Posted on 10/18/2022 1:36:23 PM PDT by aimhigh
Motorcycle drivers are 27 times more likely to die in an accident than those in regular passenger vehicles. Night driving is especially dangerous, accounting for nearly half of all fatal crashes.
Now a new study has found that a reimagined lighting configuration -- six lights running from the top to the bottom of a motorcycle rather than a single headlight -- could help improve other motorists’ abilities to see them.
The study published in the journal Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour was conducted by researchers Pat DeLucia from Rice University and Bradley Weaver from Emory Healthcare, who earned his Ph.D. at Rice.
“Because motorcycles are smaller than many other vehicles, it is more difficult for other drivers to accurately judge their motion on the roadway,” said Weaver, the study’s lead author and a human factors engineer and researcher who did his doctoral dissertation on the topic. “It is particularly difficult at night when a motorcycle has only a single headlight because other drivers can’t see the motorcycle’s full height or width.”
The study revealed that improved lighting could result in other motorists being able to see motorcycles up to 0.8 seconds sooner. “Just under a second might not seem like a lot, but reducing a driver’s response time to a potential collision can make a difference between life and death,” said DeLucia, a professor of psychological sciences who conducts human factors research, particularly related to transportation and health care.
For the study, DeLucia and Weaver recruited 35 people who were between 19 and 70 years old to take part in a laboratory driving simulation. The researchers measured how quickly the participants saw motorcycles with various enhanced lighting configurations that illuminated their full height and width. Each of the new designs improved response times compared with a single headlight, but the participants reacted most quickly to the configuration of six lights.
The study entitled “Effect of motorcycle lighting configurations on drivers’ perceptions of closing during nighttime driving” is available online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369847822001942 .
Texting while riding is ill-advised. :-)
Yep! happened to me on I-10 just west of Palm Springs. A$$hole in a big PU Truck passed me IN THE SAME LANE and the mirrors missed me by an inch!
Happened to A friend of mine, here in Florida, was actually hit by the mirrors and caused him to run off the road into some woods. he survived with a broken shoulder and a messed up bike.................
Yes and paint the bikes a dull, flat black with no chrome.
Why people buy such bikes is beyond me.
A Harley salesman tried to convince me it was ‘cool’ by calling it ‘Black Chrome’......................
Democrat solution:
BAN NIGHT TIME RIDING OF MOTORCYCLES.....................
The Harley dealer in El Cajon got a few bikes with the flat black finish on the tank. Really a bad decision. A couple weeks later a buyer shows up at the service desk. He has "waxed and polished" the flat black tank. It looks like $#|+. There is no "fix" for that stupidity. My Fat Bob and Sporty are both high gloss black with chrome. Easy maintenance.
There is no "fix" for that stupidity. .......Sure there is!.............😜
I rode for years as my only means of transport, winter and summer.
Frankly, riders are often at fault. Leaving turn signals on invites cross traffic, continuous bright lights (a favorite of riders) confuses oncoming traffic and may even cause drivers to look away. But, mostly it is bad attitude and a failure to recognize and accept that at any given moment many drivers are not paying any attention to the road, are impaired, or distracted. It doesn’t matter so much when a fender bender results between two cars. Matters more when the fender is actually a knee.
I saw a rider the other day that had a brake light on his helmet. I thought that was an interesting idea.
What the asshole didn't realize is that due to his speed and low profile I never saw him...but yet he faulted me.
I don't take that crap lightly so I tailed him and at the last stop light, I was tempted to lightly tap his rear end but thought better of it and made my turn......All the while he was continuing to scream at me.
The punk was lucky, someone else in my position may have taken more aggressive action.
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