Dimming or shielding lights

I shield my light sometimes – I used to never do it. If the light isn’t too bright and is directed down I don’t think shielding matters much, but since the practice gets a lot of support here I’ll do it as a matter of trail etiquette.

Something else that gets discussed here is blinking lights. The consensus seems to be that they are OK on roads but should not be used on a trail. My wife recently told me she passed a bike with a blinking light while driving, and found it very annoying / distracting. She asked me to never set my light on “blink”.

@CPTJohnC 71191 wrote:

I consider bikes to be in at least as much jeopardy as a 45 foot long, 16 ton plus school bus.

you are not sufficiently thinking of the children!

edit to add: unless the kids are on bikes, then they’re screwed like the rest of us

@Geoff 71159 wrote:

I shield my light sometimes – I used to never do it. If the light isn’t too bright and is directed down I don’t think shielding matters much, but since the practice gets a lot of support here I’ll do it as a matter of trail etiquette.

The goal is not to blind oncoming cyclists. This can be achieved in a number of ways.
* First, no strobes on the trail. Just dont do it.
* Point your beam down towards the trail
* Shield the light with your hand. or
* Set your light to the lower setting (on the Custis and MVT there is lots of other light from other sources)

Too frequently ppl have high beams on handlebars pointed straight forward – where straight forward means into the face of the oncoming cyclists – and all the oncoming cyclists is the great orb of the almighty hallucination. (and if it strobing you cant see nada). Even that great evil transportation tribe -> cars – does a better job than we do. Be default, regular headlights are pointed DOWN at the road, not into the face of oncoming traffic. High beams are not only more powerful, they are… “higher”. And the etiquette (and the law) is to turn off high beams for oncoming traffic. I would like to put car drivers up on a pedestal for magnanimous driving behavior! (oh, a cold shiver just went down my spine…. I have to go do 10 Hail Hains Points to atone for that sin).

You can observe the rise of HID & blue-tinted lights and recover your disdain for motorist manners. Note that the research, however, does not show any increase in actual accident rates due to those lights, only an increase in bitching…

“agitation over the effect of glare caused by powerful headlamps has gradually increased until we are threatened with drastic legislation.” — From a 1917 paper addressing complaints about the new-fangled and unnecessary electric headlights which were so much brighter than the normal acetylene lamps.

@CPTJohnC 71191 wrote:

Was she sitting behind it for a long time? I imagine that if she was, she was stopped? If not, I’m curious to know more about the situation, as I find it hard to believe there are many circumstances in which motorists could be significantly impacted (as in actually distracted — I don’t really have much concern about their ‘annoyance’ – esp. when most of them find our very existence on ‘their’ roads to be ‘annoying’) given that most of them pass most of us in a matter of seconds. It is NOT like being another cyclist following a blinkie on a trail where the overtaking might take 30 seconds or more.

I’m sure that your wife is cyclist conscious and friendly, so can you dig into this a little? I’m not about to limit use of blinkies on roads without knowing a lot more, as I find it takes a certain amount of ‘annoying’ to be noticed, and even the brightest rear bike light is not much of a presence on steady, in the sea of automobile tail and brake lights. I will note that ‘blink’ is nearly synonymous with ‘hazard’ which is why emergency vehicles, tow trucks, school buses and other similarly situated ‘special cases’ use them. I consider bikes to be in at least as much jeopardy as a 45 foot long, 16 ton plus school bus.

I may have been misleading – the bike was oncoming and the blinking light was a bright white handlebar light. I think the strobe effect is what did it for her. It didn’t even do much to make the rider standout. At first she thought a nearby car had a flashing headlight. So I now use a steady beam and rely on an array of reflectors to make me stand out.

I cover whenever I can and thank anyone else who shows me the same courtesy. I could do unto others as they do unto me, but I suspect that the weather is about to take care of things.

@dkel 71212 wrote:

I find that my cone of light doesn’t help me very much at 6 feet ahead of me, but it’s great at 15 feet ahead. Beyond that, my light isn’t bright enough to make a lot of difference, so I never turn it to a higher angle.

At 20MPH, 15 feet is half a second. At 15MPH, 15 feet is two thirds of a second. Apply your own speed & response times and then buy the appropriate light.

@dkel 71223 wrote:

If I get a 12 mph average for my nighttime commute, I feel like I’m going pretty fast for the conditions. Thanks for the math; that puts it in perspective.

The other piece is that at 20MPH it’ll take you 15 feet to stop, so you have 0 chance of avoiding something if you can only see 15 feet ahead (plus reaction time). At 12MPH you’re probably ok seeing to 15 feet as long as the pavement is dry and your reaction time is good (and your average isn’t based on speeding up down a hill ).