Thus fluorescent leggings can offer a powerful and low-tech tool...

[GrumpyGregry]

and still offend mine eye.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1541931213601954?platform=hootsuite&

 

[Pat "5mph"]

How on earth did you come across this article?
I'll give it a bash later ... maybe ....

 

[welsh dragon]

Wow. After all that, having your legs stuffed into flouro leggings will make motorists see you better than if you wern't wearing said legings?

 

[the_mikey]

Not sure which look to go for in 2018....

 

[mjr]

Firstly, conspicuity benefit is not necessarily a safety benefit. We've other research from Nottingham suggesting there's no significant change to cyclist outcomes from improved conspicuity.

Secondly, this citation smells funny: "Most collisions between motor vehicles and bicyclists involve the bicyclist being struck from behind (Hutchinson & Lindsay, 2009; Kim, Kim, Ulfarsson, & Porrello, 2007)."

Hutchinson & Lindsay is about Australia, so not relevant to their US claim. I think Kim et al is the notorious paper tabulating casualty data to say odd things like cyclists are mostly to blame for collisions.

Beware that paper...

 

[welsh dragon]

View attachment 391669 View attachment 391670


Not sure which look to go for in 2018....

As you already have the orange ones, the stripey ones are just so you Mikey.

 

[derrick]

I ride a lot with my other half, she is a bit slower than i am and when ever she sits on my wheel i drop her, so i fitted a small mirror on the end of the handlebars, the first couple of rides she was wearing fluorescent shoes, i could easily see her spinning her legs., the last couple of rides she has been wearing black over shoes, much harder to see. Fluorescent shoes do help..

 

[Ming the Merciless]

I always get noticed when I cycle with nothing on below the waist

 

[GrumpyGregry]

How on earth did you come across this article?
I'll give it a bash later ... maybe ....

Guardian lifestyle section.

 

[jefmcg]

Fluorescent shoes do help..

Does she become invisible with black shoes?

Would I be safer in my red, patent leather, high heel mary-janes? I notice they make me more visible in a party situation, maybe I should try them on the bike?

 

[raleighnut]

Does she become invisible with black shoes?

Would I be safer in my red, patent leather, high heel mary-janes? I notice they make me more visible in a party situation, maybe I should try them on the bike?

 

[Wobblers]

Firstly, conspicuity benefit is not necessarily a safety benefit. We've other research from Nottingham suggesting there's no significant change to cyclist outcomes from improved conspicuity.

Secondly, this citation smells funny: "Most collisions between motor vehicles and bicyclists involve the bicyclist being struck from behind (Hutchinson & Lindsay, 2009; Kim, Kim, Ulfarsson, & Porrello, 2007)."

Hutchinson & Lindsay is about Australia, so not relevant to their US claim. I think Kim et al is the notorious paper tabulating casualty data to say odd things like cyclists are mostly to blame for collisions.

Beware that paper...

That's just the standard boilerplate preamble to justify their existence. That's not what worries me about that paper: it's the questionable methodology and the use of statistics that worries me. I should mention that I haven't been able to download the full article - I may try tomorrow at work.

Firstly, the mean age of the people they tested was 18.7. In other words, they recruited undergraduates for this study. That is nowhere near a representative population. Secondly, the subjects were primed to specifically look for cyclists. Thirdly, they were passengers. Neither reflect the realities of driving a vehicle, and it really cannot be justifiable to attempt to make any general conclusions to cyclist visibility to drivers from this methodology.

There are also an implicit assumption that the vehicle was being driven at a constant velocity during the encounter, and a rather inaacurate means used to measure time. (Why not use a more accurate means to measure distance??) No account for the possibility that the experimenter driving the car behave in a different manner on approaching the test site, and so influencing the subject seems to have been made.

186 subjects were used. That seems a lot, but given that there were four test cases, that's 44 for each. Which is a very small number, using the Poisson distribution suggests a significant degree of noise can be expected. Despite this, they report a surprisingly low figure of under 0.001 for the p-value - the probability of their results being down to chance is thus calculated to be one in a thousand. P-values are perhaps the most abused number in science. I'd far prefer to see the standard deviation in each distance for each test case. My suspicion is that the standard deviations of some or all of the four cases merge. Were you to show that sort of thing to any physicist, they'd laugh at you and tell you to come back when you'd got some real data. If I get the time, I'll see if I can have a look at what they report in the body of the paper to see if it even remotely justifies their 0.001 claim. My suspicion is that it won't.

 

[Nigel-YZ1]

In the UK cyclists are easily visible. We just have a narcissistic & lawless road culture.