Use Those Flashers

The Wall Street Journal writes about how difficult it is to get Dutch cyclists to wear helmets, but I'm writing about the cavalier way many of them go out without lights after dark. We went off daylight savings time last weekend, so this week I've started to ride home after dark. You really need your lights by 5:15 now, certainly on a cloudy day. And you're going to need them a lot: six months until spring! I use one headlight (or the other one), and two flashers attached to my seat stays. Most of the riding here is on bikepaths, but even there, and certainly on the little country roads (dikes) drivers often use as short-cuts, you are going to want to stand out like a Christmas tree. Recently, I've added a mount underneath my seat for an additional flasher. In spite of the fact that attaching it (and taking it off when parking the bike at work) adds yet another action to the long string of actions required to get ready for a cold season ride, I'm going to start using this third flasher too. There really is no such thing as overkill when it comes to this, especially if you also realize that if a flasher is positioned incorrectly, the effect can be reduced to almost zero. Also (this is what drivers surely know), one little flasher often barely makes a difference. You could be riding around feeling quite responsible, while in reality you're still a dark ghost that haunts the road. But that's people who care. It is the people who take this too lightly who need to start thinking (the way helmet-less folks need to turn on their brains): forget, for a moment, about the drivers you would be burdening with having hurt or killed a cyclist, forget also about general credibility of cyclists as participants in traffic; if there are people who care about you, people you care about, would you really want them to have to deal with the consequences of a possible tragedy? Bike-related tragedies happen every day, and many in hindsight turn out to have been preventable. The chances of something going wrong are relatively small, but when it does go wrong it can truly be tragic. And what's so hard about getting this right: spending a little bit of money for a few lights, spending a little bit of time to keep them charged, spending just a tiny bit of extra time to attach them to the bike? With these stakes? Gimme a break.