Dont get me wrong, I didnt tell you that I have reflective spokes and ride with my (super bright) lights on even in the day time, but I dont think the onus should be on the cyclist to be wearing day glo clothing, it just gives the car drivers a get out of jail free card.
My reflective spokes look lovely but I'm under no illusion that they're pretty much useless in rush hour on Deansgate or riding up Oldham Road with junctions and ignored give way lines every 50 yards and when people are facing my front or rear end, when arguably I need to be the most high profile I can be as there's so much else going on to take peoples attention away.
they already have that: door someone under a bus, left turn over them in an ASL....
A fair point but is it any more right to place the entire onus of you being spotted and potentially staying alive onto someone else as well as giving some old buffer in a silly robe and wig yet more reason to say, sad and all that but off you go johnny driver, try and be more careful in future?
There are plenty of portable belts and slaps etc, methods of making yourself more visible; at a level higher than the chassis of the cars around you; on bike and still capable of doing the all black hipster look off it. Surely better than deliberately abdicating any notion of helping yourself in a situation that we all know is not built with bikes in mind, selfishly used and fraught with erstwhile good drivers liable to a moments distraction, dangerous infrastructure, incompetents and just plain knobheads who don't care or restrict 83% of their external vision and still get Judicial protection.
It gives thoughtless cyclists and those in the *all cars are evil *alalalalalalala* brigade a stick to beat otherwise responsible road users with and does absolutely nothing to dispel the negative mythology about cyclists that abets the sort of sentences we see handed down
The onus for road safety should be on everyone its another one that isn't your job/my job.
