CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER 4 JOHN FLAHERTY
Joint Force Headquarters – Alabama
Montgomery, Alabama

I have ridden motorcycles for most of my life. There have been times, however, where I had to refresh myself with the proper procedures and skills I learned many years ago. One skill that seems to get lost from time to time is the act of looking ahead of where you are riding. A simple acronym that helps me focus by using my eyes and mind rather than my hands and feet is SEE — search, evaluate and execute.

The Motorcycle Safety Foundation characterizes riding as more of a skill of the eyes and brain rather than the hands and feet. Once the basic skills are acquired, safety on the road is more about using your eyes and the brain to help sort out and organize, as well as prioritize, safety factors in traffic. It makes us on-the-fly risk analysts. Situation awareness is one aspect of safe riding or driving, but a safety mindset is needed for effective hazard perception.

Another important acronym I use is SIPDE, which stands for scan, identify, predict, decide and execute. The SIPDE and SEE techniques create time and space that allow us to control our personal safety margin. They both depend on visual cues by seeing what is where and how it is happening.

This process also engages the brain to retrieve the visual cues from memory. That visual memory helps the brain predict and decide for you how to execute a defensive action. It all starts with the eyes. The brain will follow based on what our eyes see.

Here are three things to do on every ride:

1. Look down the road. Looking 20 feet ahead of the front tire is too close. At 50 mph, the bike is traveling about 88 feet per second. In 0.176 seconds, you have covered that 20 feet. However, look too far down the road and you’ll lose sense of where you are in the picture. As a rule of thumb, you should look at least 100 feet downrange. A good way to judge that is the white lines painted down the center of the road are roughly 10 feet long.
2. Take a soft, wide view of things. If we focus too much on something, our peripheral vision fades, which narrows the field of vision. Soften your focus and let your awareness of the broader field come into view. Most humans have at least 114 degrees of vision with an additional 40 degrees on each side. A soft focus opens up this wider field and reduces the five faults of a too-focused visual aptitude: target fixation, compulsive overscanning, tunnel vision, looking too close and looking too far downrange. Having a soft focus and rotating the head slows down the flitting of your eyes and brings a fuller, smoother picture into view.
3. Turn your head. Most humans can turn their head between 60-80 degrees of rotation left and right. We should be able to turn our heads far enough that our chin is almost in line with our shoulders. Mirrors leave blind spots, so a glance or twist of the head brings extra potential threats into our view, which give us better situational awareness. Be smooth, glance, scan and let the brain fill in the blanks. We typically see what we expect to see, so look with an open mind and take in the full spectrum of your surroundings.

In summary, in an article from the July/August 2018 Motorcyclist magazine, Page 84, Ralph Hermens writes, “As a rider, we have to keep our head on a swivel. We have to pay attention to everything around us and constantly be in the moment. Sometimes predicting what other drivers — or in our case, riders — will do can save your life. But assuming someone will behave as we would can be just as dangerous. Leave enough space for those around to be unpredictable, and always give yourself an out.”

Look down the road, soften your focus to widen the view, turn your head to scan all available obstacles and use SEE. If could just save your life.