SMIDSY: an explanation
Well I think British motorcyclists and cyclists may well know what 'SMIDSY' stands for, but I should explain it for anyone else. I am sure there is a US equivalent. It is an acronym and this is how it looks:
SMIDSY = "Sorry mate I didnt' see you"
It is what the driver says after they have pulled out in front of you on a road junction or at a roundabout, or after they have moved across into your path when you are in a bike lane on the road. I had my own SMIDSY experience about 15 years ago in my first serious bike crash after I restarted cycling about 25 years ago. Let me describe it:
I was cycling up a main road in Cambridge, Hills Road, where there is a continous bike lane up both sides of the road, giving cyclists priority over queuing traffic on the main road. In those days the bike lane was on the main carriageway; now it has been completely separated, which would have prevented my accident. I was going up the lane at maybe 10 or 15 mph, and the traffic in the car lane was stopped for a vehicle to turn right into a road on the opposite side of the road. One of the queuing vehicles - a Volvo I think - was in a hurry and decided they could just nip into the bike lane briefly and then proceed on their way. Unfortunately, as they made this decision, I was right next to them, moving. Their passenger door acted like a set of railway points and deflected me at speed straight into a very solid bollard (the only one for the next 200 yards!). I hit it head on and did one of those unlikely-looking catapults through the air into a half somersault and landing on my back a couple of yards past the bollard.
It was all very exciting, and would have been even more so had I not been wearing a helmet (as my head struck the pavement first, before the rest of me).
So just like in the movies, I lay on my back looking up at the sky and about six passers-by leaned into my view of the sky and said "are you OK?". To which my honest answer was "I don't know".
Everything turned out OK-ish after I was blue-lighted to A&E. Lots of bruises but no breaks.
But the SMIDSY moment was when a female face leaned over the stretcher as I was being ambulanced and said, in great distress "I'm sorry, I didn't see you!". She was the Volvo driver. And I just thought "well that's marginally better than if you did see me" and still felt grumpy.
But then today, on the internet I read a fascinating article by a former RAF fighter pilot trainer, explaining that sometimes the SMIDSY is completely true, even if they were *looking straight at you*.
The full text is here:
But to precis it, the problem is that are eyes move in quite jerky jumps called 'saccades' when surveying a scene quickly, and our brains will sometimes fill in the gaps between those jumps with *what it thinks is likely to be there!*
So if you are on your bike in one of those gaps, and the viewer's brain instructs the visual processing part to fill in that gap with some empty road, then the viewer really didn't see you. They looked but their brain made you invisible. Damn that old perception eh?
The problem is that this means that when cycling past a junction you have to assume that, with the best will in the world, a driver coming onto your road might not have seen you, even though they tried to. This is an irritation, but now that I know it is quite possible for a perfectly sober and well-intended driver to just not see me, I will always cycle with that possibility in mind and my hands over the brakes.
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