Good afternoon, dear reader.

Today I want to present you an article in which he considers the features of maneuvering trucks and buses in various conditions.

This information will be primarily useful to drivers who have recently received category C. 

Well, I want to dwell on a more detailed consideration of the question of how  to still see and remain visible to other road users on the road .

In  the current traffic rules  , this topic, in my opinion, is not fully implemented: this is the use of direction indicators, the use of car lighting devices (low beam, high beam headlights, taillights), it is also said about the presence of rear-view mirrors.

Already here it becomes not entirely clear how, for example, having a Gazelle car - a van or an awning, or a GAZ car with more than 3.5 tons, to see what is happening behind or, say, turn on reverse gear and drive back. Although the rules prescribe  to use the help of other persons , but if the driver is alone in the cabin, then what can he do?

That is, predominantly only drivers of passenger cars have the opportunity to scan the space around their car. At the same time, it is simply impossible for truck drivers to directly assess the situation behind their vehicle. With the increase in the length of the truck, it becomes more and more difficult to "see" the rear of the car.

So,  drivers of trucks , light trucks such as "Gazelle", "Bull"  do not have the opportunity to see the back of their car . This also includes drivers of buses, especially articulated ones, as well as drivers of road trains.

Also, one cannot ignore the fact that drivers of cargo vans, for example, a GAZ van, have very limited control of the blind zone in the side rear-view mirrors, which can lead to accidents when changing lanes or in situations when such a vehicle starts moving. The reason for this is the van, which, as a rule, has an overall width dimension slightly larger than the cab.

The passenger car succeeded here too: excellent control of the dead zone by turning the head to the middle pillar of the car, side rear-view mirrors in conjunction with a saloon rear-view mirror.

Now it is necessary to consider one more situation, more precisely, everything that was said above, in the interpretation for the  dark time of the day  - here, in my opinion, there is a flaw in technical thought. It's the same reverse gear of a truck in complete darkness. What can you see in the side mirrors at night?

Let's imagine a situation: at night, a suburban unlit highway with two lanes in each direction, a small traffic jam in one of the directions, the cause of which is a faulty car that has stopped in the extreme position of the carriageway near the curb. The car stream, consisting of various cars, bypasses the emergency car. At the same time, the bypassers slightly fall on the left sides into the oncoming lane.

It is not very difficult for cars to do this. Well, if, for example, a faulty car bypasses an articulated bus, more than seven meters long. An emergency vehicle without dimensions - how can a bus driver in the dark see the right side of his bus and the left side of the car being driven around? How to make sure that the bus driver did not touch the side of the car at a tangent?

That's right, no way! It remains only to estimate the linear width of the bus by eye and start to go around the car in advance, so as not to touch the side of the car with the rear cabin. Having estimated the width of a large vehicle, you can turn the steering wheel as far as possible to the left when driving around an obstacle (in our case, this is an emergency vehicle) and go around it. But  it is almost impossible to see the sides of your car and an obstacle when driving around if the obstacle is not illuminated at all.

Simply put, in the dark, when changing lanes, overtaking, detour, drivers of overtaken and overtaking vehicles of any permitted maximum weight and length do not see the sides of the vehicles.

A similar phenomenon is observed at night when  the car is parallel parked in reverse . A driver making such a maneuver does not see either the rear left corner of a car parallel to his right, or the rear right side of his car, or the curb itself, no matter how carefully he looks into the right side rear-view mirror.

The same thing happens in dense flows of the same direction in two, three, four lanes or more. Especially in parallel corners, when cars turn in their lanes parallel to the sides of other cars.

From all that has been written above, it follows that the miracle of the engineering and technical thought of the automotive industry has not reached the projects for lighting the sides of the car for a comfortable and safe ride at night. True, there were, of course, rare advances in this aspect - on the sides of some city buses of the latest series, I sometimes notice small yellow dimensions, but these are separately glowing small dots installed at a distance from each other. Something similar is also observed on road trains.

But, firstly, these are single car models, and secondly, in my opinion, this is again not enough. The ideal option is the presence on the sides of a luminous yellow stripe, made in the form of a dotted line. Something like a dotted line of horizontal road markings that marks the edge of the carriageway on roads with one lane in each direction. Then it could be argued that in the dark, all cars are visible to absolutely all road users.

By the way, returning to the topic of "how to see" outlined at the beginning of the article, one can notice a certain positive trend. But, unfortunately, this miracle of engineering is available only to a few drivers. We are talking about installing all-round video cameras or rear-view cameras on elite expensive cars of foreign brands. Here is the solution to the "how to see" problem.

So, to date, a universal "eye" has not yet been invented for scanning the space around a car, if this car is different from a passenger car.

And how do you feel about this problem, what is your point of view, your assessment of the situation?