Should bicycle lights be redesigned?

[[XAP]Bob]

Not bad grammar - just ambiguous. You could have meant others 'not the person with the stupid lights' or others 'non motorists'.

[sunnydunny63]

I'm all for well designed and regulated bike lights

I commute daily on road and cycle paths into the centre of Edinburgh. For me it's a toss up for what's worst. Bike riders ( I refuse to call them cyclusts) with retina burning flares front and this winter rear facing also with what seems like a particularly bright hyper strobe like pulse mode or those who just don't have lights at all.

As always the answer lies in policing (?)

Currently and speaking for Edinburgh only I have witnessed our local finest just ignore those on the road without lights so you have to ask what chance of Police differentiating between good well designed lights and bad lights when they can't police lights or no lights??

Apologies if negative but.................

Sunnydunny63

[Username]

Motor vehicle lights need redesigning and lowering height wise and in brightless/intensity long before bicycle lights are put on the table to be a big problem. The primary reason why urban lights are used so bright on bicycles is to combat the retina burning brightness na dridiculous height of that found on every modern motor.
Police ignore this despite it being part of law.

Being 'blinded' by a bicycle light is about one occurence to every 10,000 for motors, it's really not that big a deal and as I said is driven by the allowed increase in motorvehicle lights in the first instance

Couldnt make any sense out of that sentence. What exactly is it meant to say?

[[XAP]Bob]

Motor vehicle lights need redesigning and lowering height wise and in brightless/intensity long before bicycle lights are put on the table to be a big problem. The primary reason why urban lights are used so bright on bicycles is to combat the retina burning brightness na dridiculous height of that found on every modern motor.
Police ignore this despite it being part of law.

Being 'blinded' by a bicycle light is about one occurence to every 10,000 for motors, it's really not that big a deal and as I said is driven by the allowed increase in motorvehicle lights in the first instance

Couldnt make any sense out of that sentence. What exactly is it meant to say?

The primary reason that urban cycle lights are so bright is that they have to compete with the retina searing brightness and shockingly poor position/orientation of the lights on most modern motor vehicles.

TL;DR:
It's an arms race, just as we said it would be a long while ago...

[SA_SA_SA]

...I think I had some cheap Halfords clones, which although BS-approved, didn't have as effective a lens as the NeverReadies. I remember peering for the join between road and verge, as well as a preference for using larger roads that had white edge lines, or at least contrasting kerbs, so it was easier to see the edge. The roads were quieter then, although not quiet. Did we find it easier to see when all lights - car headlights, yellow streetlamps, house porch lights - were dimmer than now?

My memory of a standard Nightrider was that in the absence of streetlamps it was useless and I had to get off and walk back to a (orange) street lit road. When no streetlamps, a Halogen dynamos was OK only at full voltage but when a car came its old halogen correctly adjusted headlamps still required a full stop from me.

I don't think car (non-cold-white) headlamps have got brighter above the horizontal (when properly adjusted), the electronic lamps 625cd limit remains and the halogen limit of 437cd would be exceeded in practice due to actual voltage being higher than test voltage (eg mini in pedal reflector TRL report gave 1000cd per headlamp from memory): so I see no reason to blame anything other than misaligned headlamps.

[reohn2]

Not bad grammar - just ambiguous. You could have meant others 'not the person with the stupid lights' or others 'non motorists'.

Well in actual fact I meant all road users,all road users are all road users,in cars out of cars,whatever.All people using the roads.

[andrew_s]

For me the dream light would be as the bottom one, but without the light going up the trees more than a metre and with less intensity overall. If that makes sense.

?
Like this one? (from here)

As a general comment, I would say that wide beams such as this don't help as much with faster cornering as you might expect.
You go into the corner, the bike leans over, the light leans with it, and the light on the inside of the bend dips down enough that you can't see round the corner. Still better than narrow beam though.

[andrew_s]

My memory of a standard Nightrider was that in the absence of streetlamps it was useless and I had to get off and walk back to a (orange) street lit road. When no streetlamps, a Halogen dynamos was OK only at full voltage but when a car came its old halogen correctly adjusted headlamps still required a full stop from me.

The Nightrider was quite a decent light for the period, provided that it was working, and the batteries were fresh.
The trouble was that the batteries had a very long tail off, so they would be bright for maybe 4 hours, but not dim enough to persuade you to replace the batteries for another 40 or 50 hours. The batteries were also heavy and vertically positioned, and them bouncing up and down due to road shock used to break the contacts off.

Dynamo halogens were OK in the absence of competing car lights (good for 40 on a suitable downhill, with well adjusted eyes). In the case of an oncoming car, the technique was to close the offside eye to preserve its night vision as much as possible, and look down at the verge just in front of your front wheel with the other eye, slowing down as much as was necessary to stay on the road. This only really worked properly on country lanes where cars were only occasional.

[pwa]

For me the dream light would be as the bottom one, but without the light going up the trees more than a metre and with less intensity overall. If that makes sense.

?
Like this one? (from here)

As a general comment, I would say that wide beams such as this don't help as much with faster cornering as you might expect.
You go into the corner, the bike leans over, the light leans with it, and the light on the inside of the bend dips down enough that you can't see round the corner. Still better than narrow beam though.

Yes, that sort of beam shape. Wide but not lighting up the tree tops. I can think of a long left hand bend I do at night where a narrow beam just uselessly lights up the hedge directly ahead rather than the road curving round to the left, giving me little advance notice of potholes and the like.

Leaning the bike over (which I do) doesn't change the direction the light is pointing. Only turning the bars does that, and we don't turn the bars very much except at very low speed.

[Cunobelin]

I'm all for well designed and regulated bike lights

I commute daily on road and cycle paths into the centre of Edinburgh. For me it's a toss up for what's worst. Bike riders ( I refuse to call them cyclusts) with retina burning flares front and this winter rear facing also with what seems like a particularly bright hyper strobe like pulse mode or those who just don't have lights at all.

As always the answer lies in policing (?)

Currently and speaking for Edinburgh only I have witnessed our local finest just ignore those on the road without lights so you have to ask what chance of Police differentiating between good well designed lights and bad lights when they can't police lights or no lights??

Apologies if negative but.................

Sunnydunny63

This was the argument for redesign in most cases what is blinding you is the top half of the beam that is wasted.

With a properly focused beam with cutoff, bright lights could be used and not be blinding

[SA_SA_SA]

The (front) Nightrider was quite a decent light for the period, provided that it was working, and the batteries were fresh. The trouble was that the batteries had a very long tail off, so they would be bright for maybe 4 hours...

I used ni-cds and found the 1W vacuum bulb useless in pitch dark but a 49p 2.4W Maplin krypton bulb to be of dynamo lamp standard (==barely OK) but with short battery life.....
I can only close the 'wrong' eye, so now use a 'cap' peak with hole in it

Hmm, in pitch dark, 40 seems highish even for car dipped lamps to me, motor vehicles with only dipped lamps are limited to 25mph*. I presume lots of night sight is required for 40mph with a dynamo halogen so that one uses night sight for beyond its range (which won;'t work with car dipped lamps cos their brightness will reduce night sight)?.

* It would make sense (to me) for there to be a nighttime upper speed limit for driving on dipped lamps to make clear to drivers that blindly following cats eyes is unacceptable as they must still detect unlit pedestrians in time.

The ECE seem to be working on trying to equalise/make consistent the range of dipped headlamps (for illuminating pedestrians etc rather than road surface) as they think it varies too much between otherwise compliant headlamps so such a speed limit is just the usual absolute max: driver judgement still required, but better than the current idea that its OK to blindly charge along at 60 blindly following cats eyes.