Lights, front one first
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Lights, front one first
The front lamp matters more than the back.
1A red light nobody in front can see
You are riding at dusk. A red light is blinking clearly on the back of your bike and there is nothing at all on the front. A car waiting at a side road ahead starts to pull out.
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 make a decision about them.
2What 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 lopsided bit, and it is the bit to keep
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.
4Two ends, two jobs
A lamp at the front, making its own light. A reflector at the back, waiting for somebody else's.
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.
5Why 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.
6Dusk, a rear blinky, and no front light.
Pick one.
Yes, and the options here are the same boring ones that keep turning up in this course. Borrow a front light, walk it, lock it and come back, ask to be collected. All four are cheap. The one thing not on the list is the one where a car at a side road has no way of knowing you are coming.
Both of those leave the front of you dark. The blinky tells the people already behind you, who are the ones least likely to be the problem. And the sidewalk at dusk puts you at driveway after driveway, unlit, arriving from the strip drivers do not search — which is the worst version of both lessons in this section at once.
7More than the law asks, and when to switch 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.
8Which of these are true about lights?
Pick every one that is right, then press Check.
Find all 4.
Four. The front lamp is the one that stops the car pulling out on you.
Two of those rely on being seen from behind. A reflector needs somebody's headlights.
9Which end first
Say it out loud while you are setting the machine up
Front lamp first. The blinky is the easy half.
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.
10Before you leave this page
At dusk, walk thirty paces back and look.
At dusk, set the machine up on the drive with everything you have switched on. Walk thirty paces away and look back at it from the front, then from the back, and say out loud which end you could pick out first and from how far. Then check the front lamp is on the machine and charged, not on a desk indoors.