Safe Driving

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Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Operator: Welcome to the Health Care Health And Safety Association conference call for June 22, 2004. Please go ahead.

Bob Gammon: Good afternoon everyone, my name is Bob Gammon and I'm a consultant with the Ontario Safety Association for Community and Healthcare here in Thunder Bay for the Superior North region.

On behalf of the Ontario Safety Association for Community and Healthcare, I would like to welcome all participants. Today our presentation is on safe driving and following the presentation we invite you to stay on the line for a question and answer period. Now please note that this question and answer period is a finite time, so if time does run out and your question has not been addressed, please stay on the line and the operator will take your contact information.

Now before introducing our speaker I have a few reminders for the audience. Please eliminate all background noise or discussion during your call since everyone will hear you, come to the microphone if you're addressing the conference in a large room, and please turn off all pagers and cell phones now. And finally, if your building has a PA system, please turn it down or off if at all possible.

Well it's time to get started, so let's proceed. Our speaker today is Doug Annett. He's the Director of Operations of Skid Control School. Doug brings a wealth of experience and a great team to the plate. He's an excellent speaker and is an expert, obviously, in driving safety. We're very pleased that he can be with us today. So welcome, Doug.

Doug Annett: Hello. Good afternoon everybody. What I wanted to start of with I guess was a review of the questions from the quiz that was made available to everyone. Is everybody with me on that?

Bob Gammon: If folks haven't downloaded that questionnaire, Doug…

Doug Annett: Yeah?

Bob Gammon: They can still go to our website at osach.ca and download those materials.

Doug Annett: Okay. So is there any…I guess what I wanted to do is use that as the basis for the discussion to start with and now if there's anyone who has any questions, they'll be able to address that, right?

Bob Gammon: Yes, certainly.

Doug Annett: Okay. Basically the questions follow the order of the kinds of risks that people face in driving and traffic safety. One of the perhaps surprising parts about looking at the numbers or the statistics regarding traffic safety is that when you consider the kinds of collisions that we have, and when you think about the appropriateness of driver responses to them, the kinds of crashes that we participate in most are the ones that we have the most control over. That is, if you look at the province as a whole, you may be - well maybe you're not surprised if you're from the Toronto area or an urban area - that the most common crash we have is a rear-end collision, typically the commuters on freeways at relatively low speed.

If you look at the country as a whole, and for just about every other province than Ontario, the most common collision is a single vehicle crash. Now when you think about the immensity of this country, there's an awful lot of two-lane highways where people are driving along all by themselves and have really nobody to blame but themselves when they do end up off the road. Even the rear-end collision, when you look at the causes of rear-end collisions, we've got a pretty good idea how to prevent those and we also have a pretty good idea of how to prevent single vehicle crashes too, but they are the ones that we participate in most. About half of the collisions that occur in Ontario are one or the other of those two kinds of crashes. From year to year it may switch as to which one is actually slightly ahead or behind but it's pretty much a quarter of all the crashes that we have are rear-end collisions and a quarter of the crashes that we have are single vehicle crashes.

So in addressing those areas of risk, that's what the first question from the questionnaire is intended to deal with. That is when we talk about following distances, there may be a variety of different methods that people have learned over the years for measuring the following distance behind another vehicle and though what we would like to have people standardize in their measuring of these distances is not just what's comfortable or not what they heard from somebody making up a rule of thumb, but to look at a strict measurement in terms of time. That is if the vehicle in front of you passes some sort of fixed point, like a shadow, a crack in the road, some sort of marking at the side of the road, and then begin to count, "1001, 1002, 1003," there's a three second gap that you're creating between yourself and the vehicle in front of you. The main argument for this is not necessarily related to braking distance; that is, unless you're driving a Corvette. Anybody out there with their Corvette company car that wants to chip in at this point go ahead, but if you're driving a Corvette or a Porsche then you might be able to stop that thing in three seconds from 100 kilometers an hour, but if you're driving something other than a sophisticated sports car, it's going to take your vehicle longer than three seconds to stop from 100 kilometers an hour. I'm using the 100 because that's the typical freeway speed and it's also a speed which people often do drive on two lane highways, even if the posted speed is 80 or 90 kilometers an hour, it's not unusual to see people doing 100 kilometers an hour on a two lane highway.

Again, if anybody feels that I'm saying any thing that's too outrageous, if I'm describing something that just doesn't happen in the part of the world that you live in, just stop me, but I don't think I'm out of line with this to suggest that people do exceed the speed limit on an 80 or 90 kilometer road and that it's not unusual to see people doing 100 kilometers an hour in a situation like that.

The three second following distance is unique for another reason in that if you're about three seconds behind the car in front of you, that means that a driver can afford to take their eyes off the car that is directly ahead and project their vision beyond the car ahead. That is when a car is close it consumes a fair amount of your visual field. So that means that you're looking at the back of the vehicle in front of you, and of course there's the complaint about sport utilities and vans and trucks and buses, but you can control the size of that vehicle that's in front of you by letting it get farther away from you, so that the tractor trailer that you know is 12 feet tall, when you back off and leave some gap between yourself and the truck you can actually make the truck get smaller in your visual field, which allows you to open up your vision ahead. For example, you can see why the truck ahead is hammering on the brakes to not hit the moose, even though you didn't see the moose, you might see the response to the truck, the response by the truck, and be able to do something about that. If you shrink the size of the truck in front of you by leaving a good following distance, you may even be able to see up the highway far enough that you can see the moose come out of the woods, aha, I know the truck in front of me is going to have to hit the brakes and I'm going to get ready for something at the same time as the driver in front is responding rather than waiting for them to respond, their brake lights come on, and then you respond to that.

Is that a clear enough explanation? Does anybody have any questions about that or any concerns in that regard? Anybody still awake?

Unknown Speaker: Yep.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah, we're all here.

Doug Annett: Okay. When we're not on a video link I'm wondering if I'm talking to myself, but that's the beauty of radio I suppose or telephone.

Where are people from? You're from the northwest of the province?

Unknown Speaker: Thunder Bay.

Unknown Speaker: Longlac.

Unknown Speaker: Thunder Bay.

Unknown Speaker: North Bay.

Doug Annett: So you know what I'm talking about about avoiding animals on highways, right?

Unknown Speaker: Oh yeah.

Unknown Speaker: Everyday.

Doug Annett: Right. And of course the whole idea about being able to see a long way up ahead to predict the places where the animals may be coming out of the forest.

So perhaps tailgating is not such a big issue for some of the roads that you would be traveling on. Is this a fair thing to say?

Bob Gammon: Actually I think it's a real issue up north here because folks will often follow trucks closely assuming that they're going to almost be the animal sweep. In other words, if a moose is going to come out on the highway, that truck that you're tailgating is actually going to get the moose.

Doug Annett: I see. It's like having your big brother out in front of you to do all the dirty work.

Bob Gammon: Yeah, exactly. So tailgating I certainly see as an issue.

Cheryl: I think we do more tailgating-this is Cheryl from North Bay-here, only because we don't have the passing lanes that we do down south, and so we're waiting to pass so we have to tailgate in order to get enough, um, before we can pass. You know what I'm saying?

Doug Annett: Yeah, I think I understand the logic there. That is, if you're close up behind a vehicle in front and then you want to go out and pass them then it means that you don't have to cover as much ground in order to get out and around.

Cheryl: Right.

Doug Annett: Again, oddly enough, if you're farther back and you can look around the car that you're behind, right? If you're farther back in the flow then you can look up the road farther from that position to see if you're making a good choice about whether to pass or not. When you would begin to accelerate, then you can ease the car over the line, if you're close behind another vehicle then you have to steer fairly abruptly to the left in order to clear the car in front of you and then get serious about getting on the gas pedal. So if you're a little bit farther back, you can get serious about accelerating on a softer arc out around the car that you're passing. So you're hitting your peak speed when you're beside the car and then it's relatively easy to get back in front of them because by that time you're going so much faster. If you are close behind something and may not be making as good a judgment about how clear the road is that you're heading into and have to steer more abruptly, accelerate later, then you're not really up to your full speed that you'd like to be at in order to pass that car, or as the case me be, the truck in front of you. That may be more the case of passing a truck, but of course, if it's going slow or climbing a hill, then you don't have to go as fast to get all the way by it, even though it's a longer vehicle. Does that make any sense?

Cheryl: Um-hum. Yeah.

Doug Annett: And of course then, again, you have to look at the advisement of is this really a good place to pass this vehicle and if I'm going 200 kilometers then if I can actually improve my speed by 10 kilometers an hour I'll get there, you know, and you do the math how many minutes you actually save in doing that as opposed to staying behind somebody and at the next town they turn right; well there you're clear anyway without the risk of making that passing maneuver. But it is a frustrating experience when you're behind that RV for, you know, the last period of time when it's trying to climb up and down hills. For somebody who doesn't know the territory either.

The other complaint of course comes from drivers who are being tailgated by the logging truck who knows every inch of the roadway, right? And they tend to tailgate the car going down a hill, because they're trying to build up steam to climb up the next hill and that's something that drivers need to be aware of on that, to not inhibit the truck driver's ability to keep their speed up coming down a hill, exactly for that reason.

I'm sure that's happened to you too, when the logging truck behind you is following too closely.

Bob Gammon: Absolutely. So Doug, just to kind of recap, and so the three second rule actually isn't so much a stopping distance as is to assist sort of visual, to increase our visual field.

Doug Annett: That's the main reason behind it. If you're too close then the tendency is for the driver to put their focus on the vehicle that they're following rather than being able to open their scope ahead to the bigger picture of what's happening around them. That's the main emphasis on that.

Bob Gammon: Maybe I need refresher training. I think it's been five years since I was at Skid Control School so that's new information for me.

Doug Annett: Exactly that. The refreshment is always an important aspect of learning, isn't it?

Bob Gammon: Absolutely.

Doug Annett: Can we go on? I can just lead through these questions if you like and we can touch on them as we go through this information or, as I say, if there are questions then by all means you can stop me.

The second question is about stopping behind another vehicle. Often when a person is hit from behind they may say well how can I do anything to prevent that? They hit me. Well one of the most common sort of situations where this can happen is when you're simply stopped at a traffic light and the road is slippery, the driver behind doesn't want to hit you, they just need five more feet. They're trying to stop but they're not going to make it. Well first of all, it demands that you're paying attention to the mirrors in that situation, if you're exposed behind with no one parked behind you or stopped behind you at the light, that's where your risk area is, so paying attention to the mirror at that point will allow you to judge the approach of a vehicle behind. Often that's the time that people consult their maps and telephones and all the rest of it, but in fact there still is a risk area behind you. The ability then to not be hit by the driver behind depends on you have the option to move up or to change lanes, or somehow get out of the line of fire of that vehicle that's coming at you from behind. The driver behind is trying to stop, if he needs five more feet to stop on a slippery road and you can move up and give him six, great. Everybody looks good.

The rule or-there's a number of rules of thumb on this. One of the rules of thumb that we've often remembered from driving school talk is to leave enough room that you can see the tires of the vehicle in front. We're not necessarily ascribing to that rule because it depends on the size of your car and the size of the vehicle in front of you and the slope of the hood: you could take the nose of a Honda Civic and put it under the bumper of a Yukon and you could still see the tires in front of you, so it's not a universal rule. In fact, if you picture exiting a parking space then you could get an idea of how much room you really do need to not hit the car in front of you if you had to change lanes and steer around it. And of course the slipperier the road, the more room you would need to have to be able to accomplish that task quickly, because if the driver is approaching from behind quickly, you would need to be able to escape fairly quickly.

It's also important to be able to take the lead on this. That is, if the driver behind realizes they're going to rear-end something and they see you start to move out of the way, then that helps them make their decisions as to what they're going to do next. One of the arguments about this is of course, well what if you move into the shoulder at the same time the driver behind you tries to move to the shoulder, well that would probably be taking action too late rather than leading the action yourself. So in this one we want the driver to be very proactive and considering that the driver behind has made a mistake, don't depend on them getting it right. Maybe you should take the lead and show them, look, I'm going to move to the right here over to the shoulder, you figure out what you're going to do next and proceed from there.

We hear from drivers on busy commuter-type roads that in fact when they moved to the shoulder, that's exactly what they need to do is to actually keep driving up the shoulder for another two or three or four car lengths because the driver behind followed them to the shoulder and still didn't have enough room to stop. So that's something to remain cognizant of is to keep track of what the driver is doing that's coming up behind you.

Another issue related to this is driver wellness I guess you'd say. When we look at statistics for years gone by, we've always sort of come back to this number that 94 percent of collisions are the results of driver error, whether a person gets ticketed or not, there's somebody that made a mistake. And it may be a mistake in terms of prevention. You didn't do something that would allow you to prevent the collision, even if the other driver was charged or ticketed or it was clearly their at-fault collision. But what happened to the other 6 percent? What are the other 6 percent that aren't driver fault or driver error? And those have been split up into two groups of collisions, one is where there's a vehicle malfunction. Wheels fall off, brakes don't work, something malfunctions on the vehicle and it's basically a really big curling stone now.

The other section of that that makes up that other 6 percent is driver incapacity. That is, if a person has a heart attack behind the wheel, they are still listed as being involved in a motor vehicle crash according to the Ministry of Transportation. They can't necessarily tell whether the heart attack happened 10 seconds before or 10 seconds after the collision, so it's listed as a motor vehicle fatality.

What we've seen over the years is that vehicles are getting better, so there's fewer fatal malfunctions in vehicles, and yet at the same time, we're having more - if you want to call it - "driver malfunction," where they're having a stroke or a seizure or a heart attack or something behind the wheel and they're incapable to change the direction of their vehicle, so the driver in front would be well advised to be aware of the trajectory that the vehicle behind is on and in that case, you have no choice but to get out of the way of that vehicle if it's approaching you from behind to swerve to an open lane or something like that. Not always easy to do if you're in traffic, is it? But it's something that we can calculate for in a large number of collision situations.

How does that sit with everybody? Any comments on that?

Unknown Speaker: None.

Doug Annett: Fairly straightforward?

Unknown Speaker: Um-hum.

Doug Annett: Okay. Question three, I already touched on this a little bit in dealing with the question number one, which relates to the following distance, question number three relates to where you should be looking down the roadway. It's, again, normal for drivers to look in a relatively short area in front of their vehicle as opposed to looking more distantly ahead. It's more difficult to look more distantly at something which requires a little will power to do that. The distance that we'd like you to be aware of, to know about in the future is somewhere in the vicinity of 15 to 30 seconds. It's easy to drive across Saskatchewan, because you can see across the flat prairie very easily, but depending on what part of northern Ontario you're in that may be more difficult than other places, and obviously if you're on a twisty road or a hilly road, it's difficult for you to see what's around the bend or over the hill, so it would make sense to slow down appropriately so that if you did see the moose standing on the highway over the hill, you'd have some time to do something about it, because you're not going to get much warning otherwise.

The standard of knowing what's 15 seconds into your future is again measurable the same way that we talked about the 3-second following distance, you could mark a landmark up ahead like a road sign, or a side road or something like that on the roadway and count it out the same way - 1001, 1002, 1003 - and as you reach 1015, see where you're at relative to the marker that you had picked. This allows you, again, to have plenty of time to accomplish what you need to do in strategizing. I see something suspicious up there, what am I going to do about that. I have time to check the mirror, I have time to go through the list of my options, select the best option and then actually carry it out. So 15 seconds is a lot of time to think and deliberate and chose an action and then carry it out. This sort of thing is important, again, even on empty highways, because as you look up ahead you may get the suspicion that that looks like a place where it would be very convenient for an animal to come out of the forest. And you know more about moose and deer than I do, but you also know that they probably come out at the least opportune times, and sometimes those are very difficult to predict. But looking far ahead will also give you that opportunity to make some predictions.

As you're looking ahead, of course, your peripheral vision will keep track of the things that are close to you, and obviously in some animal hits there's no answer, right? The animal was just so close so quickly that there isn't any time to do any responding. And of course, animals don't respond the way humans to and don't make the same decisions that humans do in reference to things moving as fast as automobiles around them, but I can maybe address that whole business about animals a little bit later when we talk about some braking techniques.

Bob Gammon: Yeah, that would be great.

Doug Annett: Fair enough. Question number four about antilock brakes, this one is a question which we still address. We've had antilock brakes on cars for 15 years or so now and many people driving company vehicles will have a class of vehicle which has antilock brakes. I'm not sure what the vehicles are that people are driving, but is there anybody there who has antilock brakes on their cars? I would expect there are some of you who do.

Hillary: I have. It's Hillary from Toronto.

Doug Annett: Oh, there's somebody from Toronto.

Hillary: Yes.

Doug Annett: Oh good. Welcome. Is there anybody there that does not have antilock brakes on their car?

Cheryl: Me, Cheryl, in North Bay.

Doug Annett: Cheryl from North Bay. So you're driving a conventional brake vehicle, so in stopping with a conventional brake vehicle, the worst experience, the worst thing you can do would be to hit the brakes too hard and end up locking the wheels.

Cheryl: Right.

Doug Annett: You know what I'm talking about with that, right? The best technique would be to approach braking smoothly so that you don't stab the brake pedal and jerk the tire so to speak when you first apply the brake. That's the worst time to startle the tire contact patch against the road, that's the easiest place actually to lock the wheels up. The highest speed is when the tires have the least grip anyway, so it's relatively easy to lock the wheels at high speed and then throw yourself into some kind of trouble that's not very efficient as far as braking and has taken away your ability to direct the car where you want it to go down the road. So smooth and careful as you approach the brake pedal, what we call it is beginning at zero as a style. So your foot lands on the pedal with no force, so you don't surprise your passengers. They don't even know you've begun braking. And almost with the weight of a feather, begin pressing on the brake pedal and then add another feather and another feather and another feather, gradually increasing the pressure. Now as you get past that beginning point that you'll feel the car start to tilt forward a little bit, it'll actually tip it's weight towards the front of the car and that's a good thing. Now you can add more pedal pressure, depressing the front, the front tires are pressed onto the road more firmly, which provides better grip for them, great, keep tipping the weight forward by continuing to press harder and harder and harder on the brake pedal and then you'll actually be quite sensitive to the change over to when the wheels lock and then be able to use that sensitivity to release your foot from the brake and then make the next adjustment as necessary.

So many people who have driven conventional brakes, have learned to drive on conventional brakes, and have used that as a style, it may sound like it's taking a long response time as I'm describing this being gentle about pressing on the brake and carefully increasing the pedal pressure, but it actually makes for a very efficient stop, and even though it may seem like you're wasting time in the response time area, you're making up for it in the efficiency of the braking method.

Now the first time you've driven an ABS car - people may relate to this - if you remember the first time you hit the brakes with your ABS car on a surface that was perhaps more slippery than you thought it was and you heard the sound of the ABS, you may have been startled. You may have been surprised. What's that noise? Is anybody familiar with what I'm talking about there?

Bob Gammon: Absolutely.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah.

Doug Annett: Yeah. And you may wonder, gee, did I just brake my car? Have I caused damage somehow by doing this? On some early ABS models it felt like you were tearing the floor out of the car it was so loud and people would go back to their dealerships and complain that here I've got this brand-new car and it sounds like I'm tearing the wheels off it, well that's the way it should sound. That's perfectly normal. The pedal vibration and the noise of the pumps and the valves that are operating the antilock brake system are simply doing the work that they were designed to do.

Newer cars often have, been better engineered to muffle some of those feedback responses from the car so that it's not quite as obtrusive as it used to be on some of the early cars. And of course, we're seeing people coming through the course now that have never driven a conventional brake car. When they were learning how to drive their parent's car had ABS, their driving school car had ABS, now they're driving a company car that has ABS and really aren't familiar with the feedback from a car with conventional brakes that can have its wheels lock.

We go into this detail because you could rent a car or borrow somebody's car that doesn't have antilock brakes and so we may assume that the vehicle that we're driving, say one that you get at a rental fleet, has antilock brakes when in fact it doesn't, and that's certainly, I guess we'd say disconcerting when you apply the brakes and find out that it doesn't have antilock brakes. I'm not sure if anybody's had that experience, but do you have occasion to rent cars very often and travel that way.

Unknown Speaker: Yes, we do in Thunder Bay, to go to Armstrong and our Longlac office.

Doug Annett: Right. So you'd fly and rent.

Unknown Speaker: Well we rent primarily to go to other sites, but it's difficult; I found lately they don't service the vehicles well, so you're really taking a chance if you're not equipped to look at the vehicle, because we get different vehicles every time.

Doug Annett: Well that's an excellent point. I mean not only looking around the car to see if there's any damages on it before you take it out-

Unknown Speaker: Like things like windshield fluid I've not had, things you take for granted. No scraper. We have our own travel bag now with some of that stuff we take when we go.

Doug Annett: That's, again, a very good idea, because then you'll have your, at least your minimum package of things that are necessary for the road, and in some places, I'm sure in Northern Ontario, it gets pretty cold pretty quickly, right?

Unknown Speaker: And there's no stores to stop on some highways to get windshield fluid, so you'd have to make sure have it before you leave.

Doug Annett: Yeah, good point. You would think of course that that would be the sort of thing that would be part of the service that the rental company would be providing, but I've had the same thing happen in Calgary where there's no window scraper in the car. As absurd as it sounds, that would seem-you know what, people take the windshield scrapers, so you think it'd be pretty easy for a rental company to have their own name branded on the windshield scraper-good, take the thing, you're taking our marketing information with you into your own car. I don't see why that wouldn't be a-

Unknown Speaker: I think they turnover vehicles so often, you really have a personal responsibility to check, that's just what I've learned. Because otherwise you're assuming things are looked after and they're not.

Doug Annett: Yep, well that's a-

Unknown Speaker: Or assuming in the north, some vehicles don't have block heaters, and you go to plug in overnight and you can't, so making sure they have that.

Doug Annett: Yeah, again, an excellent point, which relates to your environment, where a block heater really is necessary. Good point.

As far as having ABS or not having ABS, you could, of course, ask the person behind the counter. Well, if they haven't got washer fluid in it, they may not even know whether the car has ABS or not, so that might not be the most reliable source of information. If you get in the car and you turn the key on to the on position, you'll notice that the lights on the dashboard will come on that are the warning lights for the charging system and the cooling system and those various functional systems in the vehicle and there'll be a light that will come on which will indicate that it has ABS. So there's a warning light which will come on, and it may only be on for a short period of time and that's the time that it takes for the system to do a little diagnostic check, so that once you start the engine, obviously the warning lights for the charging system, the cooling system, the ignition system will come on and then go out when the engine is operating telling you that yes, these functions are working properly. You may not be familiar with the dashboard and the layout of the lights on the dashboard in a car you're not familiar with, so it may take you a couple of times to turn the engine on and off to make sure that you've checked all the corners of the dashboard that you can see that there's an ABS warning light, which does the same thing of coming on and then going off when that diagnostic check has been done. At that point, if you're not convinced of that, that might be the point to get someone from the rental agency to check it themselves, but that's a pretty much universal way of telling a driver that there is an antilock brake system in the car.

Now of course if there's a fault with the antilock brake system, that warning light will come on and that warning light would stay on until the fault is corrected. In some cases it may be a temporary fault which the next time you turn the engine off and turn it back on again it has done another diagnostic check and has confirmed that the system has righted itself. An example of that is something like a wheel sensor, where it may be slightly out of alignment or it may be loose. You go over a set of railway tracks or a particularly bumpy road and the ABS light comes on, and it's telling you that the system is not operational. Well you may find that the next bump you go over, it jolts that loose sensor back where it should be. Not a very comforting situation to realize that the braking system may be that fragile, but in fact, that's a warning that that sensor may be ready to completely malfunction. If it's your personal car, then you can keep track of that. If it's a rental car, you wouldn't know, because you don't have a history with the car in understanding its foibles. That's the surest way of knowing if the ABS is there and if it's functioning. This is a surprise, again, for drivers when they expect that it would have ABS and it doesn't, so that is an important piece of information to know about.

Any questions about ABS operation? I hear silence, so that must be fairly straightforward for everyone.

Unknown Speaker: True or false for question four?

Doug Annett: Antilock braking systems allow the driver to brake hard and steer at the same time-I didn't really answer the question, did I?

What happens, of course, if you lock the wheels on a conventional brake system, then the tire is simply sliding down the roadway, so if you turn the steering wheel, it's still going to slide in a straight line. The major advantage with antilock brakes is that because the wheels don't lock, they continue to roll, that would mean that you would have better directional stability. That is, if the car is on two surfaces, if a tire catches a slightly grippier surface than the other tire, then it won't be pulled around or it won't yaw as much as if it was a conventional brake car, and you still have the option, if the wheels are still rolling, which they do under the antilock brake system, you still have the option to change direction. So even if you're in a curve and you have to brake, you can still negotiate the curve instead of going straight off the curve on a tangent. Or if you realize that I'm not going to stop in time before hitting someone from behind, then you would have the option to be able to swerve and brake at the same time. Is that clear?

Hillary: I have a - this is Hillary from Toronto.

Doug Annett: Yeah?

Hillary: I have a question about the antilock brakes.

Doug Annett: Sure.

Hillary: When the brake comes on, it makes that sound, are you supposed to just continue applying the brakes at that point and steering in the direction you want the car to go? What is the best way to control the car when the brakes, the antilock system suddenly comes in place?

Doug Annett: Right. The noise that you hear and the vibration that you feel at the pedal is the normal operation of the antilock brake. So as long as you want that vehicle to continue slowing down, continue maintaining the pedal pressure.

Hillary: Okay.

Doug Annett: And there's nothing wrong with the system when it makes that sort of response, that's perfectly normal. So if you release your foot from the brake, then you're just not going to be slowing down as efficiently; in fact, if you want to continue slowing down, continue that brake pedal pressure.

Hillary: And steer in the direction. Because sometimes what happens, the car tends to swerve, it depends on the speed which you are going, so I guess the important thing is to steer in the direction that you want to go.

Doug Annett: Yeah. You would steer-yes, steer in the direction that you want the vehicle to travel in, okay, is your best answer on that one. So yeah, that's a good question. Thank you.

Okay, the next question, question five, sort of addresses what we have been speaking about, is the ABS always engaged every time you brake, and we included this question because, again, there are some misconceptions out there and some people actually have used this terminology talking about their automatic braking system and it really isn't automatic in that sense, that the ABS will only engage when you have braked hard enough that the wheels would otherwise lock. What the wheel sensors are doing, without being too terribly technical I think I can explain this, the car brakes work like a bicycle brake, with the little caliper that squeezes against the rim of the bicycle wheel; a car brake works the same way, just with bigger parts and hydraulic pressure to squeeze the calipers together.

There's-obviously, if you squeeze too hard, then the caliper will stop the wheel from rolling and then the driver has to sense, aha, the wheel has gone from 100 kilometers now it's gone to 0, now I have to release my foot from the brake and the wheel has to, you know, roll up to speed again, that takes time for that to happen. With the wheel sensors, magnetic sensors, what they're constantly monitoring is the wheel speed. So if the sensor is sending information to the computer, approximately 200 times a second is an average quality system on a car, about 200 times a second, that would mean that it wouldn't take very long for the measurement of the slowdown of the wheel. Suppose the wheel slows down from 100 kilometers an hour to 90 kilometers an hour in five-hundredths of a second. Well, at that rate of deceleration, that wheel is going to lock pretty quickly. The sensor has already signaled this information to the computer, the computer says don't let that brake lock, and it then triggers a series of valves and pump mechanisms which releases the brake fluid pressure the same way as your foot would release the pressure from the pedal.

Now even on an average family car system, like a Ford Taurus for example, that system operates at 12 to 15 times a second, which is far faster than a driver could ever operate the pedal, so that that system then is constantly monitoring that wheel speed and making adjustments for it all the time. It would only engage if the driver has hit the brake hard enough that the wheel would lock, and the sensors and the mechanism is constantly monitoring this wheel speed. Of course, if you're on a slippery surface, then it doesn't take very long, or it can take quite light pressure for the wheels to lock and that would mean that the driver may be surprised sometimes when the ABS engages when perhaps you didn't realize that the surface had gone from being wet to actually freezing, and that's one of the dangers that we have at the changing seasons.

Now, of course, in southern Ontario, where it stays a little warmer and we put a lot more salt down on the roads, then you can have that sort of difficulty perhaps a little more often than in northern Ontario where it gets colder and stays colder, whereas if the temperature stays close to the freezing point, when you leave work to head home and it's one degree above freezing but by the time you get home it's two degrees below freezing, then you may have not recognized that the surface which was wet from the melting during the day time has now frozen, even in the time it takes you to get home. That's one of the beauties of Winnipeg, all the folks that live in northwestern Ontario can attest to that, that when it gets cold and it stays cold, even hard packed snow gives relatively good grip, and the colder the snow and the colder the ice, the better the grip is. It becomes almost like driving on gravel rather than driving on ice. So you folks from northern Ontario know what I'm talking about there, right?

Bob Gammon: Absolutely.

Doug Annett: The next question that is, that sort of ties into this, is about increased braking distances on slippery roads. That is, if you take a dry road and take that as the baseline for the grip of a road surface and you simply had a wet road, it begins to rain on that surface, a typical more or less standard calculation for the grip loss is about 40 percent, and that's fairly consistent. Obviously there's going to be some minor differences in the surface depending on the age of the surface and the porosity of the surface, but losing about 40 percent of your grip on a wet highway is a pretty standard measure, so that would represent at least an increase of 40 percent in your braking distance. That's not unusual at all. One of the things that you've probably heard is that to be very careful when it begins to rain, because the first raindrops that land on the road tend to mix with the road dust and the tire dust and any sort of contaminates that are on the surface and form more or less like a slurry, like a slimy surface on top of the roadway, which actually makes it slipperier at that point until there's been enough rainfall that it washes that away. So again, that's a warning where drivers don't understand how slippery that surface is immediately when the water hits the pavement.

If you're dealing with a snowy surface, it's not unusual to lose about 80 percent of your grip relative to a dry surface. Icy surface you lose another 10. When you're dealing with, say, freezing rain, you're down to about 5 times, sorry, 5 percent of the grip that you would have on an icy surface. So it's not a surprise that it would take 20 times the distance to stop on glare ice or on freezing rain. So that may be a quick calculation for drivers to put into place when they're on a highway that holy smokes, I can be going way too fast for conditions relatively quickly, as the surface changes from dry to ice.

Bob Gammon: Doug, let me ask a question.

Doug Annett: Sure.

Bob Gammon: It's Bob here. Does a 4x4 stop any sooner than just an ordinary 4x2 car?

Doug Annett: Not necessarily. And there's a number of reasons for that. Of course, the brakes have to do with how the vehicle is slowed down, not what makes it go, so whether it's a two-wheel drive or four-wheel drive or front-wheel drive or rear-wheel drive, really doesn't affect the braking very much at all, so it could be a no-wheel drive vehicle essentially and still the brakes on the vehicle are the ones that are responsible, right, and that's the function that's responsible for slowing the vehicle down. Of course, if you're talking about the typical sport utility vehicle or pickup truck, very often these vehicles don't stop as well, simply because they're heavier than a car, and that stands to reason that mass in motion just makes it harder to slow down the heavier object. Another factor too is that depending on the tires, something like a sport utility vehicle or a pickup truck may have a tire which actually is a more aggressive tread, a heavier lug tread, so that it covers a broader range of surfaces, but it may not work very well, say, on a wet road or even on a dry road. It may work well on a gravel road or on a loose surface, but it may not work very well on a wet asphalt road, so the very tire design on a sport utility vehicle may make it harder for that vehicle to stop on those other surfaces.

Bob Gammon: Okay, that's good. We've got to get that message out to those tailgating 4x4s up here.

Doug Annett: Well yeah. There is that confidence level that people have sometimes in the 4x4; the term that's used to describe it is called offsetting behaviour, meaning that if you believe that you're in a safer vehicle, you might very well just take on more risk, and this is part of the message with the 4x4 is that it is, what they want you to believe is that it's a safer vehicle and unfortunately people sometimes get into trouble way over their head on that. There's a book that was written by a fellow named Gerald Wilde, a professor at Queen's University, who has written a couple of books on that topic of risk taking and risk behaviour and that's one of the principals that he addresses is what we do about our understanding of risk, so the simple situation where there may be a highway, typical story, there's a highway with a lot of twists and turns and hills and people crash because they go off the road because of the twists and turns and hills, so the engineers redesign the road so there's only one turn in the highway, and it turns out that people still go off the road at the one turn, because they're overconfident about their use of the vehicle on that road now and probably go commensurately too fast for conditions for that one single turn and still manage to go off the road. Now I'm not saying that we need to go, you know, build bad roads just so people will be more careful, but there is that issue. How do we deal with that misperception that risk is nullified completely by good engineering.

Bob Gammon: That's really interesting to me. Thanks.

Doug Annett: The last question about skid control, again, there's a number of ways to put this into terminology, and one of the easiest ways for us to understand what to do when a car skids is to think about steering the vehicle where you want it to go, and we address this issue all the time with drivers who say, "I was always told to steer in the direction of the skid and I never knew what that meant." And that's one of those phrases that, exactly that, it may sound good to the person who's saying it, but not be communicating the intent to the hearer.

The best way to have this described is that if you think of looking down a straight road and picking a target that's in that 15 or 20 or 30 second range down the highway, then that would be your target point to aim at down the road. Well, if you've hit a slippery patch and your car is beginning to go sideways, well looking at the guardrail or looking at the trees is not a good source of information. Continue to focus your vision down the roadway to where the road is and then that will lead your steering in that direction. Of course, if you're looking down that straight highway and you see the target area, if your car begins to drift to the left, if the nose of the car is going left, then it would appear that the target that was ahead of you would actually appear to go right across the windshield, and if you let the angle continue to develop like that, pretty soon you're looking out the passenger half of the windshield. Well that would be dangerous because it would be difficult to ever recover a skid from that big an angle, but the point then is that as you see the target move off center from where it normally is in your view, then that would be a trigger for you to re-center the vehicle and simply drive it towards that target.

Now this is something that we do all the time when we're driving. We're constantly manipulating the steering wheel to keep the car directed down the highway. Little movements all the time that correct tiny deviations are something that you do so often and so automatically, you're probably not even aware of it. It's as we call an automatized behaviour and you don't, you're probably not even conscious of it until you feel the wind blow and then you say, "ooh, gee, the wind just blew, I better do something about that and I'll be careful" and you then consciously head to steer the car somehow to center it. There may be even a strategic move where you're not sure about something at the side of the road and you strategically move your car away from that thing that you're suspicious of. Maybe it's a moose, maybe it isn't, maybe it's just a rock, but up ahead you're saying I'm not so sure I want to be that close to something at the side of the road. So that's a strategic move if you're, as I started off with, beginning to skid because the car's hit an icy patch, then you'd have to do all this very consciously, very quickly, in order to guide it back towards the center of the lane again. So we're taking a function that we use all the time in centering the vehicle and taking it to a very radical extreme if the car is skidding sideways, and so it's far more important to think of what's my goal, where do I want to put this car and aim it down that roadway in a target area that's in that vicinity of that 15 second target zone.

Is that clear? Does that help explain that? Is there any questions on that one? Concerns? Clear enough?

Bob Gammon: So Doug, if I can summarize that, basically then we basically aim sort of automatically toward where we steer normally? We steer basically where we're looking.

Doug Annett: Yes. Yes. Very strong orientation that way. Yeah.

Bob Gammon: So if we're starting to skid, basically look where you want to go and then steer in that direction.

Doug Annett: And the steering will follow where you're looking, yeah. And that's a key concept and yet it's not that unusual a concept. As I say, it's something that you do all the time when you're centering your car on a roadway, and we want you to be more conscious of that and how that function works so that all the time that you're driving you're reinforcing that function of targeting at something, even if it's on just an ordinary straight, boring highway. To look around a curve would require, for example, looking across the gravel and perhaps looking across the oncoming lane to look into the direction that the curve goes and the same function would hold that if you're looking around the curve and your car begins to skid, you know where the road goes, that you wouldn't want to correct the steering so that you don't stay on the roadway. Continuing to direct your vision around the curve and follow where the road goes is a critical element of skid correction on that turn. If you don't skid, you can still rely on your peripheral vision to know where the edges of the road are. So even in cornering, the task is to keep the vision up and direct it around the curve.

If you find yourself looking down at the edge, to look and see where the edge of the road is, your peripheral vision needs a little bit of boosting there, so next time you're on a curve, maybe it's a familiar turn that you take everyday like a freeway ramp or just even on the highway, if you find yourself looking down at the edge of the road you're going too fast for how well your peripheral vision manages that stuff, so go a little slower into the next curve and see if you can make yourself look up around the turn, very much the way a hockey player or a skater or a skier would keep their balance by looking up rather than looking down at the puck or down at the tips of their skis on the snow surface. Any skiers, you would know what I'm talking about on that. Fair enough?

Bob Gammon: Okay, thanks, Doug.

Doug Annett: Just one question that I said I was going to get back to was about animals, and the best advice that I've heard on this, comes from several sources, but one of them is a professor of animal behaviour at the University of Guelph, and his understanding is that, of course, that animals don't respond the way the humans do when there's a car approaching, so a deer may in fact run. That's their method of defending themselves from a predator is to run. That's their best defense. So they're not going to run back into the forest. That's the place where they can't run very well. They're going to run to open space, right in front of your car. So they also respond to headlights in a funny way, that they're responding to the shadow as much as to the light, so if you swerve or steer then that changes the perspective of where the shadow is for the animal, so they dart back across the road the other way.

His advice, and what seems to make sense from every source that I've heard, is just try and slow down. Just try and slow down and you may be successful in slowing down enough that the animal makes it across the road in front of you. Of course, with many animals, if there's one, there's several more, so you may feel that you've successfully slowed down for the first one and then four more try to cross the road. Just because the first one's out of the way, you're probably best advised to continue to brake and continue to look where the original animal came from, which side of the road, because there may be several following the first one.

If you begin to swerve, in fact you may be putting yourself at more risk of losing control of the car. If you're in a position where you've slowed down from, say, 90 kilometers an hour to 30 kilometers an hour and it looks like you're still going to hit the thing, like the typical moose response that just sort of dares you - try and move, you know; a 1,500 pound animal - then at that point a swerving action around the animal may be more easily accomplished at a much lower speed rather than picking that as your first option to take. Of course, on two-lane highways it doesn't do any good to swerve to avoid the deer and hit the oncoming gravel truck, so that also has to be part of your analysis of the situation too. And there are all kinds of scenarios that people can tell stories about I'm sure where the oncoming vehicle hits an animal and then tosses that animal across the highway into the opposite lane of traffic, so awareness on all sides of the vehicle is really critically important there.

Any comments that anyone has to make on that analysis or does that make sense?

Bob Gammon: Well certainly from my driving up here up north-this is Bob-I certainly just simply have to slow down and try to avoid driving during those critical hours of sunrise and sunset.

Doug Annett: That's a very good point again too is that knowing the seasons and the times and they say that animals tend to move at dusk and dawn and the fact that they very often move in groups, so you can do your best to get around that. I'm not exactly sure which is the worst season for that, whether it's winter or summer or hunting season or whatever it is, or black fly season. There seems to be reasons that the animals are near the highways at all times of year.

Bob Gammon: Are there any more questions out there?

Debbie: I just have a question-I looked on your website, the sheet that we got for this teleconference, Test Drive for Safety-

Doug Annett: Yep.

Debbie: It's a traffic safety bulletin series. Is that available that we could send it to other people at our sites to share the information?

Doug Annett: Some of those are accessible. Our clients have passwords to get to those sites. What we can do, if you want to leave an e-mail address or something we could be in touch with you.

Debbie: Okay. So I'll just e-mail it to the address on your site then?

Doug Annett: Sure.

Debbie: Okay.

Doug Annett: Who am I speaking to there?

Debbie: Debbie in Thunder Bay.

Doug Annett: Okay. Good.

Bob Gammon: Well, if there's no other questions, Doug, I guess this pretty much concludes our presentation today. We want to thank you very much for taking your time out to talk to us; it's a fascinating subject.

Doug Annett: It's my pleasure. I hope that that has been appropriate for the people that are listening and, as Debbie mentioned, the website is a source that you can get in touch with us and we can deal with questions that way fairly easily: www.Skidcontrolschool.com.

Bob Gammon: Great. So this concludes our presentation today and before I end I'd like to remind you that our next teleconference will take place on Tuesday, November 16, 2004. We'll be presenting on Overhead Lifts: the BC experience, so please check our website, www.osach.ca for more details on how to register.

Thanks very much everyone and have a safe day.