Lights, and the half of it everybody has backwards

1Watch

A red light nobody in front can see

That rider would tell you they had lights on, and they would be half right. The half that was missing is the half pointed at the person who had to decide.

2The idea

What the dark actually costs, said carefully

The national figures for one recent year: 1,105 riders killed, and more of those happened in the dark, 51 per cent, than in daylight, 45 per cent, or dusk or dawn. Across five years about half were in dark conditions, and the hours from six in the evening to eleven at night account for more than other times of day.

Two honest notes before you carry that around. Those deaths are mostly adults — the average age is forty-eight — so it describes the environment rather than the risk to somebody your age. And it is a count, not a rate: nobody divided it by how much riding happens after dark. It is still the right number. It is just not proof on its own.

3The idea

The asymmetry, which is the thing to actually remember

Lighting rules are written in two halves and the halves are not the same. Here is one state’s code as a worked example: at night, a lamp on the front emitting a white light visible from at least 500 feet, and on the rear a red reflector visible from 100 to 600 feet, with a red light allowed instead of the reflector.

Read that again, because it is the opposite of what everybody assumes. The hard requirement is the front. The back can be satisfied by a piece of plastic that does nothing until somebody else’s headlights hit it. A rider with a rear blinky and no front lamp is the one who is actually breaking the rule.

4Look

Two ends, two jobs

One of those is doing a job on its own and one of them is waiting for somebody else to do the job for it. Both are useful. Only one of them works before a driver has already pointed their headlights at you.

5The idea

Why every rider gets this backwards

Because the blinky is the one you can see. You stand behind the machine, you watch it flash, and something in your head files that as having lights. You cannot see your own front lamp doing its job, because the job happens out in front of you and it is being done for somebody else.

The person it is for is the driver at the side road in that film, deciding whether the gap is empty. They are looking for a light coming towards them. If there is not one, the gap is empty, and they are not being careless when they pull into it.

6Decide

You are leaving a friend's at dusk. You have a rear blinky and no front light.

7The idea

The standard asks for more than the law, and when to switch them on

The national cycling body teaches a front white light, a red rear light, and reflectors, whenever visibility is poor. That is more than the minimum most codes ask for, and it is the version to actually own: both ends lit, plus the reflectors that came on the machine.

When? Sunset to sunrise, and any time you cannot see well — rain, fog, heavy cloud, a long underpass. That last part is advice rather than a quoted rule, because codes define night differently and some do not define it clearly at all. Yours may be worded its own way, and finding it is the next lesson.

8Find them

Which of these are true about lights?

Tap the ones that count.

9Say it

Which end first

Say it every time you set the lights, because the front one is the one that gets left on a desk on charge. It is also the only one of the two that is doing anything before somebody has already found you.

10Do it

Before you leave this page