It was shorts-and-gloves weather this morning for Bike to School Day 2026, one of the happiest mornings of the year.
The kiddo and I practiced paying attention to movement in our peripheral vision this morning. Aside from a couple tough crossings, especially NE 50th Street, the ride to her school mostly goes along fairly quiet residential streets that are great for practicing this skill. She is good at looking both ways when approaching a cross-street, but sometimes her glance stays focused on one direction or the other a little longer than necessary. We talked about how the outside edges of our eyes are not good at focusing, but are really good at detecting movement. So you can glance one direction while still detecting motion coming from the other direction. Sometimes you hear people say, “Head on a swivel,” but I find it’s more about keeping your head mostly forward and being ready to lock onto any signs of movement, whether it’s a car on a cross-street or someone opening a car door or a squirrel running toward to the street.
It’s been so fun teaching her how to navigate her city by bike because a lot of times I find myself trying to put into words something I’ve never really thought about. Like how I have learned to trust my peripheral vision. This isn’t the kind of thing you’d find in a “how to ride a bike” tutorial because it’s such a small thing and you would never want to overwhelm a new rider with too many little details to focus on. But we bike together often enough that it was a cool little lesson for the morning, and I’ve been thinking about peripheral vision all day. It’s so interesting! The survival benefits of detecting movement at the edges of our vision range are obvious, but those same benefits also help us care for others. This makes driver sightline obstructions in cars even more frustrating. Human eyes and associated systems of perception are built to detect people in crosswalks or bike lanes even if the person is not actively looking in their direction. Yet car makers have gotten comfortable building extended hoods and wide beams that get in the way of life-saving glances. It’s all so preventable. This is also why intersection daylighting efforts like the bike and scooter parking project Pioneer Square and the International District are more important than ever. Roadway designs need to adapt to a world in which cars have obscured sightlines by creating extra space to ensure everyone can see everyone else. We also desperately need an overhaul of US auto standards that removes the CAFE loophole, considers pedestrian and bicycle safety (adults and children) in crash tests, and mandates clear sightlines for drivers of all heights.
Thinking about peripheral vision challenges my usual concepts of what vision even is. Eyes are not like cameras projecting a visual feed into my brain. Parts of my eyes focus on whatever I’m looking at, but then much of my vision is actually very blurry. Meanwhile, my brain isn’t just passing raw visual information straight to my consciousness, it is creating a 3D world unique to me that is based on a mixture of what my eyes see and my previous understanding of the world. I may see a table while a carpenter sees pieces of wood processed in stained in a certain way and then constructed in a certain order. I may see a dangerous slip lane that should be closed in order to slow turning traffic and shorten the effective crosswalk distance to improve safety while others see a street with some poppies blooming along the sidewalk. Many optical illusions work by exploiting the way the brain constructs its 3D world. We can look at the same Necker Cube at the same time and see entirely different cubes. It’s enough to make you question how “real” what we see actually is or whether everything I see as real is actually just an information set based on a unique mix of what matters to me and what mattered to the survival of my ancient ancestors.
I didn’t say all this to my kid this morning. Gotta save some discussion points for future bike rides. We had a great a morning and then she got some cool stuff like a reflective heart sticker that she put on her bike frame.