A look over the shoulder helps drivers when turning. Through the windows at the rear of the vehicle, they can see what they would have missed if they had looked in the mirror. The situation is different for bus or truck drivers: Especially when turning right, looking over their shoulder only reveals their view into the bus, which may be full, or even the rear wall of the cab.
As a result, serious traffic accidents occur time and again when drivers of large vehicles fail to see pedestrians or cyclists who are on the side or diagonally behind a bus or truck. In order to counteract the "blind spot" accident risk, the European Union has issued a directive that has stipulated wide-angle exterior mirrors for newly registered trucks since 2007. Since 2009, these mirrors must also be retrofitted to older truck models.
Nonetheless, large vehicles that do not comply with the legal requirements are repeatedly noticed during checks. Such violations are consistently punished by the police. However, once a serious traffic accident has happened, knowing that you have the right of way or that the other person has acted incorrectly is of no use to anyone.
For this reason, the NRW police regularly carry out traffic accident prevention in all areas. For example, during the "Attention: Blind Spot!" campaign on November 13, 2019 at the Sankt-Urbanus-Kirchplatz in Gelsenkirchen-Buer, the road safety advisors of the Gelsenkirchen police and other law enforcement partners taught several school classes about the "blind spot". They even made an entire school class disappear in an area that is not visible without the extra mirrors.
"Our aim is to make pupils aware of particular dangers in road traffic. We want to encourage them to behave considerately and defensively on the roads and thus further reduce the number of road accidents," explains Chief Superintendent Carsten Jahns, one of the road safety advisors at Gelsenkirchen police.