I've bolded the key part of your story.
@Jameshow I think you should rethink your hi-viz strategy.
On the face of it, hi-viz might seem like a step in the right direction, but once you remove the baseless "it's obvious/common sense ,init?" you are left with reality which doesn't seem to back it up.
Above are suggestions that the stats don't support hi-viz usage.
I too have faced this conundrum, as I commute in a busy urban environment and wish to avoid being squished by other road users.
I've tried the hi-viz option and found it useless with no apparent difference between wearing normal, dark cycle gear Vs hi-viz.
I've also done my own experimentation when I again wanted to revisit the hi-viz solution. I ordered a few of the popular (and not cheap) hi-viz cycle jackets available at the time. Wearing each of these jackets I sat my wife in her modern saloon car on our street lit, but quite dark, street with the headlights on while I moved around in front of the vehicle with either driving lights or full beam on.
She wasn't very impressed. This wasn't much help to me so we swapped places and suddenly I could see why she wasn't impressed, and you can easily repeat this result yourself if you have access to a car, an assistant and a quiet street to experiment on.
Hi-viz usually consists of two elements. First is the dayglo material, the bright punchy colours that catch your eye as the shades really pop in bright daylight. The clue is in the name, dayglo, they appear to glow in daylight. The second element is the retro-reflective strips/patches/decals that are no big thing in daylight, but in the dark their ability to reflect light directly back towards the light source can make them light up like a headlight.
Unfortunately, reality plays a cruel trick on both these systems.
Firstly, dayglo at night is just a pale colour like any other pale colour. Without the UV of good daylight it just fades into the washed out greyness of the background that results from Street lighting, billboards, shop window lighting, car headlights etc
Retro-reflectives are good though, they return direct light back towards the source, so provided the driver is close to the source they can be as dazzlingly bright as the light shining on them because the driver is usually sat almost directly behind the headlights. They don't need daylight to work (In fact, they don't work in daylight). However, there is a huge flaw! In an urban situation most cars are only using the dipped driving lights, quite correctly, to avoid blinding oncoming drivers. This dipped beam light pattern, if correctly set, will focus the light beam below approx knee hight and towards the ground. This doesn't hit the reflectives on a jacket and in practice don't become highlighted to the driver. Headlights on non-dipped full beam are much better, but if you wander to either side of the beam you soon lose the effect and again fade into the general tapestry of the view. Reflectives really only work if low down (ankle strips) and directly in front of a vehicles lights.
So, dayglo is good during the day. Reflectives are good at night in one direction, provided the light source and driver are in line with the reflective.
What happens at night in an urban environ is that your dayglo just washes out to pale grey, the same as all the street furniture, tarmac, pavements, fences, bushes, cars. Your reflectives are also rendered useless unless directly in the light beam, so actually work as you want them to for a tiny fraction of the time and in limited circumstances.
Sorry for the long winded post but it takes some explaining. Try it for yourself if you don't believe me.
