Tom Scott
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2020–2025
4:12 · 3.9M views · Apr 27, 2020
Tom Scott explains why Ipley Cross in England's New Forest was one of Britain's most dangerous junctions. The angled crossroads lets a car's A-pillar hide approaching traffic and cyclists because there is no relative motion in the driver's view.
Used as the go-to visual demonstration of A-pillar blind spots and badly designed junctions.
10 comments from Hacker News
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.
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
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