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So many threads on here about helmets and high vis clothing and lights and those who argue they’re not required proves that some people just don’t know how to take into account of risks and take steps and measures to reduce risks
Or some people understand that the risk reduction of wearing a helmet and hi viz is quite small compared to riding in a a defensive/assertive manner and taking steps to be seen and extend views by adjusting road position etc rather than buying a yellow tabard and riding like a tool
Never take a swig from Bez's bidon on a road ride.
Risk management:
You're riding along a narrow potholed rough country road. The edges of the tarmac are carved into ruts from vehicles putting wheels off the side to squeeze past each other leaving a sharp edge rut, there's a heavily vegetated small raised verge, and a few feet off it a barbed wire fence, or a ditch, or a wall, or a combination.
You're in the recommended position. Coming towards you is one vehicle, and behind judging from the Doppler effect is another coming up fast and obviously not slowing down for you.
Three arriving simultaneously at the same spot in the road will not go.
What do you do?
Rely on your hi-vis jacket, dominant road position, and driving skill of Hot-rod Harry behind you - who is now even closer?
Or rely on your large volume tyres to be like a mtb and take to the verge where you are guaranteed safety?
Oh, and welcome to the NC500 in peak season. 🙂
450 lumens isn’t much especially if you’re pointing it ahead. I’m probably over cautious as i have two lights, 750 Bontrager ion is used to point left and ahead, 450 lumen is pointing in front and ahead.
My commute is very dark, I think my biggest risk is from animals coming out of the hedgerows.
Todays ride was a new one on me, was a different group to mine so its a second hand account. Car overtakes group on descent, gets halfway past and runs out of road pulls into group so close to front riders the car does an automatic emergency stop. Those behind pile into back, one goes through rear window. Luckily every seems to be basically OK.
Trouble is, when I aim it high enough to see further than 4ft in front of me, i get flashed by cars. Obviously the cutoff isn’t great.
Elliptical beams aren't cut off, they're just stretched, and you'll always have that problem with an elliptical or circular beam. Look for StVZO approved beams; they not only keep the light in the right place, they send more into the distance than the nearfield, which means that this…
450 lumens isn’t much especially if you’re pointing it ahead.
…isn't entirely true. The Lezyne Pro Lite puts out 290 lumens in an StVZO beam and it's plenty bright enough; brighter than numerous dynamo lights I've used extensively and at decent speed. If the light's in the right place you need far less of it.
But that is because humans might be good at perceiving risk but not very good at reacting to it and making changes to reduce risks.
See, I think your post is kind of evidence of that: it's rather self-contradictory:
So many threads on here about helmets and high vis clothing and lights and those who argue they’re not required proves that some people just don’t know how to take into account of risks and take steps and measures to reduce risks.
I take it you're saying "people who don't use helmets and hi-viz are not very good at reacting to risk", but I'd suggest that often it's the exact reverse: people often see them as a talisman. The people who put a helmet on their kids (or themelves) with it hanging off the back of their heads with loose straps and thus more likely to worsen injury than reduce it; the people who wear green hi-viz on sunny days on tree-lined roads and thus camouflaging themselves more than standing out. Which isn't to say that helmets and hi-viz are always a daft idea, it's to say that being dogmatic about needing them is no less daft than being dogmatic about them being useless.
In any case there are two separate parts of risk: probability and consequence. I don't wish to turn this into a helmet thread by any means, but they're a classic are where people fail to distinguish the two. Large amounts of research point clearly to two things: helmets tend to reduce the consequence of an event, but by affecting the behaviour of both the wearer and those around them they increase the risk of a consequence occurring.
FWIW I've just been out on the tandem with my son. Neither of us wore helmets or hi-viz. We reduced our risk by riding in a calm manner and mostly on a disused railway line. Generally I'd far rather do that than expose myself—let alone him—to risks with much greater consequences and put my faith in a polystyrene hat to deal with them. The risk we faced was to all intents and purposes greater than for walking: would you say that people crossing the street fail to take risks into account and don't take measures to reduce them?
I think you can reduce the risk of some tool driving into you…not to zero of course, but to a level where it is so low it is practically zero.
To an extent I agree. There are some types of event for which you can usefully reduce risk (in some cases by way of a degree of inconvenience, and in many cases only through experience—which doesn't help novices) and there are some—primarily being driven into from behind by a distracted driver—for which you essentially cannot.
(By the way, I notice you don't say that "you can reduce the risk of making use of a helmet… not to zero of course, but to a level where it is so low it is practically zero". Yet you have far more control over that probability than you do over someone driving into you.)
But I can't square that argument with your next one:
But some people are not willing to take the necessary steps because though they recognise the risks they think that they are the small percentage of the population that will fall into the ‘get away with it’ category.
Your post is a response to my argument that people quite normally and reasonably (whether rationally or irrationally) react to risk in different ways, and many will simply not cycle as a result. Your previous argument was that by being awesome you can make your risk really small and therefore you can get away with it, but then you imply that people are daft for thinking that they're part of the population who can get away with it. Which is it? Risk is never zero, so if you do anything you're accepting whatever risk you perceive, regardless of the extent to which you've acted to minimise it, and thus thinking you'll "get away with it" (or that you won't but you're fine with the consequences).
People generally don’t act on perceived risk because they think they will get away with it…they play the odds and often end up worse off.
I disagree, at least within the context of this thread. My wife perceives risk on the road and she acts on it by not riding on the road. Again, you seem to be arguing against my point that people do this by saying that people under-react to risk. That doesn't make sense.
There's lumens and lumens. I have a Light and Motion Urban 500 and I can ride on it in low, which is 150lm (so they say) in the countryside. It's a bit dim for a fast downhill but it's still manageable. On medium which is I think 300lm, not sure - it's fine. But this is because it's a spot. I also have a Lezyne Macro 800XL which is more flood, and I need many more lumens to see where I'm going because so many of the lumens are sprayed all over the hedgerows instead of the road where I need them.