With respect to visibility and lighting, I read somewhere that overall visibility is correlated with the size of the light, rather than its intensity. This made sense to me because lights don't have infinite energy supplies, so your 1 watt of LED light energy can be concentrated into one small cone (beam?) of retina-searing capability, or diffused into a wide-angle slab that has a higher chance of being noticed by those who are not exactly in the cone of blindness. In fact, all motorized vehicles appear to have the diffused type of light, even if some can be diffused *and* bright.
The usual light marketing copies often remind me of way back, when computers were marketed solely on their clock speed instead of actual ability to function in a useful manner. We see lumen being bandied about all the time to sell lights, but that is a fairly useless metric because having a lot of light doesn't mean that light is being put to good use; what's useful is lux at a specific distance (let's say 10m), like with StVZO standards. But all of these are passive devices. What we really need are more active mechanisms, like higher driver proficiency and awareness. I've read somewhere that the #1 safety factor for cyclists (as far as bicycle-car interaction) is drivers actually looking for cyclists. Andy Cheatham kind of eluded to this with the discussion of "vast image with lots of complexity that can be data overload". I often bring in the example <https://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo> where one will not register something that the brain is not primed to look for, even if one technically sees it. To address this will require more cyclist presence on the road to acclimate drivers, and that won't happen unless drivers are acclimated and thus present less of an apparent risk to cyclist. So Catch-22. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/3d489bff-9abb-45fc-837a-4fa9f168ba71n%40googlegroups.com.
