Keep your head up and level !!. Look straight ahead .. Very very important

I forgot to mention that I did not have to go to court nor was I sued. The guy would be a fool to even attempt to. I wonder what kind of accident requires going to a legal court. I’ve never been to one in my life.

 

Plenty of folks who are at fault legally engage ambulance chasers, and get settlements. Our tort system is broken.

 

Using your mirrors often is always a good thing. An unwanted surprise is just as likely to sneak up from behind. Even more so in a Truck traveling slower than most 4 wheelers. I stay right, and run slower these days. Makes for less stress, for Me. Sit back and watch all the Idiots race each other, and stay out of their accidents.

 

Dash cams are cool, never know what you might see.

 

Fighter pilots are trained to fight against the lack of perception, the split second moments that happen 24 times a second when YOU DO NOT SEE ANYTHING. This is called saccadic masking.

The military has tested the phenomenon. You can shine a bright strobe light right into a person's eye and if it is timed perfectly to their saccades, they won't see a thing.

This is why fighter pilots are trained with a catch phrase: Move Your Head Or You're Dead. Peripheral vision doesn't cut it.

Here's a good article that talks about the danger of trying to rely on peripheral vision, the saccadic masking phenomena, and related issues with the hazards of driving:

https://www.londoncyclist.co.uk/raf-pilot-teach-cyclists/

The bottom line is that unless you look directly at something you can miss important details. Peripheral vision is fine for absorbing very little information in a wide area, but you should be looking for better than just a little. Moving your head to clear your posts, blind spots, and yes...checking your rear views should be part of your ongoing scan. If you have built a habit of only using your peripheral vision to MONITOR what is developing behind you, then you are deluding yourself that you really have a grasp of the big picture. You don't.

What goes on behind you can become your problem in a hurry. Did you see that 1" wide 12" long strip of tread shoot out from your trailer tandems? Are your marker lights still functioning? Was that a faint yet developing pall of blue smoke coming off your trailer tandems?

I've seen truckers merrily rolling on down the road with both tires on a tandem blown out and the mud flap wrapped into the rims and the remaining side walls on fire. I've seen a flatbedder with 30' of strap slapping around his trailer tires, when it snagged under a tire it yanked his extension ladder right out of his dunnage rack and he ran over it. I had to speed up to 80 mph to catch him, no CB, honked my horn, no lookie just stare straight ahead, I sped up more to get well ahead of him (the whole time that strap is dancing around his tires ready to yank out some 4x4's) and found a wide pull off, got out and flagged him down.

The list goes on and on and on. How many times have you followed a miles long patch of burning rubber, then see the tell tail scatter of tiny gators when that tire exploded? What if a family was driving next to that oblivious trucker and the shrapnel took off the head of the daughter in the back seat?

What goes on behind you IS your responsibility. Sure, the majority of your responsibility is in your direction of travel. BUT that doesn't absolve you from liability for your screw ups because you didn't look right AT your rear views. It is your responsibility.

 

well said

 

You cannot guage the distance of objects very well from your perifereal vision. That requires eyes to be fixed on the object in question you are studying.

Thats why nature gave us two eyes facing forward, because we are a predatorial animal, and our advantage comes from sneaking up on prey, knowing when we are close enough to sprint towards our target and close the distance before we tire out.

Prey have eyes on the sides of their head for wider perifereal vision. They dont need to know the distance their hunter is at. They only need to notice they are there and start running. They dont really sprint, they just run a lot further than forward-vision animals without tiring.

 

They also train in the military for guard duty. Use peripheral vision. If you keep looking with your eyes fixed. You will start hallucinating. Can't trust straight vision for extended periods especially at night. They train to use peripheral vision. You won't hallucinate.

 

62 mph for rookies actually.

 

While this video isn't shot in a way to capture the actual speed, I got to do the Montana Drive workshop last summer and it was very interesting in the cases of skids and braking.



While scanning is critical for typical driving, locking onto a reference on the horizon is critical in ice slide conditions. In that video they will have a car that has free running casters on the rear that simulates sheet ice. They had cones which were the object you needed to avoid and if you even glanced down at those cones while in a skid you would always hit thim.

Same thing with doing emergency braking and skid pad in a school bus. If you didn't choose a reference point on the horizon and look at where you wanted to go in your peripheral vision you were never successful.

While it is a helmet cam and you can't see eye movement this applies to all sports even extreme downhill bike racing

This may seem to conflict with my above statement but your truck will go where you look. But there are two conditions, normal driving and emergencies.

In normal conditions you should be doing as was previously mentioned in this thread:

1. Look ahead a minimum of 15 seconds
   
2. Scan your mirrors often (every 5-8 seconds)
3. Know what is around you
4. Maintain eye movement (never fixate more than 2 seconds)
5. Always make plans and have escape routes etc...

In skids and emergency steering you need a fixed reference point on the horizon and use your peripheral vision to pay attention to where you want to go, while ideally keeping what you want to avoid in your peripheral vision if possible. But DO NOT SCAN while in an active skid or when making emergency maneuvers as your seat of the pants direction senses will lie to you. In skids the truck moves in directions inconsistent with the actual movement of the truck, especially in snow and rain.

Day to day, keeping your eyes up and out of the cab is what is important, looking straight ahead all the time as other people called out is a very very bad idea.

To help pass the time I actually have a game where when I am say going under an underpass with an exit I check the lights and traffic and try to predict if there will be traffic trying to merge. I also try and keep up with all other traffic around me and if I get surprised by more than a rare un-noticed car I take it as a strong suggestion that I should stop and take a brake.

I am just an average driver, but fighting the complacency and just zoning out and passively driving is one of the hardest things us drivers face from day to day. A below average driver that pays attention will be far better than a F1 racing driver who has checked out and isn't paying attention.

Fighting complacency and ensuring that you are an engaged, professional driver also makes the work day goes by faster and really helps out with the boredom.

Note: Experience leads to lowered perceptions of risk is through exposure to near-miss events. Near-misses offer us opportunities to learn from our mistakes, or we can self justify our errors by self justifying ourselves and lowering our perceptions of risk.