Reflective vests and infrared touchless faucets

I’ve developed IR sensors and have thought of something like this, but it’s a lot harder to actually make it work in the real world, and at an affordable price. Making a bike light emit IR wouldn’t be too hard, although it would have to be coded (pulsed in a certain pattern) to be able to pick it out, and it would be hard to make it work 360 degrees, again at an affordable price. These technical details are straightforward to overcome, but convincing car manufacturers to put in an IR sensor just to detect bikes would be impossible. One other technical limitation of this approach is that is generally does not provide range (distance), so I’m not sure how useful it would be to merely know that there is a cyclist somewhere in the field of view.

BTW, contrary to what Wikipedia says, the sensor in the automatic faucet is not an active IR sensor, since “active” means that the sensor is emitting light. The sensors in faucets are very basic long-wave detectors with a simple algorithm to detect the presence of a warm object. It’s purely a passive system.

Yeah, when I typed my response that issue was sort of nagging me. Even I f I could build a sensor, and it was integrated into cars, then would cyclists be required to have the special light? And if a cyclist didn’t have it, would they be presumed to be more culpable if they were hit by a car equipped with the sensor?

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The Lumberjack Skunkworks is currently working on the development of an electronic warfare bike.

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@jrenaut 193313 wrote:

A good chunk of bike safety advocates, myself included, consider this to be pretty equivalent to victim blaming. Drivers running over cyclists riding legally is a driver problem, not a cyclist problem. Shifting responsibility onto cyclists, requiring us to wear special gear to survive, is just one more way we absolve drivers of all responsibility for their actions.

If a driver can’t see you in time to stop running over you, it’s not a driver problem. It doesn’t absolve ALL responsibility, but sometimes a driver isn’t responsible if they simply can’t see you in time.

Safety equipment to make one visible is standard for everyone – cars, bikes and pedestrians. How often do we complain about ninjas?

There is a huge difference between riding around at night with no lights and being required to wear some special reflective gear to trigger some sensor we’re now going to require in cars.

@Steve O 193392 wrote:

I cannot possibly disagree with this more. If the person walking or biking is in an expected and legal place, like a sidewalk, bike lane or crosswalk, then it is absolutely the driver’s fault if they run that person over. A driver MUST be cognizant of the possibility of a vulnerable person being where they might be. If there is not enough time for the driver to react, then they are going too fast.

If the person can’t be seen, he can’t be seen. If you go out in the street on a moonless night in all black, you could be completely invisible to drivers. It is absolutely a driver’s responsibility to drive carefully and slowly and look ahead, but it is possible for a driver to not see someone, at all, until it is too late. It is the same principle as a pedestrian walking in “disregard” of traffic, i.e. not giving a driver enough space to slow down to yield.

If someone drove a car around at night with no lights on, we’d hold it against them too.

Again, we complain about ninjas….

@baiskeli 193416 wrote:

If the person can’t be seen, he can’t be seen. If you go out in the street on a moonless night in all black, you could be completely invisible to drivers. It is absolutely a driver’s responsibility to drive carefully and slowly and look ahead, but it is possible for a driver to not see someone, at all, until it is too late. It is the same principle as a pedestrian walking in “disregard” of traffic, i.e. not giving a driver enough space to slow down to yield.

@jrenaut 193313 wrote:

Drivers running over cyclists riding legally is a driver problem, not a cyclist problem.

As mentioned, a bike requires lights and reflector to be legally ridden at night, so your strawman re: bikes is not applicable. If a driver runs over a cyclist who is riding legally because she does “not have time” to see him, she is driving too fast. It is the responsibility of the party with the 3000-pound weapon to make sure she does not kill vulnerable road users.

@baiskeli 193417 wrote:

I thought you were saying that a pedestrian… has no responsibility for being visible at night at all.

For a pedestrian, though, there is no legal requirement to wear any particular clothing (although clothing of some kind is required I believe). If a person is walking in a place that is legal for them to walk and a driver runs over them, I consider that the driver’s fault. I am not a lawyer, so I don’t know how it would play out in US courts, but in many European countries, this is true. And how it ought to be.

@Steve O 193423 wrote:

As mentioned, a bike requires lights and reflector to be legally ridden at night, so your strawman re: bikes is not applicable.

Not a strawman, just confusion. I was responding to the idea, real or imagined on my part, that someone believed that bikes should have absolutely no visibility requirements at all. If you agree that lights and reflectors are a good requirement, then we’re on the same page.

@Steve O 193423 wrote:

If a person is walking in a place that is legal for them to walk and a driver runs over them, I consider that the driver’s fault. “

I would guess that if you went out wearing an all black suit and no lights or reflective gear and you were hit by a car, and the motorist said he/she never even saw you until you were on the windshield, the court would side with the driver. I don’t know what the law is though. This, I think, is similar to the principle of “disregard of traffic.” If you were to get out in front of a moving car in a way that gives the driver no chance to react to avoid you, either because you are not visible or too close (and perhaps both) the driver can’t be faulted (again, that’s me talking, not knowing the actual law).