more is ALWAYS better. To think otherwise is un-American:rolleyes: (sarcastic).

To the OP: ride with what you think is enough. Everyone has a different comfort level with the amount of ligth on the road.

Myself, I use 2 p3d's on Turbo (over 400 lumen) while riding in town. It is enough to compete with the streetlights & light up enough road to travel safetly at up to about 25mph. I have had no complaints from drivers, and no drivers pulling in front of me either.

In the pitch-black country I turn them down to Hi (still over 200 lumen) and it is plenty.

Safety on the road depends on 2 things: being both seen and identified. over-power lights that blind other users keep them from identifying you. Weak lights cause them not to notice you in the first place. The habits of other road users vary by location - use what works well for you.

One recommendation: I have found that using 2 light heads on the bars, regardless of intensity, garners more respect from drivers. Maybe it give them a reference point on how fast I'm moving, or they think I'm a motorcycle, or something. whatever, no issues with not being seen & treated with respect.

excellent point..

Here are a couple old pics I have of two handlebar mounted NR HID lights I used to use. Two bar mounted lights are quite noticeable I think. I've since ditched the NR HIDs for LED lights, but I haven't taken any pics of these yet for comparison due to winter.

Thank you Doctor Provokian; please tell me how I can be mature like you are? Should I label you as borish with your supposely mature comments? Yes, your right, you are an extremily mature...no wait, I'm sorry but rather you are an exceptional distinguished superior mature being and I bow down in your presence.

I also agree, that's one of the reasons I have dual lights myself (the Cygo employs dual beams). The other reason for dual beams is in case one of the bulbs burn out you still have the other light to get home on.

Could be. But another reason is the size of your "light source". For a light source to be noticed, its size is even more important than its brightness. And for a given brightness, the larger the source, the more it will attract attention. Unfortunately, most bike lights sold in North America use very tiny light sources. When seen from far away, two or three light heads look like a bigger light source.

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.

This is absolutely correct and is what I've been saying for years on this forum. It's also why I use a front amber flasher because I know the limitations of the size of bicycle lights and the need to attract attention to me, and that's where the flasher comes in.

The "reference point" is a really good reason to run two headlights. It's been noted elsewhere, especially about motorcycles, that it's easier for onlookers to judge distance & speed if they see paired or multiple lights on another vehicle.

Check out what Honda put together regarding motorcycle safety enhancements:
http://world.honda.com/HDTV/ASV/ASV-3-motor/index.html

They mention some figures, such as causes of car-motorcycle crashes (35% due to overlooking, and 35% to perception of distance between vehicles). Their prototype also has twin headlights and a high-mounted front light (plus fork lights), similar to a bicyclist with two headlights and a helmet light.

Any set-up is fine until you have a close call (or worse). Me? I look like a freakin' Christmas tree. I bet they've never seen one of those on the road before.

I eventually turned into a Christmas tree over the last 3 years. I now use the Cygolite Metro with a amber flasher and a helmet light; along with 3 Cateye LD600's and my new Bell Metro helmet has a red flasher in it along with barend lights.

I think I'm done!

Good info BarracksSi. When people mention their bike lights make them look like motorcycles, my reaction from 20+ years of riding the motor driven beasts is: "Cars don't see me on my motorcycle".

So is the OP going to reply to any of these responses or was he just trolling in the first place?

I live in Austin, Tx. The other day I saw someone riding thru town with some strange, new kind of rear lighting system. The orange LED lights were part of a strap-like set up that went on his Camelbak. It was not totally dark yet, but it looked like it could be removed, and put on a different pack pretty easily. MAN....It was bright! We could see for a good 1/2 mile ahead of us before we caught up to him on the road. We asked him want it was, and he said that it was new; and he'd gotten it off the internet.
DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT THAT WAS THAT I SAW? Where can I find one for myself? I've gotta get one. Any help is appreciated.

I've run a similar setup. The luminous efficacy of an MR16 is 12 to 15 lumens/watt. That makes an MR16 300 lumens max.

You are off by a factor of over 2 in the efficiency of the MR16. At nominal voltage (12V), an MR16 puts out around 40 lumens/W. At 20% overvoltage, it puts out up to 70 lm/W. Follow acroy's link.

Exactly. Listening to people opposed to bright lights deriding people for them is like listening to fixed-gear fanatics bemoaning derailleurs. It gets tiresome.

You are forgetting some aspect between car/bike - namely the size of the tire and lack of shocks. Because of its larger size tires and cushion/shock, when driving car, you don't have to worry about small rock, patch of sand and/or tiny potholes. When you are riding 20-25mph on 700c/28 bicycle tire, those little thing becomes a very big things - and you want to make sure you have a light that could point those out!!!

Just think about it - do you care how bright your headlight is on your car? Yes to a degree, but you are well protected and as long as you can see the road, you don't really care. On a bike, you want every advantage you can get/afford.

YES, because being able to see stuff at 70 mph is a significant part of safety. And potholes still suck in a car.

"NLPIP tested several MR16 samples to determine their efficacy. Efficacies ranged from 12 to 15 lumens per watt."

http://www.lrc.rpi.edu/programs/nlpi...erformance.asp

I guess it's case of YMMV.

Reading through the NLPIP stuff and finding some other items, we may be looking at two different measurements with the same units. Efficiency and efficancies are confusing and used confusingly. I'm not sure where Steven M. Scharf got his numbers from and it looks like he just divided the lumen output by the wattage to get some of his numbers. He is an electrical engineer so I assume that what he is doing is valid.

From the standpoint of results (I don't have the equipment to measure lumens but I do have eyes:rolleyes:), overvolting certainly does what Scharf says it does. Overvolted MR16 are much brighter than equivalent MR11 lamps and certainly rival...or exceed...HID for light output.

Hopefully OLED lights will become practical over the next 5 years or so. Over 70 lumens per watt...

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008...-princeton.php

I finally found it! A local rider was wearing one...so I asked him where he got it. It turns out the lights are still in pre-production so webs sales was my only option. It is called the FlashBak Lighting System. I have attached it to my Camelback when riding, and my summit pack when I was hiking. I think this thing will attach to anything. Pretty cool, and very bright! It has a remote switch that hangs over your sholder so you can power it on or off without taking off your pack. The remote switch also lights up when the back-lights are on, so you know that you are illuminated. Pretty inexpensive. Worth a look.

The best bins for Cree XR-E and XP-E LEDs are available NOW and are rated at over 110 lumens per watt.
The XP-g is due within the next six months and will get over 130 lumens per watt.