Re: headlight recommendation?

Frank Krygowski wrote:

Chalo wrote:

I use low wattage Cree LED bike lights, but I aim them at windshield
level and strobe them at full power, just to improve my chances of
being noticed _before_ being hit. If motorists find that annoying, so
what? They seem to get plenty annoyed at each other and a lot of
other things too, for reasons both real and imagined.

FWIW, I absolutely hate having a cyclist with that mindset coming at
me when I'm riding my bike. It's bad on a road, especially a narrow
one. The couple times I've had it happen on a bike path, it was
terrible. I imagine it's also very annoying to pedestrians.

I have been dazzled by bike HID lights, but even the brightest LED
lights are less intense than car headlights and streetlights. They
are not more annoying than anybody else's lights. When I cross into a
section of lakeside trail, I switch from full power strobe to low
power steady beam to go easy on dark-adjusted cyclist and ped eyes.

Folks, the fact of the matter is, you don't NEED to blind motorists to
be perfectly conspicuous.

You mean "obvious", and that presumes that a driver is even bothering
to look for you. Turn it up to "irritating", and a driver need not be
looking for you to notice you anyway.

My lights are powerful be-seen lights, with plenty of output but
minimal beam focusing. They are not disablingly intense, which is why
I tend to strobe them when I'm on the street. A wide field of
illumination may not stab far into the darkness, but it lights the
street in front of me adequately, offers the potential to irritate
oblivious or intoxicated drivers, and even sheds some light on
overhead hazards (which are more of a concern for me than for most
riders).

I usually get a beam like that by retrofitting a small 2AA
incandescent headlight with a voltage converter and a Cree LED. The
light becomes much brighter overall, but the stock reflector doesn't
collimate most of the Cree's forward-directed light. I get a fairly
consistent wide wash of light in the shape of the light's front
bezel. If I could make it car-headlight-bright, I would. But I'm
dishing out a modest 100 lumens or so into a broad area. There's not
much risk of blindness, unless you find the overhead marker lights on
trucks blinding.

If a light with proper optics is
aimed so it illuminates the road sufficiently, there will be plenty of
"spill" light that goes directly to the retina of anyone who needs to
see you.

Ummm, no. There are too many other light sources near and far in the
central city to depend on one small steady light to announce your
presence in time. Drivers have no consensus about how fast to drive
on city streets around here, and distances close quickly at a relative
50mph or more.

The lumens that make you conspicuous go directly from
your lamp to someone else's retinas. They don't get partially
absorbed by any road surface. They do NOT need to be as intense as
the road lighting.

You keep saying "conspicuous" when what you mean is "visible". And
merely being visible only works when someone is _trying_ to see you.
On some streets, that's plenty. On others, it would be better to be
mistaken for a police car.

It's easy to get a bike headlight that's fine for conspicuity - in
fact, that makes you more conspicuous at night than you are in
daylight.

By "at night", I think you mean "in darkness". Downtown at night is
not a good place to be made conspicuous by a feeble light turned down
towards the road. The street lighting alone will do at least that
much for you.

Don't fall into the fallacy that cycling is so dangerous that you need
extreme measures to survive.

Three hit & runs on four peds (two fatalities) in the last week in
central Austin. Another attempt to leave the scene by a driver who
hit a pedicab and injured the passengers. And that's just the ones
reported to me by my personal friends.

Cycling is not particularly dangerous. Sharing the city with cars and
their extremely faulty guidance systems /is/ dangerous, whatever mode
you happen to be using. But this too shall pass. I have become more
certain than ever that I will live to witness the demise of the
personal car. It won't be a moment too soon.

Chalo
.

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