On 4/10/2021 9:04 AM, Roger Merriman wrote:
Frank Krygowski wrote:

About your questions: First, nobody has yet bugged me in person about
not having a DRL, although both Scharf and Joerg have gone on about them
in this discussion group, portraying them as either absolutely necessary
or used by "all the riders with brains." But there have been ads pushing
DRLs for all riders, and I won't be surprised to see efforts to make
them mandatory, perhaps first on invitational rides. If those rules
catch on, there will be efforts to mandate them for other riding.

I’ve not seen any attempt bar some club ask that you have lights of some
degree.

There is a cycling club not very far from me that mandates blinking
taillights for all its recreational rides.

In its earliest years, the company Vermont Bicycle Touring mandated six
foot tall flags on its bicycles. Those flags were promoted for all
cyclists. That's a somewhat unusual example of a "safety" fashion that
fell out of favor - although there are those who now tout horizontal
flags, pool noodles protruding sideways, etc.


Personally I like them i suspect that in terms of risk it’s within
statistical noise. In my case the front light is a fairly powerful light,
with a remote so I can toggle High/low. Which gets folks attention very
sharply! Though that maybe happens once a year or so, ie something so silly
that it’s worth high beaming them same as in the car, it’s rare that I’d
need to use the horn.

What it seems to do, is stop folks just pulling out/doing U turns as the
light at glance says motorbike than bike, i suspect. As folks can’t predict
speed or much generally, do I think it stops accidents? No.

Does it make my commute less tedious yes I think so ...
But beware of confirmation bias.

On yesterday's ride, we had a motorist pull out closely in front of us,
a very rare occurrence. A daytime headlight would certainly not have
helped. We were on the tandem, which is conspicuous, and our friend was
behind us. The driver looked at us as he ran the stop sign and yelled
something at us - probably "Get off the road," although I couldn't
really hear.

Absent properly collected data, I could claim that all the thousands of
times that _doesn't_ happen to me are because I _don't_ use a DRL.

--
- Frank Krygowski