dark cycle kit!!

[Andrew_P]

All Black and from my boots to my head every bit has silver reflective Scotchlite, what beats me is the Hi-Vis people who then run a set Tesco 2watt lights ..

 

[Hitchington]

I'm with The Claud on this. And anyway, who really want's to go cycling looking like a big bag of hi-vizzy custard?

So vain!

 

[Hitchington]

My jacket is half black and half hi viz. So I guess I'm half cool

 

[theclaud]

So vain!

Yebbut the song actually was about him.

 

[GrumpyGregry]

I think you miss-understand what I'm recounting.

Entirely possible. And I'm grateful for the long version of the explanation.

My worry was/is that "go ahead take a calculated risk" is a shocking naive thing for an instructor to say unless they know for a fact the driver concerned has sound judgement, excellent risk perception and assessment skills, can perform multiple likelihood/impact planning scenarios in their heads, under pressure, can make the right decisions and has the necessary technical skills to deal with the circumstances when they don't judge things correctly.

Otherwise it feels to me a bit like "shoot happens", the sort of motoring fatalism that seems to regard what happened to Mary Bowers and Sam Harding as just unfortunate accidents.

My instructors point is, sooner or later, being on the road on any vehicle is a risk and it is one that you take when choosing your route, your time of journey and your positioning. What she was meaning is, you are waiting to pull out of a side road and it's constant traffic, a gap emerges and you have to calculate the risk since there is an element of the unknown. in this situation the risk is less on the bike than in the car, the bike is smaller, lighter and accelerates into the gap meaning I can take it, in the car I assess the risk and decide the gap is too small, on the bike in the wet I decide not to take the gap as I could slip and cause a car to hit me.

I'm not sure what these unknowns are and why they cannot be turned into something resembling knowns via observation.

 

[Archie_tect]

1) Bet we haven't.
2) So anyone can come on here and preach at others about how they should live and in order not to upset them nobody questions it?

I'm ill, so I claim immunity... actually that's impossible because I caught it first...

 

[ianrauk]

So vain!

Yup...

 

[Chrisc]

Hi-viz doth offend mine eye.

Low sun? you need contrast. Contrast in that context = black.

Why is folk wearing black such a problem for you?

Contrast is king. I too own no hi viz, it all looks grey in half light anyway and only really shows up in broad daylight. The contrast of my black with white flashes jacket seems to work OK and there's a few bits of 3M dotted about the seams. Best I've seen was a guy in a sky kit who I was hunting down for a mile or so after spotting his very visible white stripe even at that distance.

 

[Archie_tect]

They are both wearing black. That just won't do.

They didn't have colour back then....

 

[Fnaar]

They are both wearing black. That just won't do.

FTFY

 

[GrumpyGregry]

FTFY
View attachment 16377

I prefer monochrome myself

 

[Crackle]

I prefer monochrome myself

Sam Browne belt, my weapon of choice, when I need one. I still think it says two wheeler, rather than dustman, bloke walking in Hiviz or whatever. That's cooler than mine though. I got mine free with 12 lard wrappers about 25 years ago.

 

[GrasB]

You know what, despite having 4 HID bulbs ablaze, the cyclist wearing day-glow yellow with retro-reflective bands on the reason I still only saw a small glimmer that I thought was a light on someone's drive wall. It was the nice bright light source, which turned out too be another cyclists, that came over the crest of a bridge which made me dip my head lights instantly.

You see the lights the cyclist heading in the same direction as me had fairly pitiful lights & the light from my headlights was having to travel almost 2km through water laden air. The decent lights on the bike coming towards me was sending the light half that distance & so had far less time to diffuse. This made it much easier to work out what I was looking at & react appropriately.

 

[bianchi1]

Not driven away! Just out on my bike. No cyclists in black today

 

[ianrauk]

No cyclists in black today

Must have been very disappointing for you