The First Time I Experienced Thinking Distance

And oh my! It really brought home the reality of something I’d only known in theory.

I was already beside the car when it started to pull out in front of me. I saw every detail of its wing, its shiny paintwork. And I knew everything — really everything — about the context of what was happening.

When you’re a motorcyclist, you have to assume you’re invisible (hard, I know, with the racket your machine can make, but necessary). I knew all the dodgy areas on my regular commute; the tight junctions, the blind corners … and I made sure I was aware of every nuance — parked cars, moving cars, where the drivers were looking, pedestrians, dogs, everything.

And this was one of those dodgy areas; main road, round a blind corner, always cars parked outside a shop. Any one of them might pull out. I knew where every vehicle was located on that stretch of road as soon as I was around the corner. I worked out the direction that each parked car would take if it began to move. I knew so much that, after the event, I was able to reconstruct everything and work out how much time elapsed between seeing the car start to pull out and it hitting me.

It was less than a third of a second. Thinking distance.

My thoughts were crystal clear. No panic, no confusion — no time for that. I knew what I needed to do — turn away, swerve around the encroaching car bonnet. It was far too late to stop even if my hand could have grasped the brake, but in that third of a second, my mind raced through what I had to do. If I could just move a little bit… and if that encroaching car wing would just straighten and get out of my way…

Because surely it had to straighten. I knew exactly which car it was. I knew if it moved it would essentially go straight. It had no reason to pull out in front of me, its path ahead was clear. If it would just straighten, we would get out of this.

Less than a third of a second.

It didn’t straighten. It kept right on coming like it was pulling out round something. Yet I was so sure there was nothing in front of it.

A third of a second, it closed in. I never saw much of it beyond that shiny wing coming out in front of me.

Then we hit. I went from knowing exactly where I was to chaos. I was tumbling. In the air. I was going to land and I had no idea where. All I knew was that I wanted to remain aware. I didn’t want the world to vanish into darkness. People who got knocked off motorbikes didn’t always wake up again. I was desperate to be conscious when I landed.

And I was. I lay still, feeling thankful that I seemed to be in one piece. I didn’t hear a bang. I don’t remember feeling the impact. I just remember feeling relieved that I’d stopped tumbling and was awake.

There was an odd interlude then. Lots of people around. Flashing lights. A guy standing by the roadside holding a broken wing mirror. And two ambulances, because although passers-by had been on the phone at once to the emergency services, an ambulance had happened to be passing on its way somewhere else. They stopped and did the things that paramedics do. Then the other ambulance arrived and there was a discussion over the blanket they’d wrapped me in. They did some kind of blanket trade to keep the books straight before I was put on a stretcher and taken on my first ever blue light trip to the hospital.

Bits of the scene replayed as we headed for town. That guy with the wing mirror? I was annoyed. I’d only just had it repaired and it must have snapped off in the crash. Yet when I met my bike again, both mirrors were intact, so I thought I’d got it wrong. And the way that car bonnet just kept coming out in front of me. I had to have got that wrong too. If it had been the car I thought it was, there’d have been no reason for it not to go straight, even if it hadn’t seen me.

It turned out I hadn’t been wrong about any of it.

The guy was holding the wing mirror from the car, one of those old-style ones that stand up on the wing. I’d taken it off with my legs. The impression of it stayed across my thighs for weeks like an unwelcome tattoo.

I wasn’t wrong about the car either. It had no good reason to pull out so far into the road, but it did have a stupid one. The dozy old git of a driver was pulling out to do a U-turn. I’m sorry to use ill-mannered and ageist language, but honestly! It was his routine. Every week, he went to the Post Office, then did a U-turn just in front of a blind corner on a busy main road to go back home. He was an accident waiting to happen and I was there at just the wrong time.

One thing I didn’t know until a long time afterward when I met someone who had witnessed the accident, was that when I’d stopped tumbling and was feeling relieved that I was in one piece and conscious, I was in the opposite carriageway. I’d been thrown across the road. Had anything been coming at that moment, my relief (and I) would have been short-lived.

As it is, I got away with no broken bones, but the bike was a write-off. I’ve never ridden one since. I couldn’t get past the fact that at a place where I knew all the dangers, where I was aware of every feasible possibility, I’d still been caught out.

I’ve known about thinking distance for years — I had to learn the details to pass my test many decades ago. What surprised me about the reality was not my inability to react physically, it was the detail and the clarity of the thoughts I was able to process in that third of a second.