Rear view blindspots. How do you cope with them?

[sootie]

Were you watching the CCTV too much?

Not totally wrong actually!!
The real problem was the refocussing time of my eyes. (Younger eyes should be faster, but still too slow I think.)
When you use a mirror you still focus at the total distance to the other vehicle which is always similar to the distance to the car ahead.
With CCTV you look for fine detail in a small close picture & then have to refocus out to 10m or so.
If you do this several times a minute there is quite a lot of time when you are not really seeing anything. This is bad news in my opinion!

Of course, nobody has ever had this problem with studying a GPS - or have they?????

[george formby]

Not totally wrong actually!!
The real problem was the refocussing time of my eyes. (Younger eyes should be faster, but still too slow I think.)
When you use a mirror you still focus at the total distance to the other vehicle which is always similar to the distance to the car ahead.
With CCTV you look for fine detail in a small close picture & then have to refocus out to 10m or so.
If you do this several times a minute there is quite a lot of time when you are not really seeing anything. This is bad news in my opinion!

Of course, nobody has ever had this problem with studying a GPS - or have they?????

Yup, t'is just one of the things I dislike about them on a bike, even though the image is designed to be read at a glance I find myself taking to much time putting together what the screen shows & were the road ahead is going. European motorways with mutiple intersections in a very short stretch combined with heavy traffic & rain is very taxing. Amsterdam, Hamburg & the Benelux countries are freaking scary by bike with a sat nav. I ended up just using a blue tooth earpiece & only occasionally looking at the screen. Riding back from the south of France I spent a bit of time plotting my route in advance & mainly used road signs. T'was much betterer.

[sootie]

Yup, t'is just one of the things I dislike about them on a bike, even though the image is designed to be read at a glance I find myself taking to much time putting together what the screen shows & were the road ahead is going. European motorways with mutiple intersections in a very short stretch combined with heavy traffic & rain is very taxing. Amsterdam, Hamburg & the Benelux countries are freaking scary by bike with a sat nav. I ended up just using a blue tooth earpiece & only occasionally looking at the screen. Riding back from the south of France I spent a bit of time plotting my route in advance & mainly used road signs. T'was much betterer.

Well said, and good for you in recognising the potential problem. I can understand why a GPS is so much more necessary in Europe than here in NZ. Population densities are high, the roads are much older, and routing becomes very complicated in many instances. Personally, I just use the "pre program from a paper map" approach in NZ or Australia, (as you suggest) but I will change if the need ever really arises.

Actually, along the same lines, I have a quite cramped speedo display on the ZX11, and the speed does tend to creep up! To make it easy to galnce at, I have added a big red wedge of red tape. When the white needle hits that I have reached "Law Enforcement Interest" territory!