No eye contact, no go.

As an experienced motorcyclist, eye contact doesn't mean a fucking thing. People will stare right into your eyes (or helmet) and then drive right into you.

Basically, people zone out when driving. All they do is half-ass scan for something the size and shape of another car moving the way they would expect a car to move. Anything that isn't automatically a car gets filtered out as unnecessary information. It's called Inattentional Blindness.

Everyone's brain filters out anything it doesn't deem as important. Think that you don't experience this? Right now both of your eyes see your nose but your brain discards its existence. Check it. Close one eye and focus on your nose.

Car drivers who zone out, which is most of them, aren't looking for motorcycles, bicyclists, or pedestrians so even if they "see" them they don't actually acknowledge their existence and will drive right the fuck into them even after staring them in the eye. Article about it.

Again, drivers will SMIDSY (Sorry Mate, I Didn't See You) even through they stared right at you. The statistics are bad.

"One of the main findings was that a failure by the other vehicle driver involved is attributed to 51% of motorcycle crashes.

Of those crashes, 70% was attributed to “traffic scanning errors” by the other vehicle driver."

People make fun of those "start seeing motorcycles" stickers and signs but it's true. People need to actively look for smaller moving objects like motorcycles, cyclists, and pedestrians or they will literally not know that they exist despite looking right at them.