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Better Bike Turn Signals At Your Fingertips
Velohub's rechargeable Blinkers are a turn in the right direction
Today in silly but promising bike design: bike turn signals that might not blow! The idea of hands-free turn signals for bikes has inspired many, many product designs, few of which make any damn sense. Of those that do, most require donning dorky apparel, integration with the frame, or a departure from the usability of traditional lighting. Today I'm looking at the Blinker lights currently on Kickstarter, which buck that trend a few ways.
These lights are the first product launched by new company Velohub. To start out, I really appreciate Velohub's core premise that vehicles (and thus their operators) ought to be able to speak the same visual language if they're going to be able to safely understand and navigate one another. Also up front, I'm not loving the lights' form. Simplicity, security, and sexiness are pretty crucial in accessory design, and these whale tails get an arguable 1 out of 3. But even if they seem clunky, they might make up for it in practicality.
Enter a caption (optional)The lights themselves look like the bridge on a 90's sci-fi spacecraft, and they use that width to display a long line of LEDs. The white front puts out around 200 lumens, the red rear offers 100 lumens in the back, all powered by rechargeable batteries. Left alone they function like standard if wide bike lights. But with one click on the bar-mounted remote, they double as turn signals.
Enter a caption (optional)The front and back are tethered using RF tech, so one click activates both front and back blinkers. They also feature an accelerometer & gyroscope that lets the rear light do triple duty as a brake light, brightening as soon as it feels you slow down. The final lighting feature is an optional laser running light, intended to display on either side of the bike and give viewers a clearer sense of where the bike is in space.
Enter a caption (optional)The lights attach with a sleeve fit and magnetic closure, rather than a snap fit or band. The designers say this system is strong enough to withstand the bumps and grinds of a daily ride, and without testing one I'll have to take them on their word. The brackets appear simple to install and fairly versatile, and the attachment appears easy to disengage once you're parked.
Enter a caption (optional)The Blinker lights recharge via mini USB, and once in use, the remaining charge level displays on the LED array when you first turn them on. As reported, the life on the 1600mAh Li-ion batteries currently comes out to around 1 charge per week, when used for around 1 hour per day, which is pretty dang competitive considering their multi-functional design.
Enter a caption (optional)I can't help but wonder about some of the specific design decisions though. Why is the rear turn signal white with a red center, when tail lights are almost universally red and red LEDs traditionally have better battery life? Conventions vary a bit internationally, but here in the States riders with their light colors displayed backwards from the standard white-front/red-rear have gotten me distracted. Even as a very bike-aware rider and driver, gauging a bike's direction of motion head-on is difficult in the dark. Adding to confusion is the opposite of Velohub's goal of creating a more consistent visual language for transportation.
Interesting bracket design
Enter a caption (optional)Does the width of the rear light look bonk-susceptible to anyone else? It might be my curvy personal build, or my dramatic dismounting techniques, but I've often found myself smacking into rear mounting accessories when they're wider than your saddle.
Enter a caption (optional)Less pressing, do the runner lights really advance their purpose? Local standards differ on the legal amount of passing room to give cyclists, but the 1 or 2 foot buffer that these lines suggest is much narrower than I'd want to encourage. They highlight where the bike is, which is nice, but if the idea is to imply staying outside of that space, they aren't asking for much.
Enter a caption (optional)The best part of this design is, hands down, the single click remote. Because bike riders vary so widely in physical confidence and (sadly) knowledge of road rules, this simple system could appeal to a wide array of people. Clunkiness included, the Blinkers seem like a new nod at making turn indicators that wouldn't suck for everyday cyclists.
Does this seem like a promising blend of old and new ideas? Or an overly lo-fi version of a tool like the Hammerhead? Will this lead to a biking dystopia filled with slow old cyclists who hog the road and never turn off their blinkers?
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This: https://lumoshelmet.co/ seems to be the same idea, better executed. Clear delineation between signals, same accelerometer use for the brake light, and wireless remote for signals. The front light is likely less effective for seeing the road ahead, but it still offers high visibility to the drivers ahead of the rider.
My worry is that the left/right signal would look alike from a far in a moving vehicle.
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I'll point out a visual fallacy: in the video a bicyclist initiates their brakes and the 'rear light' turns on to, as the copy says, "warn the vehicles behind that you are braking." But if you have to 'warn' a car that there's a pedestrian crossing the road (that's the visual cue) then you're f****d, because that car should already be braking too.
Watching the video, one of the immediate operational issues is how bright the indicating LEDs are / the material chosen for the diffuser. The light seems to diffuse throughout the entire casing, appearing as if both sides are at least partially illuminated. The sequential cycling of the LEDs (mimicking some modern car indicators) simply isn't defined enough to be effective.
As a regular cyclist in Copenhagen I feel that these are doomed to fail. I only see about 30% of my fellow cyclists giving proper signals and and lights are by law now necessary to be permanently fixed to the bike. The rear light has to be red. This idea clearly comes from a less developed cycling culture and I think the real problem is that proper cycling codes need to be agreed on internationally. For example, not many people know you always need to make junction turns at 90 degrees and not cycle out in the middle of traffic to make a left / right hand turn (depending on your country). Ideally there needs to be cycling instruction and courses (these are offered at schools in Denmark and to people moving here) and ultimately maybe there needs to be a simple test. The best lights are the magnet driven that can be left on the bike, but I do back them up with a removable LED that really brightens up my path.
To a driver passing you at 30mph, a left turning signal that is separated by just a few inches from the other, looks not that much different. Focus on making it bright.