A Canadian cycling campaign says that daytime running lights would make cyclists more visible during the day and is pushing for them to be made mandatory.
Mike Connolly, the executive director of Cycling PEI (Prince Edward Island), told CBC News: "The number-one priority for cyclists is to be visible and the flashing, white light will help. We strongly recommend for cyclists' own safety that they adopt the white light, especially for daytime running."
Cyling PEI made the recommendation in a recent meeting with representatives of the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal. Graham Miner, the safety director for the Department of Highways, described it as "an interesting, and probably not a bad idea” and said that the proposal was under review. "I guess the rule of thumb is always see and be seen."
We’ve raised the topic of daytime bike lights a couple of times here on road.cc, most recently in August after Trek advocated the use of rear lights during the day. The firm argues that using a light during the day makes sense because that’s when about 80 per cent of cycling incidents occur – although it is of course also when most cycling occurs.
Prince Edward Island already has a mandatory cycle helmet law, but this summer police issued fewer tickets for this than ever before, saying that enforcement was ‘not a priority’.
Deputy chief of Charlottetown police, Gary McGuigan, explained:
"The numbers are down from past years. The bicycle helmet awareness programme didn't run this summer. That would be part of the reason. The other part would be that we concentrated our efforts this summer on distracted driving — cell phones, texting — so we'll probably see a spike in those numbers and as expected, a drop in the bicycle helmet numbers."
38 thoughts on “Canadian cycling campaigners call for mandatory bike lights in the daytime”
Daylight running lights is
Daylight running lights is just an arms race, and it isn’t one that we can possibly win (or even just stay level on…)
Are the laws of physics
Are the laws of physics different in Canada, or do they all have macular degeneration? I can see vehicles and bikes during the daytime even without lights.
lights just make it harder
lights just make it harder for the driver to judge the speed and distance. Better off just riding in black-ops mode..
Darkhairedlord wrote:lights
They also lead to people only ‘seeing’ those with lights, they are more likely to not see a vehicle without them. If you watch a line of vehicles when most have DRLs or headlights and others have none it’s as if the unlit ones somehow recede and become less obvious. Not good.
Funnily enough, a police uniform is black but usually pretty visible to drivers.
My point was, that once some
My point was, that once some vehicles have daylight running lights then it makes it harder to see the ones that don’t; if everyone has them then some will have to be brighter to stand out; then everyone else makes their’s brighter; and so on and so on. And I don’t want to have to have a Mr fusion on my bike just to power my lights, so that some pillock doesn’t have an excuse to say SMIDSY.
Flashing daytime light, yeah,
Flashing daytime light, yeah, that will prevent punishment passes.
HalfWheeler wrote:Flashing
I assume this was sarcasm.
bikeboy76 wrote:HalfWheeler
Gee – you think? 😕
I guess this has to be taken
I guess this has to be taken in context. Cars are already required to run daytime lights in parts of Canada. With many hours of twilight per year in the high latitudes, some people feel it is better to remove the guesswork from when to switch the headlights on. Not that I agree with that…
rookybiker wrote:I guess this
Doesn’t much of the population of Canada live at similar latitudes to the UK? Might be an argument for winter but seems both completely pointless as bike lights aren’t any use in sunshine, and a recharge/battery problem if you’re out for a day or longer, for the long summer days.
Northernbike wrote:rookybiker
80% of Canada’s population lives within 200 miles of the border with the USA – Toronto is almost on the border, and Vancouver and Montreal are within 30 miles of it.
All major Canadian cities and the great majority of its population live at a more southerly latitude than anywhere in the UK. Montreal is on the same latitude as Paris. Shortness of winter days is not really an issue.
PEI is the bit of Canada you
PEI is the bit of Canada you fly over just after you leave Maine in the USA, when flying from Boston or New York to the UK. It looks almost deserted from the sky, apart from huge wheat fields.
My tuppence worth, how do you get a light with enough battery to last a long ride with enough output to make it better than pointless in daylight.
re What fields in
re What fields in PEI…Potato fields more likely
rookybiker wrote: All major
Shortness of winter days isn’t really the issue. Temperature and snow depth, in most places other than Vancouver, certainly are. I live in Ottawa, a city with a fair number of keen cyclists and reasonably good infrastructure for them (although some wouldn’t agree with that characterization). The level of cycling enthusiasm drops off pretty rapidly when it gets to -20c. Although I am seeing more and more fat bikes used as commuters they are clearly the exception.
rookybiker wrote:I guess this
Prince Edward Island is one of the more northerly parts of Canada that is actually populated. It’s not very big, and it’s capital is at 46° North.
Lizard Point, the most southerly part of the island of Great Britain, is at 49.959° North
Re: PEI being one of the more
Re: PEI being one of the more northerly, populated parts of Canada…Uhhh. no, it’s neither. Best look at a map. There is an awful lot of Canada north of PEI, and quite a bit of that is populated, particularly when you look at the Western Provinces. In fact the only bits that aren’t are Nova Scotia and southern Ontario. (I realize “populated” is a relative term…we do have a lot of empty space.)
It’s also worth noting that the entire province of PEI has a population of about 140,000, although this goes up quite a bit in summer when you count tourists.
achfraser wrote: (I realize
The population density of Canada is 1/50th of the UK, and 1/100th that of England.
To a first approximation nobody lives there! Its mostly moose.
So plenty of room for dedicated cycle infrastructure, I’d say!
[I may be overlooking some other practical considerations, granted]
rookybiker wrote:Cars are
In Austria, daytime lights for cars became compulsory in 2005 but the law was withdrawn again at the end of 2007 when incident numbers didn’t go down but instead rose further. So even for cars the effect is a bit dubious.
In any case, bicycles are not cars. The main argument for car daytime lights (at least in Austria) was the danger of overtaking on country roads (we used to say all Austrians think they’re Niki Lauda!). When you drove at the speed limit of 100kph, you’d get people overtaking at 120kph, and if oncoming cars also do well above 120kph, they approach each other at about 100 metres per second (!). So you have to see a car at least from about 1 kilometres distance to attempt an overtake; and this is on country roads through forests and mountains with varying light conditions! It’s much worse for motorbikes, as they travel at the same speed but are even more difficult to see.
But bicycles rarely travel at 120kph, and they also don’t take up the full width of the lane, so there is much less risk of a head-on-collision during an overtake. So the scenario for which bright front lights are suggested just isn’t the same for bicycles as for cars.
As far as I know, the law in Austria was repealed because there was an element of risk compensation. With lights, people thought they can see all cars from far away and attempted more risky overtakes in dodgy conditions.
rookybiker wrote:I guess this
It’s not part of Canada…it’s the entire country. All vehicles built after December 1, 1989 have daytime running lights (front only) that come on when you start the car. A decade before that I was earning a Military Driver’s Licence as a Canadian reservist. We were required to have lights on at all times as their studies showed that it reduced the risk of collision significantly. That had been a rule in the Canadian armed forces long before I got involved.
Will this also apply to all
Will this also apply to all the street furniture that drivers keep on crashing in to?
Cycling Campaigners are
Cycling Campaigners are calling for this move, not government. Cycling Residents of PEI; ITS UP TO YOU IF YOU RUN LIGHTS DURING THE DAYTIME OR NOT.
Thank you.
Well, there’s a cycling
Well, there’s a cycling campaign with it’s priorities BACK TO FUCKING FRONT
Won’t be long before
Won’t be long before pedestrians are pulled into this too.
I also advocate that pedestrians aren’t allowed to wear headphones or use mobile phones as these are distractions, and they, of course, should be wearing hi-viz and have lights too.
Dogs shouldn’t be allowed in public without these safety measures either.
Victim blaming at its worst…
They seem to be anti-cycling
They seem to be anti-cycling campaigners not cycling campaigners.
The campaigners are
The campaigners are misguided. This has been tried in some countries with motorcycles and it made no difference to safety.
I have a dynohub so I leave my lights on during the day time because I can’t be arsed to switch them off. I don’t think daytime lights makes any difference to inattentive driving.
“We strongly recommend for
“We strongly recommend for cyclists’ own safety that they adopt the white light, especially for daytime running”
Are they really suggesting that bike lights are less necessary in the dark?
“we concentrated our efforts this summer on distracted driving — cell phones, texting — so we’ll probably see a spike in those numbers and as expected, a drop in the bicycle helmet numbers”
Genius! But did it really take several years to conclude that ‘distracted driving’ causes more incidents than driving without a helmet?
Do lights make cyclists more
Do lights make cyclists more visible?
LED’s are now bright enough for daylight use at 250 lumen plus, and USB charged give 15 hours or more before recharging.
I have cycled in and out of Bristol for over 30 years, doing 2,500 miles or so annually. In this time I have had encounters with drivers who have not seen me.
I now always have flashing front and back lights on my road or town bikes.
Although subjective, it seems with lights vehicles give more space overtaking. But I can say that bus drivers see me in their mirrors, even when I am the only thing coming from behind, and give way.
Perhaps that van driver who pulled out and knocked me off 2 years ago might have seen me in his mirror if I had lights then.
I have wondered if it is worth it on sunny days – and concluded that there are plenty of shadows on my regular routes making it better to be visible. So why debate this when being seen is so important?
One Canadian’s perspective.
One Canadian’s perspective. The whole victim blaming argument is a red herring. Yes, drivers should be aware, and drive appropriately and carefully, but not all do. The bar to get a driver’s licence is not that high and enforcement is intermittent, not out of malice, but because police cannot be everywhere.
I bought one of the new Bontrager daytime lights for my son. Although we live in a city with pretty good infrastructure and driver awareness of cycling, he now goes to school in a city with neither. He commutes to school by bike for a few months of the year…basically until it gets well below freezing or the snow starts to fly in significant quantities, which might be as soon as late October. He’ll start up again in late March/early April when things melt.
Should drivers there be more with it, and responsible for driving appropriately around cyclists? Of course, but as a guy who makes a living in risk assessment I have a pretty useful understanding of how much easier prevention is when compared to recovery. No light will absolutely prevent a collision but it can reduce the probability. So am I going to take reasonable steps to make my son visible? Also, of course. It’s not victim blaming…it’s avoiding becoming a victim.
achfraser wrote:One
It’s opening up a whole new world of victim blaming. There are enough drivers who think they can interprete the law in order to justify the poor driving towards cyclists. Plenty who think they can hurl abuse at cyclists around laws that they believe exist, bells and helmets or having to ride as close to the kerb as possible, for example.
We don’t need to add another level of shit that drivers can use to blame cyclists for the misfortune of being run over when choosing not to adopt.
I hear what you’re saying about a higher level of visibility to protect yourself (and agree), but it’s a choice, and shouldn’t be allowed to be shoehorned into law. Not unless pedestrians have to follow suit and cars have to sport the fluoro chevrons that motorway maintenance vehicles have. Etc…
achfraser wrote:
Should
I have to say I have yet to see anyone victim blame who didn’t claim as they did so that “I’m not victim-blaming”.
Besides, the original article is about a request to make such lights _compulsory_.
A woman might choose to dress-down to try and avoid harrassmen [agreeing with her or not, its her own private business] but that’s not the same as the state making burkas compulsory, is it?
One Canadian’s perspective.
One Canadian’s perspective. The whole victim blaming argument is a red herring. Yes, drivers should be aware, and drive appropriately and carefully, but not all do. The bar to get a driver’s licence is not that high and enforcement is intermittent, not out of malice, but because police cannot be everywhere.
I bought one of the new Bontrager daytime lights for my son. Although we live in a city with pretty good infrastructure and driver awareness of cycling, he now goes to school in a city with neither. He commutes to school by bike for a few months of the year…basically until it gets well below freezing or the snow starts to fly in significant quantities, which might be as soon as late October. He’ll start up again in late March/early April when things melt.
Should drivers there be more with it, and responsible for driving appropriately around cyclists? Of course, but as a guy who makes a living in risk assessment I have a pretty useful understanding of how much easier prevention is when compared to recovery. No light will absolutely prevent a collision but it can reduce the probability. So am I going to take reasonable steps to make my son visible? Also, of course. It’s not victim blaming…it’s avoiding becoming a victim.
To be clear…
1. I don’t use
To be clear…
1. I don’t use daytime lights, high viz clothing, or any other special measures. I also didn’t say anything about support (or not) for making lights mandatory. I spoke about choices my family and I made. The cycling infrastructure in my city, and the fact that most drivers are mediocre, but not awful, and have some awareness of bicycles, means that I do not face the same risks my son does. In his circumstances a daytime light makes all kinds of sense.
2. To equate my son choosing to use a light to make himself more visible, with a woman dressing down to avoid sexual harassment or assault, or a government making burkas compulsory, is a considerable stretch.
3. If this is the way you treat a fellow cyclist with a different experience and opinion, I would hate to see the interaction between cyclist and driver, and I’m glad it isn’t reflected in the groups I ride with.
achfraser wrote:To equate my
Yes and no. They’re both examples of people adopting their own behaviour/appearance solely in order to avoid becoming a victim of an action that is wholly in the control of others. To make such changes mandatory is not an intervention to be taken lightly, especially where others’ circumstances (as you yourself point out) differ significantly and/or there is limited or no evidence as to its efficacy.
In the case of riding a bike
In the case of riding a bike on roads we share with cars I would contend that we are never in a situation that is “wholly in the control of others”. To accept that premise is to put the entire weight of responsibility for the integration of mixed traffic onto shoulders of drivers.
I’m not that fatalistic. I choose to pay attention to cyclists when I drive, and prefer to be deliberate about how I ride. I read an article recently that argued it was wise to think like a cyclist while driving and think like a driver when cycling…to try to anticipate what the other might do, in an effort to make life easier for both. Seems like a reasonable response to me.
(And I still see a fundamental difficulty equating discussions about collisions between bikes and cars with discussions about being the victim of sexual assault or harassment. The latter is done with malicious intent and is about exercising power over the person assaulted. I suspect the number of cases of a driver hitting a cyclist that fit that description is vanishingly rare. I’m sure there are drivers who put cyclists at risk in all sorts of way…inattention, impairment, poor decision making, etc, etc…but I have yet to encounter a malicious one. Perhaps I’ve been lucky but, if so, I’ve been lucky for forty years.)
achfraser wrote:In the case
I entirely disagree, and I can cite a number of legal cases where cyclists have, for example, been struck from behind and explicitly deemed blameless, which I would suggest prove the point.
I agree, but there are grey areas in all of these which illuminate some commonalities. And while the act of having a collision may not be deliberate, contributory acts such as driving while using a phone *are*, even though the mens rea is somewhat different. The main thing, though, is about the response: do you seek to change the behaviour of those committing the offences, do you seek to change the behaviour of the victims, or do you seek to address the problem by other, environmental means? Too often the choice is the one that’s least fair, least effective, and has the most negative side-effects.
Related:
http://singletrackworld.com/columns/2015/02/bez-the-wedge/
achfraser wrote:
(And I still
The exercise of unequal power is common to both situations. What may be different is intent, but one can never actually know another’s intent. Indeed, I would argue that intention is, in practice, irrelevant (and the law might be more usefully protective if it were also irrelevant in law). I have no ability to know whether the woman who forced me into the ditch by left hookimg yesterday did so because she was malicious, or incompetent, or desperately upset about her personal life, or simply drunk. I also have no motive to care.
@achfraser
I disagree on
@achfraser
I disagree on multiple levels with everything you say, I’m afraid.
For responsibility – just look at the multiple cases reported right here of cyclists hit from behind while fully visible. Look at the case on here now of the blameless guy hit by a speeding car avoiding another car that pulled out in front of it. Or look at the recorded statistics on cause of accidents – the majority due to driver error. What could any of those victims have done to ‘stay safe’?
Looking to find the victim’s responsibility in every case is a defence mechanism to avoid facing up to one’s own vulnerablity. Not being fully in control of your destiny is not a comfortable feeling, but you have to face that is the reality on the roads as they are.
Then there’s the greater point that morally, responsibility primarily lies with those who bring the danger, in the form of momentum and kinetic energy. That would be the driver – cyclists rarely kill anyone (barring rare collisions with pedestrians). Its the drivers who are creating the danger by operating dangerous machinery in a public place.
As for ‘intent’ and sexual harassment vs bad driving – that’s irrelevant. Inattention and not looking where you are going is a _choice_. It might be a long-term, cultivated habit (one that society finds acceptable, and even incentivises), but its still a choice.
The more visibility aids cyclists, pedestrians, and street furniture are clad in, the more drivers will choose to not pay attention (more time for texting and eating bowls of cereal).
None of which is to say your son can’t choose to have a daytime light.
Even though I think it tends to create an arms-race effect that in the end leaves nobody any better off (look at the police report on the Regents Street cyclist death, that stated his lights would have ‘blended in with all the other lights’) , every individual in a vulnerable situation has the right to decide for themselves how to cope with an imperfect world.
But compulsion is an entirely different issue. An individual’s choice is completely different from saying that everyone doing it would help, or that its people’s responsibility.
Cycling PEI seems like a
Cycling PEI seems like a problem. Are they accountable to cyclists or able to go mad unpunished?