Professor Merrill Allen has been in the forefront of technical and policy concern over the visual environment provided by the contemporary automobile. His findings in the past have stimulated legislative, motor vehicle manufacture and repair and maintenance action. In this book, he brings together his research and analysis to encourage the motor vehicle and railroad industries to continue to improve the driving task by removing known defects in visual design including signal lights, warning bells, whistles, horns, cones, triangles, flares, barricades, etc. . . . His goal is to assist the driver in coping with an ever more demanding highway environment. He also informs drivers of the myths and commercial banalities that impair and hinder their visual perception.

Vision constitutes about 95% of the sensory input whilst driving a motor vehicle. Despite the obvious fact, limited vision per se seems to contribute little to the accident rate of vehicles. This book is an overview of many subjects relating to vision and driving. The authors are all optometrically trained and all have experience in the practical methods of assessing the driver and his visual ability to drive his vehicle safely through the ever increasing traffic of our roads . . . This book . . . does provide a useful guide to all aspects of vision and driving safety. Its bibliography is excellent and will provide the reader, of whatever specialty, guidance for further reading.

Dr. Allen's book provides law enforcement and others with information on the visual aspects of driving a motor vehicle . . . any police officer who investigates and/or reconstructs traffic accidents will benefit from Dr. Allen's expertise.

Especially useful to the trial attorney is the chapter on "Forensic Vision and Human Factors in the courtroom," which guides lawyers through the basics of vision analysis and its role in understanding highway deaths and injuries. Lead author Merill J. Allen,...has served as an expert in more than 600 lawsuits, testifying on the role of visual factors and alcohol in motor vehicle accidents. Allen describes so many vision problems facting today's drivers-related to the auto, the highway, and the drivers themselves that it seems almost miraculous that most car trips don't end in head-on collisions. Overall, the book is a useful guide for trial lawyers and expert witnesses who need to understand and explain the visual factors behind the serious auto accidents.

Forensic Vision: With Application to Highway Safety, 3rd Edition
–A review by Joseph E. Badger

From the presses at Lawyers & Judges Publishing Co. comes a book of benefit to a number of audiences including attorneys, ophthalmologists, highway engineers, and accident reconstructionists. This review is mostly for the latter group.

The book Forensic Vision: With Application to Highway Safety, 3rd Edition’s principal author is Marc Green, with numerous contributions by Leslie Weintraub, J. Vernon Odom, plus late Merrill Allen (1918-2003) and Bernard Abrams (1929-2003).

Among the topics discussed are psychophysics; attention; conspicuity; eye anatomy and optics; systemic diseases; alcohol and other drugs affecting highway safety; and visual problems and hazards in the automobile and on streets and highways. And there is a must-read Chapter 17 titled “How Long Does It Take to Stop?: Methodological Analysis of Driver Perception-Brake Times.” After reading that chapter, you will never use 1.5 seconds as a perception/reaction time again. Later in a chapter titled “Forensic Vision Toolkit,” author Abrams writes concerning a hypothetical case, “This perception/reaction distance at night in an unexpected situation would be, in this author’s opinion, between 2.5 and 3.5 seconds.”

I often testify regarding driver expectation and conspicuity, especially in nighttime underride accidents, and I talk about replacing the word “see” with “perceive as a hazard. In the section on attention and conspicuity, Marc Green writes it another way: “Visibility refers only to whether the viewer can detect a sensation. It does not specify whether the viewer will like notice the sensation.”Green notes, “…people don’t see what they don’t attend to, and they don’t attend to what is irrelevant.” We have had attorneys ask us what a normal driver would do in such-and-such an instance. Who is to say what is normal? Chapter 9, Visual Aging, addresses that very thing under the heading “The Definition of Normal.” Perhaps a good section to quote when asked about “normal” in a deposition. Speaking of underride accidents or any involving retroreflectors or retroreflective sheeting, read Chapter11. Although the chapter discusses candlepower and relative luminance, it is also useful regarding nighttime pedestrian accidents.

Accident reconstructionists not versed in optometry may be dazed at terms such as dichromatic confusions and anomalous trichoromats or words such as endogenous and parasympathomimetic, but fear not, if you like and must have equations, chapter 13 “Visibility Analysis: Physics” is for you.

Among the topics covered by Forensic Vision: With Application to Highway Safety are: Cognitive Information Processing, Physiology, Eye Anatomy and Optics, Types of Attention, Cognitive Conspicuity, Inattention, Metabolic Diseases, Visual fields, Reaction time, Peripheral Visual Field Loss, Color Blindness, Depth Perception, Age, Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus, Anatomical/Physiological Changes with Age, Windshield Tint, Glare Effects, Perception-reaction time, Child Behavior and Accidents, and Driving: Are Older Drivers Really Worse Drivers?

For a complete list of topics, visit Lawyersandjudges.com, search the book title and click on Table of Contents. You can also read more about the book’s contents and its authors. Readers may notice the appendices begin with “Appendix B.” That’s because Appendix A and supplementary materials are included on a CD, neatly tucked away inside the back cover.