in the UK: ▶ this video

Sounds to me like cars shouldn't be allowed to drive where pedestrians travel, if they can't really avoid driving people over. Edit: This Tom Scott video shows how a cyclist can be perfectly occluded by the A-pillar while both are moving ▶ this video

For a particularly dramatic example of this, Tom Scott made a video about an intersection in the UK that's poorly designed for visibility: ▶ this video

The Tom Scott video has a good animation on this: ▶ this video Because of the layout of the junction the cars are actually approaching from behind the cyclists.