Originally Posted by Frugle
obviously I only mean on roads where you have the possibility of getting hit.
Yeah, that's like... every road.
Riding with headphones is:
• distracting
• blocks your hearing
• illegal in many states
Hearing is also omnidirectional, and vision is not; in fact, if you read up on "change blindness," you will be surprised to find that vision is nowhere near as sensitive to changes as we normally think it is. So hearing may warn you of something that is outside your visual field.
E.g. I was in Ireland awhile ago, riding on very narrow and winding country roads. There were several times when I could hear a vehicle long before I could see it, and in some cases I even had to get out of the way (e.g. big heavy farm machines). So even in the middle of nowhere, hearing is helpful.
Did you not run across any of these reasons for regarding headphones as unsafe in the numerous anti-headphone threads...?