As I understand it, the effect is at its worst when the cyclist is behind the pillar on the same side as the driver, because then the pillar is closer to the driver and so obscures more of his/her/their field of vision, meaning this would happen with a bike approaching from the driver’s left in the states, with the narrow angle of the intersection also on the driver’s left, between the rider and the driver. Or, if the roof pillar is wide enough, on either side in either country.
Wiki:
The New Forest is an area of southern England which includes one of the largest remaining tracts of unenclosed pasture land, heathland and forest in the heavily populated south east of England.
In this context, ‘New’ is ‘post-1066’.
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As featured on Dragon’s Den
The price for a new one starts at £10,899, a 1960s original will cost 10 times that.
The microcar that I actually want to see being made again is the Bond Bug, which was designed by the same person who designed Luke’s landspeeder in Star Wars (both of them use the same chassis too).
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This whole thing was completely new to me. Whoa.
Hey, Google, please do a quick survey on your maps data how many junctions there are in the world with a combination of angles and speeds resulting in two vehicles, moving at steady speeds in straight lines towards a collision will maintain the same bearing.
Seriously, you can do this.
OH! Also supercute! But I swear, I could put that Peel car in muh pocket. Talk about saving on parking!
Hm… I want to say I’ve only seen 3 wheeled cars in British things (Mr. Bean, I think). Am I wrong in thinking that? maybe it’s more common in European cars across the board?
I guess the smallest car we get here in the states is the Smart car, which is made by the parent company of Mercedes:
We have Fiats and Minis here, too, but they are both larger than the Smart cars, I think.
Of course, here in the southern US, many people drive massive SUVs or trucks, even in the city. Even when they don’t need them.
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Duhh! Get a bike!
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This pillar-blindspot thing happens in roundabouts too. Say, I’m a cyclist already in the circle. When a car is approaching / entering, I either speed up or slow down to make sure 1) I’m in view and 2) I can see the driver’s face.
I need to know whether they’re checking the blind spot, staring straight ahead, dozing off to sleep, etc
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It’s an actual forest, it’s been “new” since William the Bastard changed his sobriquet to “the Conqueror”. The roads through it are impossibly narrow and often rutted, and at any moment one of her Majesty’s citizens may pop out of nowhere and go speeding by in a cloud of dust to get a ploughman’s at the Trusty Servant. It was wonderful to visit although slightly terrifying to drive through.
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In a roundabout i would presume that cyclists would not be traveling as perpendicular to a car as they would in an intersection, nor would the cars be approaching the roundabout as fast. Perhaps the blind spot problem would be there but there’d be more of a window for either party to react i would hope. Being in the US i don’t encounter them much so i’m just making some assumptions.
They were attractive to some people here because you could drive one with the cheaper and supposedly easier to pass motorcycle test. I think you might even be able to drive a Peel on a moped license, going by the engine power.
The three wheeled Reliant Regal/Robin/Rhialto has been the butt of many jokes though with Jasper Carrott, Only Fools and Horses, and Mr Bean featuring them regularly.
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He never conquered us!
Starts whistling “Do you ken John Peel”, even though I hate fox hunting.
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It even showed up in the Mr. Bean cartoon!
and look what I found while looking for mr. Bean cartoon cars!
Amazing!
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Any junction where you’re travelling in straight lines has this effect.
I sail a bit, and this “constant bearing decreasing range” thing is how you spot a vessel that’s on a collision course with you. Say you see a ship, and it’s 45° off your bow. Then you check again in a few minutes. If it’s now 40° off your bow, it’s going to pass infront of you. If it’s now 50° off your bow, you’ll pass infront of them. And if it’s still 45° off your bow, they’ll pass through you.
This is the nature of straight lines and steady speeds - it just means the shape of the triangle formed between the two vehicles and their collision point, never changes.
This junction is just a perfect storm of things like:
- Roads crossing at a slight angle. This gets a bit mathy, but when you’re on this constant-bearing collision course, the angle between you depends on their course (the road), and their speed. This road just happens to cross at the perfect angle that it puts a fairly rapid cyclist behind your A-pillar.
- What looks like a long, gentle downhill for the cyclist. As a cyclist, that’s my favourite way to become a fairly rapid cyclist.
- A deceptively clear view, making it much easier for a driver to take a quick glance and assume they can blow through the junction, and miss that chap behind their A-pillar.
Now you can’t really fix the constant-bearing thing. As I said, it’s simply the nature of collision courses (in straight lines). And you can’t even solve cyclists - at a different angle on the junction, the math would solve for a 60mph truck instead. So we need to design away that last problem - that the junction encourages you to just blast through it.
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And ‘Forest’ does not mean trees.
Welcome to England.
Our language does not always mean what you think it does. 
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I can’t rule out the possibility that an intersection like this is created by “sheer dumb luck” but at some point it is always going to cross over from bad luck to poor planning to near-criminal negligence.
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Some of our roads still follow the routes of roman roads from nearly 2000 years ago. I don’t think they were planning for motorised vehicles or bicycles.
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Yeah, but what I’m saying is that at some point someone has to do something to fix the problem. Others have pointed out it looks like they’ve added stop signs. That’s a little bit of metal and paint that might have already saved several lives.
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