Why this British crossroads was so dangerous

Tom Scott has a good video for anyone looking for a visual of this phenomenon: ▶ this video He shows off a rural (and thankfully now fixed) crossroads in the UK with seemingly great visibility and an unusually high rate of cyclist fatalities - the roads are at such an angle that any reckless driving speed can align with a reasonable cycling speed such that the driver's door pillar can block visibility of a cyclist with right of way right up to the point of impact - and it's compounded by the fact that the car is necessarily approaching from behind the cyclist, so a passing cyclist will be unaware of the danger possibly until they get hit. Of course if drivers in the area actually followed the stop signs no one would get hit - but if you watch the video in a five minute period genuinely only about half of the cars passing through actually come to a complete stop at the stop sign. You need more than signage and quietly hoping that people to do the right thing.

The Wired reporting is based on Bez's article on Singletrack (as stated): link Tom Scott made a good complementary video about this: ▶ this video It's already fixed just last month: link and link

The Tom Scott video has a good animation on this: ▶ this video Because of the layout of the junction the cars are actually approaching from behind the cyclists.

Example of an insideously unsafe intersection that was changed to make it safer (for bike riders): ▶ this video How it was fixed: link

this article seems to have some actual pictures: link the previous configuration as shown on the satellite image looks a lot like the intersection Tom Scott made a video about, where the intersecting road is angled to keep cross-traffic hidden behind a car's a-pillar. ▶ this video

See ▶ this video for an example. One of the advantages of raking the front windshield for aerodynamics is changing the geometry for the A pillar to be more sideways instead of vertical, allowing a bit more hope of seeing something.

The blind spots in the article are from the A pillar, which isn’t addressed by rear view mirrors. The momentum would tend toward this being solved by sensors/computer vision, but maybe chip shortages have curtailed that. Tom Scott presented an interesting example of A pillar blind spots causing problems: ▶ this video

For a particularly dramatic example of this, Tom Scott made a video about an intersection in the UK that's poorly designed for visibility: ▶ this video

Sounds to me like cars shouldn't be allowed to drive where pedestrians travel, if they can't really avoid driving people over. Edit: This Tom Scott video shows how a cyclist can be perfectly occluded by the A-pillar while both are moving ▶ this video

> The angles we were converging at meant that he basically disappeared into the background because there was no relative motion. This effect is demonstrated in this video about a particularly dangerous crossing in the UK: ▶ this video