Let me preface this with a disclaimer: I don’t suggest that I could have reacted any better, or that her handling of the situation suggests that she is a poor rider. I claim that her response to the threat ahead of her was very poor, WHETHER OR NOT IT IS REASONABLE TO EXPECT THE AVERAGE “SAFE” RIDER TO DO BETTER IN SIMILAR CIRCUMSTANCES.
Put as simply as possible, her reaction was not optimal at all. Especially when you’re traveling at that speed, the MOST OBVIOUS targets for your continued vigilance are the cars immediately encircling you: in front, behind, and adjacent to you, both slightly ahead and slightly behind. Especially when I’m moving past an adjacent car, I have to take extra precaution and be extra prepared to either brake rapidly or GTFO on the gas. It “looks” like it happened fast, but as she was coming up on that left-hand car she should have already been keeping tabs on it, waiting for it to unexpectedly lane change into her or do something erratic.
With two fingers on the brake in such anticipation, it should have been only a tiny fraction of a second before she was hard on the brakes. I count 3 seconds from beginning of skid to impact. If we throw away a WHOLE SECOND for reaction time, that still leaves her with 2 seconds. A competent track rider can lose about 22mph/sec of braking, and a competent street rider with a decent front brake can lose around 18mph/sec or so. That leaves her with a ton of options: slow to a stop combined with leftward drift(maybe not if there was a car on her ass), lane change right (not the best since the car was headed that way), lane change left (only bad if the skidding car circled around and went left again…the left lane was clear, which she should have known), or continue braking hard in order to minimize impact in the ensuing collision. If she didn’t change her trajectory at all, she should have been able to get down to about 0-10mph depending on her brakes and her riding skill, and the precise speed at which she was going.
Her response was the worst possible response: she failed to brake much (I see only mild slow-down) and clearly target fixated on the threat itself, moving towards the skidding car instead of away from it. In fact, I would disagree with Zep with respect to the fact that you don’t have to be scanning ahead at ALL to see that coming. If you freeze-frame the vid at the moment the car started skidding, there are only about 2 car lengths between her and her target (it’s hard to tell because of the fisheye lense, but use the gold Accord to the right as ruler). That was practically in front of her nose!
In the end, like I said, there might be little chance to be so clear-headed in that moment, but there were lots of things she could have done to either completely avoid or dramatically lessen the effect of that accident.