Front flashing lights

[Andre Jute]

LED lamps have a MTBF in the region of 50,000 hours. You have to be real cheap to switch them off in daylight. Good ones, like the CYO, also work better as daylight warning lamps than the limp daylight flickers BUMM fit to some of their lamps as an extra "feature". It is true that I buy my lamps with the light sensor switch which can switch them on and off automatically in inadequate visibility/bright sunshine, but that's not because I intend using the facility but because so many of them are sold that their street price is less than the lesser specced BUMM lamps. I run my lamps all the time, whenever the bike moves.

Even if your lamps are set up with courtesy to other road users in mind, a cyclist can just tilt his bike a little or weave to sweep a healthy dose of lumens through the eyes of a driver approaching stupidly fast on a narrow way.

I actually welcome an oncoming driver on a country road flashing his lamps onto high and down again to identify me as cyclist. It shows that he's alert and he knows I'm there.

I take George's point that we shouldn't forget that adequate (not good) bicycle lamps arrived only a decade or so ago, with BUMM's Cyo; before that bicycle lamps not intended for offroad use were the poor relatives of Lucas, Prince of Darkness. I rate the Cyo at just about the level of usefulness of the lamps on a VW Beetle from the 6V era.

SUV drivers are people too. If I say it often enough, perhaps someday I'll convince myself.

[John Saxby]

SUV drivers are people too. If I say it often enough, perhaps someday I'll convince myself.

I dunno, Andre -- you're starting to sound dangerously fair-minded and even-tempered...

[Andre Jute]

SUV drivers are people too. If I say it often enough, perhaps someday I'll convince myself.

I dunno, Andre -- you're starting to sound dangerously fair-minded and even-tempered...

Who knows, St Peter might arrive to open the gate in an SUV rather than on a bicycle.

It’s like the schoolboy joke:

Priest to old roue on his deathbed: “Do you with your last breath repudiate the Devil and all his Works?”

Old roue on his deathbed: “Now is not the time to make new enemies.”

On reading this thread again, I remembered why I keep the front flashing lamp turned downwards so that the lens is nearly parallel with the road, whereas the flashing rear lamp is aimed the same way as the steady rear lamp. It is so the blinkie (which doesn’t even begin to describe the strength of my flashing front lamp) reflect enough light, and then some, from the road to give drivers arriving from any direction a full-height, 360 degree bicycle and rider signature, while a flashing red light of sensible strength is something I’m happy for drivers to see and, in case the front blinkie hasn’t been switched on or has a flat battery, come to the conclusion it could be a large vehicle with one broken rear lamp. (We can discuss the irrationality of cyclists’ fear of being rammed from behind, which hardly ever happens, another day.)

In years gone by, when I lived above the surgery on a wide main road, there was was traffic circle near my house and when I operated a narrow-angle blinkie pointing forward, there were often pointed imprecations hurled by me through open sunroofs at drivers coming in from the side road who, despite four lamps on my bike, had somehow missed seeing me. After I bought a stronger blinkie still, guaranteed to freeze a deer in its tracks 250 yards out, and decided it was just too antisocial no bugger that strike from antisocial dangerous to my own skin to point it forward, I tried the downwards mounting and never had another near-miss at that roundabout at night, nor at another similar roundabout at the other end of town which we often passed in the dusk returning from autumn or winter rides. (For those of you who are into bicycle politics, some cycling wag — remember, if one finger points at me, four point at you — put up a cross at that crossroads with a name on it: John Forester, he of Vehicular Cycling notoriety.)