A Fighter Pilot’s Guide to Surviving on the Roads

To mods: A complete aside, but I posted this yesterday (say 30 hours ago) not today.

is this some reset for labour day or other deeply cunning ranking algorithm? Or maybe i fat fingered it ...

Indeed. People expect cars to be appliances. Sadly they're not.

I'm not talking about mechanical accidents such as a tyre popping though. I'm pointing out that the guy on a B road entered a curve, failed to account for the clues that grip was closing in to limit due to underinflated tires, looked into the approaching headlights which were blown up by its dirty windshield, blinding him, pushed the brakes which further reduced grip both front (due to wheels being turned) and rear (due to weight relief), misinterpreted the car reaction due to loss of visual information and overcorrected, throwing his car into a spin, and crashed into the incoming car.

Change "car" to "plane" and you get a thorough investigation pointing at the chain of events that led to the crash, but somehow with cars society accept it as normal, the go-to explanation generally being "he drove too fast", skipping all manners of root cause analysis. But hey, it's more efficient to lay out speed traps and reduce speed limits (both having proved to be inefficient long-term) to satisfy lobbies of crying families hit by careless people and looking for an easy scapegoat. Plus it rakes in cash like nothing else. Speed† being a byproduct of movement, as long as you have movement you have a risk of collisions, so the rhetoric can be recursively applied until we reach perfect standstill; interestingly enough, some other means of travel proceed at much higher speeds yet are statistically much less dangerous, because training, procedures, infrastructure design, and maintenance.

† Speed does have consequences, due to simple enough energetic calculations. Nonetheless "speed" is not a cause, it's an effect.

In the past at a dangerous junction with limited visibilty owing to corners and high speed traffic I found myself looking one way then the other repeatedly before moving. Now I look to one side until I'm certain it's free I look the other way and if I see nothing, I go. It feels like I'm fighting my instincts but so far so good!

I reckon a dynamo hub and good always-on lights is perhaps the best cycling purchase I've made for my commuter bike. No faffing around with charging batteries and blinking lights, just leave it go all the time.

("perhaps" because mudguards are pretty useful too). b&m lights, sensible ones that have a backreflector so you don't get horrible specular lights shining in everyone's eyes.

Partly, the instinct is about feeling trashy, and having to replace worn-out old junk as it accumulates stains, scuff marks, battle damage.

It feels wasteful to have to discard perfectly useful items, because they look worn out. We all know that black, dark items tend show the least amount of wear, and in the interest of efficient frugality, some of us gravitate toward that instinct.

You look at a white t-shirt, and you know it's going to show pit stains by the end of the year. A black t-shirt might show some white accumulation inside the armpits, but not outside, and you really are only going to have to trash it, once some holes show up. Same with socks.

So too with hi-viz stuff. You just don't want to buy something, and throw it out, the moment it gives a sense of unintended imperfection. It's more an equipment maintenance perspective, than a live, situational awareness point of view. The best equipment is the stuff you have, and the stuff you have is the stuff you keep.

Being a little OCD, but that's what's going on under the hood, from my own perspective.