The Science of Being Seen: A Guide to Safer Riding
What matters and why when sharing the road
On a straight, flat, windswept section of U.S. 36 north of Boulder, I see a rider far ahead. At this distance, normally I wouldn’t be able to make out another cyclist, but the blinking red light, with an irregular low-low-bright-low pattern, is unmistakable, even from over a quarter mile away.
The rider, whoever he or she is, is one of many cyclists these days (including myself) who use rear and sometimes front lights, even in the daytime. But do these lights work as well as we think? And are lights alone enough?
In any discussion of cyclist visibility and safety there’s a victim-blaming undertone that it’s partly a cyclist’s fault he got hit if he’s not lit up like a runway at O’Hare—and this shouldn’t be the case. But the simple, physical fact remains that in any car-bike crash, the rider loses. So it’s worth asking: how can we make sure drivers see us? The answer might lie in the way we as humans process visual information.
RELATED: What It Feels Like to Be Hit By a Car While Cycling
Joe Lindsey is a longtime freelance journalist who writes about sports and outdoors, health and fitness, and science and tech, especially where the three elements in that Venn diagram overlap.
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