Originally Posted by
Bike Gremlin
For clarity, if I got the study right, the experiment compared day-time running lights vs no daytime lights.
Not the blinking lights vs steady beam lights.
That makes perfect sense and, for what its' worth, it aligns with my subjective impression when running lights on bicycles and motorcycles during the day (which is why I've started doing that all the time).
They were blinking lights. They used a magnetic induction method which lit the light with each wheel rotation:
Two magnets are fixed to the each of the spokes of both wheels and the lights are mounted to the front and the rear wheel fork. When the magnets passes the light an electric current is induced, which makes the lights flash, when the wheels are rolling.
They also go on to state that blinking lights were illegal and they needed to get special permission to run the study.
The main difference w.r.t the current thread is this is for both front- and rear-lights, they didn't try just one or the other. Also they didn't compare steady beam to blinking. I think some other studies already showed blinking is superior which is why they didn't try steady lights. (EDIT: here is one such study,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs...41931213601755 - for bike tail lights only but it should be similar for a front light.)