Hi-Vis Study Research Material:
https://cyclingfallacies.com/en/19/people-should-wear-hi-viz-when-cycling
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925753518309871
https://road.cc/content/news/232944-study-finds-wearing-hi-vis-can-increase-chance-collision-while-cycling
Attributions:
Title: Butlins 3 Day International Cycle Race 1980 – Filey, UK
Author: Half Back
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkn765M6QJc&t=128s&ab_channel=HalfBack
License: Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)
Title: Cycling Crashes – Worst CRASH Compilation – Toughest Athletes in Sports
Author: Half Back
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cce29GYlQlM&t=149s&ab_channel=SportsHistoryChannel
License: Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)
Title: The Day Jonas Vingegaard Lost GC by ONE SECOND on the FINAL Stage | Cro Race Stage 6 2022
Author: Half Back
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH4-EEDl4uE&ab_channel=LanterneRouge
License: Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)
Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.
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#hi-vis #cyclesafety #cyclegear
Welcome to the Daily ride and today I’m going to talk about something that’s top of mind for motorcyclist which is safety now there’s a lot of ways that you can keep yourself safe but I think one of the most contentious issues is high Vis clothing I’m not convinced by it I don’t
Think it’s always effective and this is why the kind of uh common group thinking with hi this clothing is it must be effective because let’s face it the police all the kind of um accident and breakdown Services they wear them uh ambulance people all these kind of
People wear high Vis clothing so we think okay it must be safe but there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary that it might only make very little difference but it might also be more dangerous I want to start off with um a study by a professor at an English
University in bth called Dr Walker he did a study in 2014 and what he was looking for was to see how much space people gave when they passed him on his bicycle in different kinds of clothing um he used a variety of different kinds of jackets some which
Were just dark blue normal kind of cycling jackets and then he also wore the hi is jackets one even had the uh police logo on the back one had polite and then it collected the data he had Sensers on the side of him so he could see exactly what
Kind of distance he was being given the overall results I think there was something like six or 7,000 uh passes where that he was given just over a meter of difference I think it was 1 M 17.5 CM or or or close to it now what he did find was
Regardless of what jackets he wore with one exception which I’ll come on to is that it made absolutely no difference he was given this standard amount of space The Only Exception was where he wore a police jacket and he got an extra 5 cm so what this would lead you to assume
Is if you do wear a high jacket you might be seen but you’re going to get no more space when someone passes you which is very interesting um the same Professor he also did um a close pass test with helmets which gave very different results and helmets that’s
Something I want to come on to as well and I’ll probably do that maybe in the next video or the one after but that also um led to some quite surprising results so going back to the high Vis test what this tells us is that that if
You do wear hiy clothing don’t expect to get any more room because you’re not now this was done in 2014 in the UK laws in the UK have changed since uh This was done now in um the last 2 three years the new laws mean you have to give
A cyclist 1.5 MERS and I think they’re doing that because I was cycling back in the UK last year and I did notice a perception shift uh in my own mind that people were giving a little bit more room which is a good thing so now if
These um same people in the 2014 study were passing at uh 1 one 75 cm then they’d be breaking the law and it just wouldn’t be enough uh the study also showed that um 1 to 2% of of all vehicles were only giv 50 cm of room what that that that’s something
Like that I mean that that’s insane that’s just not enough that really is not enough that’s not been my experience actually um in the UK or uh anywhere else have been cycling I would say you do get close passes but one in 100 that’s that that that’s shocking quite
Honestly I would say for me yeah it’s maybe or I don’t know one in a thousand or something like that anyway that’s one of the first studies I’m going to move on to another couple just to give you a flavor there are a lot more of these and what I’ll do is
I’ll link um th this web page here and that gives you um a list of other kind of studies that support what I’m saying going to move to Italy and then to Nottingham I’m only going to look at another couple of studies and as I said
Before if you want to check out all the other ones just go to the link in the description below but very quickly the next study is one in Italy where recently they repealed um uh sorry they made wearing hi’s clothing mandatory for cyclists at dawn and Dusk and in the
Nighttime hours and they found it made no difference whatsoever why that’s the case they don’t know but it’s kind of another um piece of evidence if you like that maybe hi’s clothing doesn’t make that much difference the final study is one that was carried out in Nottingham and it was
Carried out by Nottingham University Hospital and it perhaps um one of the more involved studies because what they did is anyone admitted to a hospital having a cycling accident they looked at the kind of clothing they were wearing and not only did they do that they took in-depth interviews with a cyclist and
They went back to the place where they actually had the accident and they looked at the behavior of the cyclists they interviewed them extensively saw what kind of clothing they were wearing and then start to correlate results of how effective hiis uh clothing was in um preventing accidents and
Surprisingly it showed that there was a significant correlation between wearing hi’s clothing and having more accidents which is completely what you wouldn’t expect it wasn’t a big study I think for the top of my head it involved about 5200 people but it’s still an interesting one um that is the final one
I’m going to look on the pro side if you like um and now looking on the other side of things I think one of the biggest studies was carried out in Denmark now this should study did show that there was a reduction of over 40% of people that were wearing hiy jackets
So effective therefore that’s a tick in the Box thinking okay you should wear hi’s clothing and since it had I think in in the region of like Professor Walker study about 7,000 participants then yes is significant um yeah so the studies they’re there uh there’s some for some
Against but there’s a lot less on the pro side than you would think and there’s a lot less Research into how effective hi clothing really is and I think another thing you need to uh bear in mind is that a lot of high visz clothing or the kind of yellow
Clothing has reflective material on it and I don’t argue about reflective material because I think I uh pgy pardon reflective material I think it really works I think there’s a very very good argument for reflective material because when I know myself I drive a car and when I’m driving around and I see
Reflective material my I can see it from miles away especially in the dark so I think in the dark reflective material is fantastic it really really does work so if you have hi’s clothing and that also has reflective material then you have to ask well is it
Is it the fact that you’re wearing a big bright yellow jacket that’s helping you keep safe or is it the reflective material on it and I I don’t know and I don’t think the research has being done in that area and I think it should be because all we’re doing now is basing
Our um protocols to keep ourselves safe on not quite hear say but on on on what we think is is solid evidence and there just doesn’t seem to be any um maybe it’s intuitive bright clothes you can be seen there is something in that as well
And I do think at nighttime if you wear something white rather than dark you can be better seen But of a night time if you’re relying on bright clothes um to get you seen I think you you’re heading for a hospital you really really do need good lights that’s the imperative I think
Reflective material as well is great and I do have some bits and pieces when I’m riding in the dark that are are reflective on my bike and on my person and if you are riding at night as well um I I I I I think having reflective
Material on your uh legs and so people see the motion of your legs as a good idea and that can be carried over into the daytime because there have been studies where they’ve shown if you have high visz um leg warmers uh people can see the the motion of your legs and and
That can have an effect on keeping you safe how well that stud has been um proved or not I’m not really sure um but that’s kind of a little bit um off a tangent reflective material yes good hi is I really don’t know I’m not convinced
Um and these are some of the reasons why the first thing I think about hiis clothing is it gives the wearer an unfounded feeling of safety to think wearing high visz clothing gives you some kind of superp Power Protection it’s Insanity it’s absolute Insanity you’re still vulnerable and wearing a
Helmet as well it doesn’t make you any safer and I honestly believe that people that wear all this High Vis stuff they wear um the helmet they do everything right and I’m not knocking that but you cannot ride in any different manner to when you’re not wearing this gear it doesn’t
Matter if you’re wearing only protective gear if you’re wearing none at all you have to ride very carefully and you have to ride very I’m trying to think of the world word but not aggressive ly I see this word a lot where people say oh he’s
Taking an assertive line and I I’ve seen a lot of these videos on close passes and I think that looks aggressive to me it’s not assertive you have to be a lot more unassertive struggling for the word again to to keep yourself safe don’t think that wearing this hiest clothing
Is going to give you a superpower it really won’t and I think people that wear it get this false idea that now oh okay I’ll be safe and they get the themselves into some poor riding positions and I think that can cause accidents and that’s maybe why uh when
We go back to the study at Nottingham University that they found people wearing high Vis clothing had more accidents or more likely to and that kind of comes on to riding skills and that’s one of the things that I think people need to improve on I think there
Should be more courses maybe bike sh jobs um should get involved in in Pro providing adult courses for people coming back into cycling because it’s okay if you drive a car and then you go into cycling but if you’ve had very little experience of cycling it’s a different world I’m a car driver
Motorbike rider and a cyclist and those three skills are all very separate skills you can’t expect to go from a car to a bike when you’ve only ridden your bike as a kid around the park and have those kind of skills so I think it’d be
A good idea if there was more adult training now I can remember as a kid um back in the 60s yes I am that old and we had the thing called the tufty club in the UK and the police used to come around to the schools I thought it was a
Great idea I do now and you used to have to do this proficiency tests before you were allowed to go on the road and you used to get this little badge called the tuy badge and you were in the tuy club but they came around and it was like a
Half day so it wasn’t just a small thing and they they they they were very patient and they were great and I would love to see something like that the police take in a more proactive kind of um approach to cyclist and trying to help them and maybe bike shops cycling
Clubs getting involved to give people uh a better idea of the kind of riding positions they should be taking in what situations so basically when they do start to back into commuting or or or just LED cycling they they have a much better idea of um
How to keep theel safe okay so that’s one thing um I think riding skills could be a lot better and I I I I think there’s this kind of perceived level of safety and the other thing is I think also motorists when they see someone in Hive is they
Also think that the road user is a lot less vulnerable than they are and if they’re wearing hiest clothing the the um Rider will also have a helmet on which kind of again confuses uh the issue because a lot of these stats are taken with people with
High Vis clothing but they’ll also have a helmet on and you think well is it does the helmet and wearing a helmet have some kind of um um what’s the word some kind of impact on people having accidents or not that’s something I will come into in another video um but when
The driver sees this person with they’re looking like they’re they’re they’re dressed to go to war or something like that they can perceive that they are actually uh a lot less vulnerable than they are which might mean they make close passes as well and the final point is there was a
Poll taken amongst uh um drivers about their perception of people that wore High Vis clothing helmets Etc and this was in the UK and the majority of drivers said that they saw these people as less than human which is absolutely appalling I mean it’s a terrible attitude and it it makes me
Embarrassed as as a driver to think that drivers would think of someone less than human because they’ve got hiy jacket a helmet they’re just trying to protect themselves and keep themselves safe um unfortunately I have kind of witnessed this um attitude to cyclist myself and more embarrassingly it’s only
Been in the UK uh last year I did the L enter jro’s ride with my friend Ian and we both experienced some hostility of just normally riding on the roads uh we weren’t wearing high Vis gear that I can remember but it just show that there is some
Hostility certainly in the UK it seem to be more so than anywhere towards cyclist um and maybe High Vis kind of exacerbates that and makes you more likely to have an accident because you just get less uh regard from drivers I again I don’t know this is this is this
Is all guessing so let’s wrap up hiis clothes I’m just not convinced I’m really not uh I’d like to see more evidence and I think more research needs to be done into this area and we just shouldn’t accept that it’s a fact it might not be
It might be if you want to wear high Vis clothes go for it I’m not saying you shouldn’t I’m saying that you should be aware that there might be other factors involved in keeping you safe and hi VI maybe not the panace that you actually think it is I think the most effective
Way to keep yourself safe is to practice defensive riding that’s the word I was struggling for earlier always ride defensively ride sensibly don’t run red lights obey the traffic rules that will keep you safer than anything the second thing I think are lights at night time if you don’t
Have one strong rear and front light you’re insane you really are you need them at night I would say you need two rear lights with different flashing patterns daytime running lights I think are a great idea as well um I don’t actually have them but it is on my mind
And it’s something that I I am considering putting on my bike and I think they’re a very good idea and I’m also a fan of reflective strips and if possible to put them on a moving part of your body like your cars there a few sensible ways to keep you safe if you
Think High Vis will work then yeah okay go for it if you obey and carry out all the other things and yeah you’ll probably going to be safe but whatever you do remember that the number of cyclists who actually have an accident or sadly we lose them completely they’re
Few and far between you’re far more likely to die on your sofa stuffing yourself with potato chips and pizza that’s all for today that’s all for the daily ride please ride safe take care
14 Comments
do you think the studies done in other countries like italy or the u.k. would apply differently to thailand? not challenging you here, just curious on your take as you've obviously done your research.
personally….i think it's like wearing a mask during a pandemic. it might not help as much as previously believed at the beginning but it has to help some imho. any little thing you can do to help swing the odds in your favor is worth doing i think.
looking forward to the helmet episode. i hate wearing them but again, it's one of those little things that help tilt the odds your way imho.
Very interesting stats Jay. I do not wear high vis and have only had a couple of close calls. I usually do wear a helmet and because 90% of my rides are on two lane country roads I do use a flashing headlamp as well as my taillight. Here in the states 3 feet (just under a meter) is the required clearance motorists are required to give cyclists "BUT" if you asked 100 drivers here it would be astonishing how many would not know that.
Interesting topic Jay. When we were both commuting and it was still dark out, we would wear some reflected type of clothing, but BUT we also had very bright non-flashing tail light and a very bright headlight. When we are out cycle touring, both of our bikes are equipped with again super bright and steady rear lights and front headlights. Sometimes depending on weather and we may throw on our high vis windbreaker, but we never have considered ourselves to have super powers… haha nah always to opposite. We get the dangers of cycling. I think the word you may have been looking for and one I tell others that are new or even experienced commuters is to be "predictable" to the drivers. Meaning obey all the darn rules and don't do stupid last minute shenanigans. Let the auto-drivers know you're turning, stopping, coming out in the lane, etc…. Also, something I've learned after many years of commuting is to take up the lane if needed. Don't ride as close as possible to the edge thinking you are being nice. NO! Those drivers will thread the needle and at speed to get past you. Come out in the lane about 2 feet and the drivers seem to have a whole other attitude since now they have to actually go into the on coming lane to pass and guess what, they slow down and pass with caution. As for helmets, we stopped wearing them while bike touring and honestly I think we ride safer. I know for a fact that I (Ron) take the downhills a little slower than I used too. With the helmet, I would push my loaded bike as fast as I could down the mountain passes, but now I take them slow. Anyway all good and cheers from Florida. Hope you had a Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year! ~Ron & Petra
Loved this video mate, stay well
Surprised by the info, but very useful advice; thanks for sharing.
With regards to the 1st UK study, I'm not sure that proves anything in the sense that seeing someone in hi-vis might not make them pass them any differently. Hopefully the driver will be more aware of the riders presence
Hi-Vis only works when drivers are looking. But when drivers are looking, it's not needed. I've been out with lights and bright colours in broad daylight and some drivers still don't see me. Too busy scrolling their phones these days. But it also happened in the days before smartphones.
Are there any studies that ask drivers if they were looking? Somehow I doubt it.
Some nice info there! My own take on this is two fold, as follows
Firstly, are you more easily seen or not? Wearing hi-viz does make you stand out more, but only for those drivers doing what they’re supposed to do, which is to keep their eyes on the road!
The second part is more behavioural/psychological when you are actually seen. If you drive by the road’s shoulder, some (many?) drivers will always try to ’squeeze’ past, no matter how narrow the lane, even with oncoming traffic. Depending on the road, (like smaller, narrower countryside ones), and especially when cycling with a buddy, we hog the entire lane, just like a slow tractor would. This forces drivers to slow down. That then leads to two options.
A) They follow & wait until it is clear to pass, or
B) we both gradually move to the side as much as we can to make room for the ’squeeze’, but we now know the vehicle’s speed is well slow. Sure, we get honked at quite often, and sometimes abused by people in a massive hurry to nowhere, but that’s a small price to pay compared to the greater chance of getting wiped out!
Anyway, in the end, we just gotta accept that there is no 100% fool proof strategy to keep us rollers safe on the road. However, just as is taught in defensive driving courses, ’treat EVERY driver like a potential idiot until proven otherwise’ … and give them every reason / opportunity to act smart.
Oh, and my rear view vision mirror and listening closely for approaching traffic also help to avoid a lot of potential side swipes! 😏
Cheers mate, thanks for the great post!
If you are going to quote studies at least know the facts from them !
As a driver I can guarantee that it is easier to see high viz in low light than the black or dark blue .
If you are such a vulnerable road user as cyclist claim you would have thought they would have tried to reduce their vulnerability .
That first study isn't addressing the issue: it's not the distance that a vehicle passes that counts it's whether they've seen the cyclist in the first place – that's the killer! My wife worked as an optician for 40 years and you would be horrified to know the standard of vision that some people think is acceptable for driving. Given what I know, and as cyclist for over 50 years, I would be too scared not to wear hi-viz.
interesting research but I,ll continue to wear hi vis. Anything that reduces the chance of a driver not seeing me is more important than looking cool. Long time [ 40 Plus years] rider.
For me, anything that is not black, grey. green or brown will hel pyou stand out from the coloursa of nature. Something that will catch a drivers eye will always influence human behaviour
Hi Jonny, I will get to your videos when I have the time.