Joy Beeson wrote:



Which would give me a topic for a column: When you stop GET OFF THE
ROAD. Never mind that it's three in the morning and this road has
almost no traffic during rush hour.


I think there's definitely something to that. If you stop, then you
become an impediment, in the same way as anything else stationary, such
as a traffic barricade, or even a stopped vehicle.

Some depends on what kind of lighting that you have. I know that here's
a lot of riders that always use a blinking tail light (and some that use
blinking head lights), even in the daytime. During day hours, a
blinking tail light is effective and appropriate to communicate "slow
moving vehicle". As a parallel, there are several mountainous roads that
I drive that have long grades, and it's common for semi trucks that are
significantly slower than car traffic to have their flashers on.

Night is a different situation, and as a motorist, I don't like seeing
bikes with flashing tail lights. I get that the flashing helps identify
a slow moving vehicle, but one of the things that frustrates me about
those is that the flashing doesn't allow easy tracking of distance and
relative speed. And I've never seen a rider do both, of having one
blinking light and another steady light.

On my own bike, a couple of years ago, I came across a light (and I
don't remember brand/model) that allows for several settings -- not only
traditional steady and traditional blinking, but where there's
additional settings of slower low-to-high pulsing. For the controller,
instead of a square wave (on or off, but no in-between), using a
sawtooth wave of starting low, and increasing to high, before reverting
to off, and restarting the cycle. I've never seen what this looks like
as a motorist, but it does have the feel being able to better allow
communication of distance and speed, while still having enough animation
to attract the necessary attention.

Smith