Even WHEN THE DRIVER sees you, some subconsciously ignore you. I'v had people look straight at me, keep driving then looking shocked when they finally realise and hit the brakes.
I can only surmise they perceive traffic in terms of threats. When you're in a bigger car, threats are reduced.
At one point when biking to work I stopped at an intersection and filtered to the front. The head vehicle was a huge yellow thing built for construction work. I turned my head to see if I could see the driver (then at least he would have a chance of seeing me) and you know what he did?
He understood what I was doing and pointed straight at me to indicate he had noticed me.
This is something I've started doing when I'm driving now, too. I wish everyone did it.
I'm in my 40s, I've never had a car, and the only thing that makes me feel somewhat safe when I cross in front of a vehicle is making eye contact with the driver, which is sometimes difficult with the prevalence of tinted windows.
In my experience, drivers look for other cars, not for pedestrians. We are not a danger to them, so they subconsciously filter us out, as we are not a threat to them.
To make things worse, in North America traffic rules are particularly hostile to pedestrians, allowing things such as right turns on red. Which is to say, as a pedestrian I am naturally not allowed to cross the street when the light is red for me, but for some unclear reason, if I were to be driving a 2-ton vehicle then somehow it is no longer considered dangerous for me to ignore the same red light. Bonkers.
The difficulty with eye contact is that it's easy to interpret as being there when the other person really just looks through you. Very common to hear about accidents when one person was confident they had eye contact and then the other just had no idea they were there.
In fact, eye contact works so badly for me that I prefer looking at the front tyres – their direction and angular acceleration tells me a lot more about where the vehicle is about to be.
Pointing, however, is very explicit and rarely happens by accident.
People don't look for peds because they aren't trained to, and for the most part, peds aren't that common. Only if you're in a dense urban center, would I say that they're common (in the US)
I do this, too, especially for pedestrians in crosswalks but also for cyclists and other motorists. The funny thing is I've never seen anyone else do it, yet everyone I point at always seems to immediately understand.
There's that famous video of people dancing, where a person in a gorilla suit enters and leaves the action, and at the end, people don't remember seeing the gorilla.
I think drivers are creatures of habit, especially in heavy traffic on a familiar route such as their daily work commute. They are not really in complete control of their cars -- certainly if traffic is heavy enough that nobody is following at a safe distance. Now throw distractions into the mix.
I'm also an experienced urban cyclist, and I believe that route choice is a major safety factor. I have some rules of thumb for roads to avoid, and am extremely lucky that I live in a town that is fairly cycle- and pedestrian-friendly. I have a hunch that car drivers in my town have gradually adapted to the presence of cyclists, for the better.
I do ride on 55 mph roads in the countryside, but only ones with very little traffic, and the region has quite friendly drivers. Stories from cyclists living in other states suggest to me that straightforward aggression is a factor in a lot of the close passes and other antics that they experience.
Somewhat fittingly "the basic Simons and Chabris study was reused on British television as a public safety advert designed to point out the potential dangers to cyclists caused by inattentional blindness in motorists."
I beleive that the paper was originally titled "Gorillas In Our Midst" which is a wonderful play on the title of the Dian Fossey book Gorillas in the Mist.
It applies because drivers tend to look for other cars, which are a threat to them, while filtering out pedestrians and bicycles. It is very noticeable as a pedestrian, e.g. when a driver enters a road through a right turn and only looks left to avoid incoming traffic, ignoring the possibility of a pedestrian coming from their right.
If it is about threats, then you should try to make the cyclists and pedestrians more threatening. Make yourself bigger, travel in large packs, bear your teeth, etc.
That or just have completely separated pathways for motorized vehicles and cyclists and pedestrians.
I tend to think of the drivers, not as reacting to threats, but navigating an evolving mental model of their surroundings -- with a primary focus on opportunities rather than threats. The mechanism that updates that model doesn't have "training data" with cyclists in the picture.
Probably because of poor training and infrequent interactions with cyclists/pedestrians. If something isn't a part of your regular life, and you haven't been told you need to watch out for it, then why would you?
In some ways cyclists are slow enough compared to how fast a car can accelerate. Even a moped or motorcycle can use speed assert its presence and maintain safe stopping distance between other cars.
Especially in a urban area where everyone is stuck trying to get to home/work/etc, most cars appear to be looking for opportunities. Opportunities to get ahead, to squeeze through a left turn lane before oncoming traffic, to find an empty bike lane to drop off an uber eats order. With that opportunity, get ahead” mindset, cyclists do not register. Until, of course, something happens.
I don't think threat assessment is driving people's driving habits. More likely, they didn't actually see you, or if they did, they made an assumption that you were going to wait for them or otherwise not be in their path. That could be because they don't know the laws concerning cycling, or maybe being tired/distracted/inebriated.
I have had similar experiences cycling a number of times. It's really more of a mental block. They aren't expecting to see a cyclist so they don't see one.
Even WHEN THE DRIVER sees you, some subconsciously ignore you. I'v had people look straight at me, keep driving then looking shocked when they finally realise and hit the brakes.
I can only surmise they perceive traffic in terms of threats. When you're in a bigger car, threats are reduced.