Originally Posted by
ken cummings
I do not want over powered lights, I just want parity or equality with the other road users. Please, do not tell me cars and trucks need 50 to 100 watts of lights because they are going much faster, in most night traffic here I am as fast as they are. Federal and state headlight standards call for light levels and beam patterns for good reasons. If there was not such a weight penalty I expect many of you would want lights like mine. I just use a head-light designed for night off-road racing or small aircraft landing lights.
Without sounding borish; are you saying that you can ride as fast as cars on a freeway or a country highway where the speed limit is at least 55? That's what the brighter lights on cars are for. Even in the city where cars routinely are running speed limits of 45 (and often exceeding that) you can't ride that fast either!
Obviously if your in tight traffic in the city your probably going to be able to keep up with cars or at least catch them at the next light, but at those speeds the brighter lights on cars are not helping them really to see all that much better far down the road, their there more to be seen by others. In the city you'll find cars all the time either not realizing their lights are off, running just the daytime running lights, or they just turn on their parking lights and see just fine because of all the street lights...although this is not a legal thing to do.
If I was wrong about all this bicycling light thing then the laws would have been written years ago that all cyclists would have to have lights as bright as cars dim lights; obviously this isn't the case because the speeds on bikes are not as great on cars thus the laws are not as strict.