Pretty brilliant having emergency info on the helmet. I'll be adding that.

Thanks for all the responses!

Colleen C, that mtn bike setup is an absolute Howl !!! I love it! This is a great discussion on the topic. I like the ingenuity of the folks working things out to best suit their needs. I like to engineer a little myself and getting the hear/see what others are using is a big help to this newbie.

This gives me a lot of info to sift through. I like the CREE XLM's but I'm not sure about using one as a helmet light. Granted, it works very well but, I'm a bit concerned about blinding drivers by my looking around. I did pick up a "TwistLit" yesterday. It's an elcheapo LED. Seems to be a fair amount brighter than the spider lights. At least its something until I decide which route to go on a better light. I'm a fair weather bike commuter. When it's raining, I bum a ride. The rain makes a huge difference in night time visibility. My entire route is on lighted streets so, just getting drivers attention is what I'm after.

Thanks again for all the replies. Everyone be safe.
Ed

Good point, here is a $20 super bright flashlight on my helmet.

I noticed the emergency info as well. I plan on adding something similar too.

Where is your helmet?

If you're wearing a helmet, I'm not sure that mounting lights etc to it is such a good idea. Anything external to it could impede the helmet's ability to do its job, and also add extra leverage in an oblique impact. In any case, what's wrong with mounting lights to the handlebars? Every other road vehicle mounts its lights to the vehicle rather than the driver...

I was all set to buy a 18650 powered helmet light when I won a Viz 360. I already lights on the rear rack, and just left them on after I started using the Vis 360. I usually don't use the other rear lights anymore, but I'm really visible when I do.

But you can lift your chin. Or turn your head. Or look down. The light is on a gimbal mount that has a wide range of movements.

You and mikhalit are both making a common argument that is based on mistaken observations about bike lights. First, yes, the beam is intense if you look at it directly. But, then, a car light is incredibly intense if you look directly into it. Go out and stand at arms length and eye level...which is how most people 'test' the brightness of bicycle lights...and have someone switch on the lights of your car. You'll be seeing blue spots for a week.

But a bicycle light is a lot of light packed into a pretty small space. That is both the problem with the 'hold the light at arms length, turn on the light and then complain about how bright it is' and the argument that the light is blinding to road users. Putting that much output into a small package with a small reflector concentrates the light into a narrow cone. When you consider where we cyclists ride, i.e. usually a few feet to the right of the passenger's light on a car, a narrow cone of light isn't going to shine into the eyes of on-coming traffic.

Exactly.

It's not really a problem. I've crashed with helmet lights mounted and smacked my helmet. The light mount broke but the helmet did it's job.

As for mounting the light on your head, it's an advantage. It's not just to get the attention of drivers but it also helps you see into corners and avoid obstacles. Some cars are now coming with lights that track the corner rather then just shine off in a straight line.

Helmet Rain Covers and Helmet lights are incompatible, unless you have a clever solution .

then, do share that ..

.
I RESPECTFULLY disagree!

For commuters and riders that do lot of riding in darkness, a helmet light is almost a MUST!! A helmet light does so many things good for the commuters at night time, amd for the mountain bike riders in the dark, that they are too numberous to mention.

Cover your head inside the helmet. My helmet light is rain proof.

Well... No, thank you, it's rather bad advice, can result in bad consequences. See, lights like Magicshine and alike have very broad beam. Even if there is a hotspot in the center, it is still pretty wide. So you really have to turn your head sidewards or downwards and keep it so for ten seconds or longer if you don't want to annoy fellow road users. But you should be seeing what is happening to the left, to the right and ahead of you instead.

I find it pointless to mount a (helmet) light with a powerful symmetrical beam in the way that it's illuminating only the near field, it gives very little bright spot, wasting the battery. And if you mount it properly you need to look away which is dangerous. I am not saying you never shall mount your mighty light on top of the helmet, but what is perfectly good for mountain biking may not be appropriate for commuting.

You are making a rather broad assumption about the observations made by other people, seems it is based on no data. What do you mean by "most people"? Why compare it to the car lights only a hand away? Which car lights do you mean, focused with the cutaway on the top or the flood lights?? Could you please tell me exactly what part of my observations is mistaken? Why shouldn't one look at the light directly? The lights I am talking about have a very wide front opening, symmetrical reflector, surely the people you meet look directly into it unless you look at your front wheel.

Do not forget why they add a little cap on the top of bright lights. It is already very annoying when you pedal standing and get just a little bit of the beam in your eyes.

Well, lights nowadays have beams too wide and lumens too many. I am not saying all of the lights will make others blind, but many will if they are set correctly. And there are not only the motorists out there, but also fellow cyclists and pedestrians who will curse you if they get a bit of such lights into their eyes. I know, it happened to me even with lights way less powerful than 1000+ lumens.

Nevertheless, i find that a "be seen" helmet light is almost a must for commuting in the dark. But please be careful with those Chinese monsters.

Absolutely agree about the beam pattern. Personally i need those crazy magicshine XXXX lumens only for night riding in the forest or bad weather and definitely out of city. In those situations primitive round reflector is exactly what i need == floodlight. For everything else fork crown mounted IQ Cyo + Tikka on top of the helmet are enough.

10 seconds!!!??? At a leisurely 12 mph (20 kph) you are covering 18 ft/sec (5 meters/sec). In 10 seconds, you'll have covered 180 feet (50 meters). If a car is coming at me at 30 mph (50 kph), they are covering that 44 feet/sec (13 m/s). My lights are aimed about one car length or about 18 feet in front of my bike. A car coming at me is going to cover that gap in less than a second. Hardly enough time to be blinded and certainly not enough time to need a 10 second diversion of the light.

A helmet light is as appropriate for commuting as it is for mountain biking for the very same reasons. It provides a source of illumination that can be directed to where you need the light to shine. If necessary, it can be used to alert a motorist to your presence if they do not see you. I do not shine my helmet light at motorist indiscriminately but there have been times when it was necessary to avoid a collision.



I didn't say 'most people'. I said "where we cyclists ride". Most every cyclist I've seen rides outside of the flow of traffic most of the time. If you are riding to the right of the flow of traffic, your light is pointed down the road in a straight line on the right hand side of the traffic. Motorists coming at you are between 15 feet (4 meters) and 30 feet to your left, assuming an 11 foot lane and a 4 foot shoulder plus the distance the on-coming traffic is from the center line and the position of the driver of the car. Even if you headlight was a 35 degree flood light, the beam spread at 20 feet isn't 15 to 30 feet. There is, simply, no way that your light could be blinding to other traffic. In addition, a wide flood light is a more diffuse beam than a narrow spot so the amount of light you could spill over into on-coming traffic is less because it is more spread out. That's what I mean by an incorrect observation.

I also compare bicycle lights to car lights because that is the light that you are going to encounter if you are riding a bike on the road at night. Yes, automobile lights are shaped but they are only shaped on flat ground. Once you throw in hills and differing elevations, the light is still going to travel in a straight line. Motorists deal with bright lights all the time. I was trained not to look at the light of on-coming traffic so as not to be blinded. I think most people were taught the same thing.

I don't worry about fellow cyclists because they are even further from my lights then a motorist as I don't ride bike paths at night. If someone is being a salmon, I can't do much for them because they are already violating the law as well as common sense.

Low intensity 'be seen' lights are a bandaid at best. In a city environment, my lights are competing with thousands of light sources. A weak 'be seen' light can't really be seen against that kind of background illumination. I've found, through years of night time commuting, that if I want to really be seen, I have to compete on the same level as the motorists. And that means throwing lots of lumens.

Nope, not so in my case. Okay, I got how you use your light. You point it down at a rather close distance, while i tend to set the beam center next to parallel to the ground, to cover larger area and to take the advantage of the simple round reflector. So it will be seen very well from 500 meters or more thus the 10+ seconds and that's why i cover it when others appear in front. In cities i just keep it off.

Hm, when mountain biking you are not setting the light at the same angle, are you? If you point the light downwards the illuminated patch will be quite small, not something i would want when riding in the woods.

If you encounter out of city someone with the type of light i am talking about (with a wide and uniform beam) you'll definitely want him to switch it off or look away. The contrast is way too large to be bearable.

Well, here in the Northern Germany drivers are very polite and you rarely get unshaped lights shining into your eyes. They expect same from you. Since i ride in the dark about 6-7 hours per week I try to respect the others. Few times my dynamo light was set too high and people did complain by turning the high beam lights on and off. Most of the Magicshine lights have stronger and much wider beam than my dynolight, so i can imagine it's even more uncomfortable to encounter it on the road. Again, if you point it down and close then it is less of a problem, but i find it is too ineffective.

But are there bike paths? Isn't it violating the traffic rules not to ride there when they exist?


Okay, you know what you are doing. If it makes your ride safer and you think it doesn't annoy the others then I am happy with that. My strategy for the city riding is to have a strong shaped light mounted low and a complementary "band aid" on top of the helmet. I can tell there is a noticeable difference between riding with the band aid and without one. I find its enough, perhaps it is because i ride like a pussey, but i don't think any light will always save me from a careless teenager, so i ride like they don't see me anyway.

That's a true statement, and a great finishing line!

Ah. An aiming problem. I use my lights to illuminate my path so that I can see the road at about normal operating speed. Being seen with them isn't all that much of a problem even when aimed so that they provide road illumination because they are bright. The primary function of the lights is to see, not be seen.

Aiming lights so that they are set at infinity...500 meters is as close to infinity as you can even with high intensity lights...doesn't do anything for seeing the road and could be an annoyance to other road users. Look at the way car lights are aimed, for example. They don't aim them out to 500 meters but aim them so that they illuminate the road at some finite distance from the vehicle. The driver can see what is coming up and make corrections to course as needed but not blind other road users.

Yes, I am aiming my lights so that they illuminate the trail. The lights on the bar are aimed approximately 5 meters in front of me and the helmet light is about a meter in front of that. If I were to aim the lights parallel to the ground, they would only illuminate the trees. A light that is set parallel to the ground and aimed around 500 meters in front of me is ineffective. I don't really need to see 500 meters down the trail but I need to see what is 5 to 6 meters ahead so that I can plan my line.

Not if that person is traveling in the opposite direction on the proper side of a roadway. As I said I avoid bike paths at night.

It doesn't matter if the beam is shaped or unshaped. If the motorist is at a higher elevation than you are, their light will travel in a straight line to your eyes. As a motorist, I encounter lights that are higher than I am all the time..even when driving a high profile vehicle. The world is a hilly place and we learn to deal with bright lights at night. Here's a couple of examples. Both were taken from the steering wheel of my SUV which is almost 2 meters above the ground. The cars in both pictures were on a hill above me




Neither car had their high beams on and both were late models that used shaped beams.

My state doesn't have a mandatory side path rule. The cities and counties I ride through also have dusk to dawn curfews on the paths that I would normally use during daylight hours as well. Even if they didn't have curfews, I wouldn't ride a bike path at night to avoid issues with pedestrians and bright lights. I really am not a jerk now matter what some Bikeforum members might think

Sure, i take your points. The issue with hills is something one has to live with, I am only trying to minimize the unnecessary discomfort.

Just for fun, let me illustrate how my light is set. Below is a picture from fonarik.com, i set the light in a very similar manner. As you can see the near field and the sideways are illuminated very well, even if the light is aiming at infinity. That's why I am afraid it is too bright for oncoming traffic. If the light is aiming at much closer than that, I get a very bright nearfield and can't see the sides and the distance very well, the contrast is too high.

I use a Princton Tec Apex headlight which I have attatched to my helmet. I prefer to use helmet lights as my main light, that way the light is always with me, wherever I turn my head thats where the light goes. The one thing I've noticed is that a lot of drivers get a little bit confused or "shocked" when they see a very bright light on my head I think a helmet mounted light has a big advantage over a handlebar mounted light ,not just for illumination but also if you have an emergency or breakdown at night... it's nice to have your handes free when trying to change a flat tube in the dark.

I recently got a Bell Muni helmet which has a visor built to have a Blackburn Flea headlight clipped on and has a place for the Flea taillight on the back. Ordinarily the first thing I do with a helmet is toss the visor, but this intrigued me, so I picked up a set of Fleas to give them a try. So far, I'm liking it a lot.

The Flea headlight puts out 40 lumens, which seems fine for a helmet light complemented by my 600 lumen light cannon on the handlebars. At full power it only lasts about an hour, but my ride is only 45 minutes, so that's OK with me. The rear light is reasonably bright, but I'm still using a PDW Radbot 1000 on the bike's rack. The taillight lasts around 10 hours on solid before it needs charged. These two lights together weigh about as much as my non-winter gloves and both are USB rechargeable.



(Image from Cycling News.)

There may be a bit of geographic difference going on here. Mikaliht is from Germany, most of the other posters are from the US.

I don't know what bike commuting is like in Germany but my general impression is that drivers and cyclists co-exist somewhat better there than in the US, and that it is generally a more controlled, disciplined society.

In most cities in the US, bike commuting is a bit like going into combat. On bike-unfriendly streets, usually no bike lanes or paths, drivers texting behind the wheel of their 5,000 lb SUVs, generally abysmal standards of driver training (and bicyclist training, to be fair). In a hostile environment like that, as a cyclist I am first interested in my own safety, only second about inconveniencing drivers. And on a fairly regular basis, I want - even need - to hit them between the eyes with a dazzlingly bright headlamp. Because they are about to drive right over me.

Here is an example. One of the most common car-bike accidents here is the right hook. A cyclist is riding on the shoulder of the road, maybe in a painted bike lane. A car is driving in the lane ahead of him. The driver sees a driveway, a parking space, a side street - and suddenly turns right, cutting off the cyclist, who either slams into the car's side, gets knocked into parked cars, or goes under the wheels. The driver doesn't turn his head to look behind him, just assumed that since he is in the rightmost car lane there can be nothing to his right. A couple riders are killed each year in my city, in this manner. Last summer a young woman was riding on a bike lane when a large truck turned right, not only cutting her off but crushing her to death in his wheel well. The drivers are never charged with any crime. The police always find the driver blameless. In the case of the young woman, the official report said her speed was a contributing factor, as in she came up behind the truck too quickly for the driver to have noticed her. She was going about 18 mph and the speed limit was 25 mph. A few years ago, a young woman was straddling her bike, stopped and waiting for a red light. A large commercial truck pulled up next to her, paused, and turned right on the red light - right on red is legal here. Its rear wheels crushed the rider from behind. That driver was also found not at fault. The police said that when he was stopped next to the rider, he couldn't see her, so it wasn't his fault.

That is the environment we deal with in most US cities. Mine, Portland, is even considered the most bike-friendly major city in this country.

So, when I am riding in traffic and a car in front of me is showing the signs of getting ready to hook right - it is slowing, the driver's head is turning, it is drifting over toward my little bit of bike lane - I will put that 600 lumen spot right through his rear window, light up his whole cockpit, dazzle him with the blaze off his mirror. Anything to get his attention. When I am riding past slow moving cars, I will play the headlamp beam over every driver's side mirror, to light each of them up.

The ability to dazzle a driver with directed light is an important tool to have. A little "be seen" blinky doesn't do it.

In general, I think - guess, really - that sort of aggressive light usage wouldn't be normal in Germany. I'm guessing that because, as far as I know, you're not even permitted to have blinking lights on a German bicycle.

I had a hard wipe out, front tire wash out on pavement/ice, I slammed my head with a Cygolite Triden/with battery attached to the helmet; both the light and battery got ripped off including my helmet visor and goggles. 4 cranium scans later the docs say I’m OK. I still ride with this set up but the helmet is new.

Well, thanks for bringing up these examples, jyl. I sure do give personal safety highest priority. Especially in the case of right turns I think it's a good strategy to illuminate the cockpits from behind, also the rear view mirror must be completely white -> would be hard not to notice a cyclists approaching.

Another big difference between Germany and US might be the width of the roads. I rarely see those multilanes wide roads here, normally they are much narrower, and i often take the lane, so it's easier to get the oncoming traffic close enough to make it blind. In US it probably happens less often.

Like i already replied to cyccommute, if people know what they are doing and if it's gonna improve their personal safety without compromising the safety of others, perhaps adding only a bit of minor discomfort, then i have absolutely nothing against it. I started city commuting not in Germany but Russia, where it's much more of a mess and it made me doubt the competence of every single motorist. Those stong lights were not there yet, so i had to rely on the weak once. Probably now i would have resolved to using the magicshines just like you describe, i know people are doing it there as well.

Right, i don't think it would be normal. Even if motorists and cyclists do not share the road they still stay pretty close, all of them, both directions. I find that it's often quite packed, you will find a pedestrian sidewalk, bike paths and a two lane road all within few meters. Hence my worry about blinding the oncoming commuters and pedestrians.

PS. True, blinkies aren't allowed. Though many use them anyway, our childrens trailer has blinkies, in addition to steady lights on parents bicycles/rucksacks.

Funny how Tucker cars pioneered this 60 some years ago and just now the big manufacturers are finally getting around to this. It is one of the advantages I appreciate about having a light mounted on my helmet. Being able to turn my head and aim that light at cars that are coming at me from side streets is invaluable.

I agree with the sentiments about once having had a helmet light not wanting to go back, and believing in having basically two sets of lights. I run a flashing light on my handlebar, and a Planet Blaze 1/2 watt helmet light on the top of my helmet.

I also agree that having a light on the back of your helmet is vital as well, I use a Planet Bike Blinky 3H for this. Because when you are turning your head or lifting it the light will moved out of the line of sight of cars approaching from the rear I also run at least one other rear light, usually a Mars 4.0 on the seatpost or saddlebag, and a Portland Design Works 1 watt Fenderbot on the fender. I like having the second bike mounted rear light in case I am remiss in keeping the batteries charged and one of them goes dead, I still have another. All of my lights use AA or AAA rechargeables.

I wouldn't worry about the mounting systems for putting a light on top of your helmet being uncomfortable. I remember being concerned about this as well before I got helmet lights, but it's usually quite easy to run things so they are either under, or below the level of the pads in the helmet.

Although I am a big fan of DIY stuff, in this case I happen to have gone with purpose built items for my helmet lights. The PB Blinky 3H usually runs about 15-20 bucks. The PB Blaze helmet light can be had for about 25 dollars.

I'll admit I'm tempted to run a more powerful flashlight instead, but the 1/2 watt Blaze is actually quite bright with fresh batteries and since it runs on AA's it is easy for me to feed it fresh rechargeables.