Then you'll have to explain how that's possible given that rubber can handle 5 to 9 times more volts/mm than air. Check out the link I posted.

Al

Dry rubber or wet rubber? That nice water coating should provide a good path from the rims to the ground.

The point was that the rubber on the tire is not going to protect one from a lightning strike. I don't really care about further details. Do you believe that the rubber will protect the bicycle rider from the effects of a lightning strike? Then please explain the two bicycle deaths and the several motorcycle deaths from lightning since 2005.

I suggest folks read AL's linked article, my quoted article, and then make a decision if they want to trust that their bicycle tires will protect them from the effects of lightning.

Heck, just outside of Apache Junction Az are two really tall hills adorned with a cluster of radio towers on each.. I used to love to ride up to the pass between them in thunderstorms to sit and watch the lightning attack those towers and zap the city below. Never got so much as a tickle sitting between those two hills.

You are missing the point: it simply doesn't matter. The strike may go through the tire, if it cannot it will go through the 20 - 50 something mm air gap from the rim to the ground instead. It is still going to go through you, your tires offer you no protection whatsoever. If instead the lightning hit a nearby power pole and spilled a transmission wire onto you, yes, your tires will protect you if you can manage to get the wire off you and your bike without touching the ground.

Keep in mind that part of the reason so few people are killed by lightning is that most of us have the good sense to seek shelter! If no one ever took any precautions against lightning the death rate would still not be huge but it would be much higher. Sound travels about 1 mile in 5 seconds and I follow the 5 mile rule. If there is less than 25 seconds between flash and boom I head for shelter. Chances are excellent that by the time the lightning risk has hit its peak staying outside will be unpleasant for other reasons. If I am caught out in the open with no shelter nearby then I just ignore it. There is little that you can do to protect yourself so you might as well just continue until you can reach real shelter or the storm passes. If I am inside I won't go out until the storm passes and on days when there is likely to be no rideable weather I don't ride. Cycling is part of my lifestyle but it is not my religion so I don't feel any compulsion to ride in unpleasant weather; there is no greater purpose to be served by doing so. I read that the open sided shelters commonly found in parks near where I live are fairly ineffective against lightning though they do keep you dry. I see that some of the newest ones actually have something I cannot recall being installed new since my youth: lightning rods and ground straps. Those, I assume, would be a better choice, not that you typically have a choice when caught in a storm.

In short, for me there is no incentive to ride in a thunderstorm so why take the risk, however small? Riding in a thunderstorm won't win you any prize, not even a Darwin Award!

Ken

Sorry but I can't resist the irony in this thread, of two of the themes which remained distinct but which should be considered together! One, dipping into probability and statistics with respect to lightning strikes and two, why is it more pertinent for 50+?

It's simply the balance of risk versus gain, or expected value in mathematical parlance. At 50+ we have fewer remaining years at risk, and therefore for a given gain a greater risk of fatality is justified. In fact a simplified equation might be

Value(riding) x (1-Prob(death)) - (Life Expectancy-age) x Prob(death) x Value(year)

if it evaluates as greater than zero, we come out ahead by riding in lightning storms! Less than zero, stay in. I approach the Value terms as subjective, but from some perspectives they might be objectively quantified.

If you are in foul weather and your hair starts standing up; pedal like your life depends on it, it just might.

Larry, you started this by trying to become the high grand pobah of where to post a thread. Remember?

P.S. If you send us a good thunderstorm with rain I promise to ride in it.

I gotta admit that some of you guys have more balls than I do to not care about riding in a lightening storm. The central belt of Florida from the Gulf coast to the Atlantic has been given the appropriate title of "Lightning Capital of North America" and unless you have seen some of our lightning storms, you will know why I don't ride after seeing the first flash. I would rather wait at a convenience store than ride in that stuff. Nooooo Thank You!

If you were to read my post more carefully, you'd find I said exactly the same thing about the tires.

The reason why strike fatalities are so low is because the risk is extremely low. Many cannot get to shelters in time nor do they try.

There about the same number of snake bite deaths a year in the states. I've not stopped going in the woods/swamps nor taking my family there.

My wife and I have spent several hundred days in the woods and have encountered gale force winds, many nearby very close strikes, hail, near zero temps and very close (emphasis on very) and numerous encounters with alligators, snakes, bears, moose, wolves and wild hogs. The moose and the hogs can be really dangerous. I've been chased several times by water moccasins which are abundant in N Florida.

You want real danger? Get into an automobile or ride a bike on the road. You should check out the accident fatality statistics for the home. And those statistics are not because of people have the common sense thing.

The "common sense" relating to bears, snakes and lightening has a lot to do with irrational fear. We are too isolated from nature so we fear it. We are overly familiar with cars and the home so we are blasé about those risks.

Al

It's the carbon black in the tires that make them conductive to electricity. If you had those colored tires on your bike, I suppose they might be insulators, but, like someone said, a one to two inch gap from rim to ground isn't going to even slow down a lighting bolt if it hits you.

That's a very good point. I found on Wikipedia that they add it to help carry the heat away. Therefore rubber + carbon black is definitely a better electrical conductor than plain rubber because if it conducts heat better than rubber, it conducts electricity better too.

I could not find the break-down or ionization voltage for rubber + carbob black or can find if it will conduct much current in a voltage field at the value that air essentially breaks down/ionizes and effectively becomes a conductor. The rubber +carbon black will certainly support some current flow, but I believe the "big bolt" will travel rim to ground through the air path, but can't prove it. As indicated previously, you'd have to know the parameters and run the equations to really know what is likely to happen.

There's more like a 5 to 7 " gap between the rim and the ground on my tires. But the distance is not relevant. If the air has started conducting current to the car at the breakdown volts/mm of air, you'll have that same volts/mm in the air between the rim and the ground no matter the distance. So it will break down or ionize and become a conductor too.

Al

I think the rubber tires insulate against the positive charge buildup from the ground and make it incrementally less likely to be struck. If true, my intuition is that the difference is very small. Once struck by lightning though, the electricity will take the path of least resistance to the ground - whatever is between you and ground isn't really important. An inch or less of air isn't much extra on top of hundreds of feet.

I like lightning storms, myself. They make me ride faster.....

This morning we finally broke our drought with the first rain of the monsoon season.

I rode through rain, thunder and lightning. It was flat out wonderful. The aroma of the desert after a rain cannot be matched this side of paradise.

I learned several years ago that lightning cannot read. It struck my ham radio station and did things it should not have done, and things it should have done, it didn't do. Go figure.

I never really worried about lightning on a bike until I took my kids out riding and the center of the storm went right over us. We ended up waiting out the lightning under an overpass.

when I was a kid, there was a forest ranger that worked near us that was struck by lightning 5 times over his career. He became depressed and committed suicide. Apparently, it's not a pleasant thing to go through and has severe physical ramifications even if you aren't killed.

My favorite lightning story was the woman that was struck by lightning in her house while she was praying that her family members at the beach would be safe from lightning. Fortunately, she lived. Is lightning a zero-sum game?

When we lived in Utah, there were a couple of boy scouts that were killed by lightning while waiting out a storm under a tree. The weather in Utah is very changeable. lots of nice weather mixed in with lots of severe weather that moves in very quickly.

Thats a problem...I make sure my 160M inverted L is grounded,and all the cables to the house are un hooked,been lucky(sound of knocking on wood)
Bud

Compared to metal, rubber is an insulator. But compared to a block of solid mylar or another good insulator, it is very conductive. Black tire are actually designed with carbon (lampblack) impregnated in them to discharge static buildup on cars. For one thing, this is necessary to prevent fires at gas stations.

But even if a tire were to be a good insulator, there is a ready air path between the rim and the ground, along the side fo the tire. If lightning can jump an air gap of say, 2,000 feet between the cloud and your bike, it can certainly jump a gap of 2 cm between the bike rim and the concrete.

Tires won't help you.

I agree, well rubber has about half the dielectric of neoprene but close enough. Where it might protect some is prior to the strike. As I understand it, there is a buildup of positive charge in the earth - attracted to the negative charged clouds - and there is an initial discharge from the ground up, marking the path for the return strike. The highest points, influenced by shape and charge distribution, are the most likely to be struck. So it does seem likely to me that insulation from the ground charge would reduce the likelihood of a strike. Not prevent, nor mitigate the effect. I could be wrong, but I haven't actually seen that addressed beyond the common and correct "it won't protect you if you're struck."

In my previous post I said I like lightning storms because they make me ride faster. Well, that is true. Here in South Cackalacky, any warm day after May can become a thunderstorm by afternoon. But if I just cannot ride away from localized storms and the lightning they produce - I seek shelter.

Now, the odds are slim that any of us will be struck, about 1:6000 in your lifetime. So just riding on through it will probably amount to no harm done.

But you don't have to be directly hit by lightning to be hurt. The weather that breeds lighting also offers hail, tornadoes, wind shear/gusts and things I probably cannot think of. Downed trees and power lines are frequent occurrences during sever weather, too... Crashing into a falling branch is not fun, and not all lightning comes from the clouds. Some is contained within wires.

Most worrisome is that you don't have to be directly beneath the clouds to be a victim of a lightning discharge. As mentioned most recently in this thread, lightning is really the discharge of static electricity between built up of charges. From cloud to earth is most common.
However, once these charged conditions exist, the lightning discharge itself can happen anywhere within a several mile radius. So the storm itself can be way over there, but the lightning can strike where YOU are.

Of Natures furies, I reckon lightning ranks only behind tornadoes as the worst thing to be caught in. Once I realize that I cannot outrun lightning burst conditions - I look for a place to shelter. The last time it happened, I got off the road and sat on someone's front porch while the lightning ripped all around around. After about 20 minutes, the burst front passed. No one was home that day, and I still don't know whose house it is... nor do I care.

Call me crazy, but I'd rather take my chances with a homeowner, the sheriff or whatever else might come of camping out on a strangers doorstep.
It sure beats being out in the maelstrom, alone and exposed.

I guess the government is really totally out of money, the file you linked returned a not found error message.

Were statistics detailed enough to know if they were actually riding when struck or just cycling and got hit while standing around or whatever.

A woman actually got hit in the shoulder with a meteorite and survived. I guess we ought to get some titanium bike helmets to save us from that risk.

I suppose the difference is you dont HAVE to ride in a lightning storm. A meteorite is not a known factor - lightning can be. Getting out of it, or at least making yourself less of an electrode when all else fails, well... these are choices you can make.

I just tried it and the link works fine for me. Perhaps your computer was struck by lightning?

https://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/statistics.htm