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Comment by Cumpiler69 | Hacker News Reader

>Blinking lights makes the bicycle driver more visible.

Blinking lights are not legal according to road code in Germany and I assume many other EU countries nor do they necessary improve your safety.

Yes, strobing lights do draw more attention at a glance (which is why they are reserved for emergency vehicles and signaling an emergency) making you think you'd be safer, but actually not since it makes it very difficult for the human eye to determine the distance to/from that object in motion on the road if it's always blinking, making the use of only strobing lights on the road unsafe and therefore banned for non emergency purposes.

That's why your front and tail lights must be in a constant state. It's for your own safety too, hence why emergency vehicles don't strobe their running lights/brake lights but have additional strobes for that.

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I agree with the underlying logic here. However, when street maintenance trucks are driving around normally with their extremely bright orange strobes enabled (mind you, not parked in the street doing repairs, I'd totally understand that! Oftentimes they are just driving normally with the strobes on) I fail to see the logic applied consistently. In my opinion a good compromise for cyclists would be to allow strobing rear lights that only have power cycle of at least 90% and power periods of at least 2500ms, meaning they are on for 2500ms and then off for ~280ms, creating a strobing effect that is not as overpowering as normal strobing rear lights, which I'd agree are overbearing in commute traffic.

>when street maintenance trucks are driving around normally with their extremely bright orange strobes enabled

Street maintenance trucks and all such vehicles, at least in Europe, don't strobe their running lights which are constant-ON as on all road vehicles and the strobes are additional warning lights. So they get the best of both worlds.

But for cycling, blinking lights are stupid because you're strobing your only running light you need to see and be seen.

I have both. My bicycle has a headlight and taillight. My helmet has built in front and rear lights, which can flash.

Fixed mixed with flashing or pulsing is fine. It's the strobing lights that do 5 super-short staccato flashes and then nothing for a moment that are the bad ones.

Same thing for bicycles btw. Strobing rear lights are allowed as long as they are on your person (i.e. clothing/helmet or backpack), only on the bike itself they are not permitted.

Germany also has the most cyclist deaths of any country in the EU (~450/year), twice as many as the next country.

The UK has one quarter the deaths despite having ~3/4 of the population of Germany...

Such statistics without the full context are meaningless. How many people per capita cycle in the UK vs DE.

It's expected that if a lot more people cycle, you're gonna have more cycling deaths than in countries where fewer people cycle.

If nobody would cycle you'd have zero cycling deaths, hooray problem solved, you successfully gamed the metrics, if wining arbitrary metrics is the goal.

I mean, the numbers are the numbers. Sounds like the point you wanted to make, accidentally, is that cycling has a linear growth rate of death if more of the population cycles.

Was that your goal?

>I mean, the numbers are the numbers.

Random numbers alone mean nothing if they're meaningless and out of context. More people are killed every year by cows than by sharks. Does that make cows more dangerous than sharks or just that people are more likely to be around cows more often than around sharks?

If Germany has a higher population than UK, and also a higher percentage of people of that population cycle, then yeah you're gonna have more dead cyclists. D'uh!

Show me deaths per capita and cycling rates per capita, then we can talk about drawing a conclusion.

In terms of urban distance travelled:

DE 5.5%: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

UK 1.7%: https://www.cyclinguk.org/statistics

Blinking lights are also banned in the Netherlands, which does a lot better in the statistics. Even then, the statistics are kind of useless; here bike deaths are mostly caused by old people on (electric) bikes falling over or getting into minor accidents, nothing to do with lights. The statistics are skewed in ways that cannot be compensated for easily, as on average UK cyclists are younger than Dutch cyclists and therefore less likely to die or get severely hurt in a traffic incident.

Great Britain has half the bike usage of Germany. Germany has 36 million bikers (43% of 84 million), Great Brittain about 12 million (19% of 68 million), so the stats line up more than you'd think at a first glance. The difference between Germany and Great Brittain becomes laugably obvious when you look at the statistics for how many people use bikes as a primary transport method (6% GB vs 21% DE).

That said, biking outside of large cities in Germany is kind of terrible, so I'm not at all surprised about how deadly cycling in Germany, though that may just be my spoilt Dutch take on things.

Edit: my source for these statistics: https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/...

Correlation is not causation.

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