I tried a mirror once, but found it shook around too much to be useful. Unless I just had a rubbish one?
you did. Zefal Spy mirror for any bike type or Zefal Doobck for flat/slightly moustachioed bars - no arms between clamp/plug and mirror to shake about so both are remarkably stable even on the worst roads that I've been on & over 1/4 mile of cobbles.
I've not read this through from the start and might even have posted way back when on this, but on impairments:
I ride with previously broken vertibrae & significant muscle damage in my neck and turn my head very rarely because of the rotational problems this still gives, so I can sympathise with the 'compensatory sense' argument of long term headphone wearers because I am a perfectly safe rider with mirrors - 10 years since I broke it, no accidents or near misses down to me / not seeing something behind. I use my ears far more and to far better effect since my accident that ever before it.
I don't wear headphones because I've already got one impaired sense in my rearward vision and don't want to make things any worse by deliberately hamstringing another one. I've got headphones galore of many types which I use when hill & dog walking and indoors but never as a pedestrian as all of them cut out noise to some degree or another & all by too much for my personal comfort zone with cars around.
Radio on my desk at work and someone wanders up behind me = I hear them, headphones in = it takes a tap on the shoulder to get my attention. Translate that to the roads and the thing tapping me on the shoulder will be a ton and a half and doing 30 odd mph.
Also the distraction of music piped direct into your head is more akin to a mobile phone pressed to your ear than ambient speakers otherwise car stereos would be prohibited and there'd be plenty of the grumpy rider types haranguing motorists over their radios in the same way they do their mobiles.
Would any of the pro-headphoners ever dare to cycle with one eye taped shut or with something cutting out half the vision in both of them, or a virtual reality goggle on, playing a film you really like direct into one eye or partly into both?
but going back off topic, bringing (decent) mirrors into the argument is spurious as they enhance what you're seeing by giving you simultaneous front and rear vision, or compensate for a physical failing in my case, rather than being used to block part of your sensory arsenal.
