Originally Posted by Crayon
...riding in a lightning storm is just asking for it. Bike tires as well as car tires provide zero protection from lightning strikes.
It's a common misconception that it's the car's tires that protect you from lightning strikes. The reality of it is it's the metal body of a car. Lightning is high frequency electricity and it tends to travel along the surface of a metallic object, not through it, to ground. AKA "The skin effect." Since you don't have a metal covered body, a lighting strike while riding a bike will most likely kill you.
Many years ago, I was driving a car in a bad storm. The top of the car ended up taking a strike. The strike went along the body and through the tires to ground. The paint on the roof was badly burnt and blistered, the metal had burns and was galled, and I had 4 flat tires as the rubber melted. Had it been my Miata, I most likely wouldn't be posting here today as it has a canvas top.
You could also think of it like this, the lightning bolt just cleared a 5 mile spark gap. That amount of power is truely unimaginable. What possible defense could a 16" car tire provide, yet alone a bike tire.
Car tires do provide some degree of protection from downed power lines. This is because the voltage is many orders of magnitude lower and it doesn't exceed the break down voltage of a rubber tire. If a line lands on your car, don't get out of it.
Be safe, seek immediate shelter in a lightning storm.
And this is precisely the type of input I was hoping for.
That is why I repeated your post in quotes. Note I again recommend, as I did in a post just following that one, that a person take up racing rather than pull a stunt like I did. I don't mind the input, especially in an open forum, because through my experience and the knowledge of others we are hopefully making people more aware of potential dangers that they may not have thought of. Despite my background, I never associated the magnitude of the energy released with the lightening bolt. This is probably due to stories told in my youth of my grandmother surviving a lightening strike out in the garden where she was working. ( see how previous knowledge can skew learning !) When you said "like a 5 mile spark gap", ding! the association struck home. ( pun kind of intended )