Andrew Durian, BSME
A delivery truck approaching a four-way intersection impacted a bicyclist approaching from the street to his right. The truck operator claimed that overgrown bushes that came right up to the edge of pavement blocked his view of the approaching bicyclist.
The collision reconstruction engineer was called in immediately to document the physical evidence. Data was captured using traditional methods of surveying and photography. The importance of the geometry of the bushes and the perishable nature of this data were immediately recognized. For this reason, it was decided to also perform a 3-D laser scan of the area as well, which could be correlated to the other data.
Soon afterward, the bushes were cut back by the owner, but the accurate and detailed 3-D data captured through the laser scan provided documentation of the scene at the time of the accident. At a later time, the reconstruction engineer, from his desk, was able to look at the scene in a 3-D virtual world, as if he were actually there at the time of the accident. This allowed him to evaluate the effect of the bushes as a sight obstruction from virtually
any point of view.
