My quest to make motorcycle riding that tad bit safer

I’m glad to see this was already posted. I wear mine when I ride my 1500w ebike around and I feel so much safer with it. It’s really bright too!

[1]https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcyc...

They started via a kickstarter in 2015: https://www.google.com/search?q=lumos+helmet+history

...they kindof "always" had reliability issues w/ detecting braking accurately, I think switching between the handlebar remote/sensor or phone sensors. It's an existing product with a direct analogue to your project goal, and minimally you could trawl for contacts within customer reviews or online reports to get some ideas about the good/bad in this problem space.

Beware of patents (as relevant), but it's a noble and useful project and goal.

Is it safe in case of an accident? The helmet is quite round, and the not round shape may be a problem.

Sad that this would be needed. At that price it's insane to me. OP's article is about democratizing safety and keeping it at a low price, while this over engineered brake light is $160 plus tax. Then a 3350 mAh battery and it lasts only 8-12 hours. Crazy

The Technology Connections YT guy has a whole piece analyzing tail lights and I agree with him.

Def not a daily event but not unheard of.

In best cases this brake gives a bit of feedback when it engages the light but not yet engage the actual brake.

You are free to use this technique to signal "back off" whenever you're engine braking or before you brake or even when you're not even braking but don't like the tailgater

for braking, I use engine braking at stop lights, and can easily slow down almost all of the way without any brakes applied. Motorcyclists should definitely be taught to drag the rear brake when engine braking to let others know. Most people are unaware of how quickly a bike can slow down, or rather, how so little mass reacts much differently to situations (ex. even going downhill, unless in 5th/6th gear, bikes generally don't pick up speed coasting but rather slow down).

Also, is this accidents total men / women? Then it would not even take into account, that there are significant more male riders.

Another interesting stat is that the majority of motorcycle crashes are single vehicle accidents, ie. the rider going down by themselves. While this can be equipment failure, in most cases this will be crashing due to riding too fast or above skill level.

So yes, riding very carefully at safe speeds and avoiding dangerous situations (I choose my routes to avoid situations where drivers are likely to be in their phone — mostly freeways and freeway-like streets in cities) will make bikes a lot more safe.

I knew someone at a previous company that was here one day then gone the next due to a non-highway accident caused by someone else IIRC.

It's sort of like being friends with someone who plays low-chance russian roulette for fun in their free time.

I've done a decent amount of miles like that and I've barely had any close calls.

There are already voices against this, as the recuperation functionality of electric vehicles can repeatedly trigger this feature if the driver lets go of the gas pedal for a short time.

The UK is trialling noise pollution cameras that mail fines to your home, same as for speeding. It's an externality whose days are numbered.

The amount of time me or our kids were woken up by some ferrari, maserati, chopper et al flooring it on purpose on nearby intersection past midnight has been many, punishment 0 nothing. After moving to rural countryside its one of many aspects I am certainly not missing from previous life and would have hard time coming back to lower quality of life in cities.

When there was a high-speed crash into the barrier at the end, the car would often plummet into a ravine into the valley below. My mother tended to call this "taking the shortcut to Benihana" as that was the restaurant to be found at the bottom of the ravine (not an actual shortcut, but just a macabre sense of humor.)

Now we had some neighbors with a very picturesque home a few blocks down. They were from Switzerland, and Dad owned a Volkswagen repair shop a few blocks in the other direction. Since they worked frequently on German-engineered Volkswagens, they also worked on Porsches. And so it worked out that Dad would often bring home a Porsche to work on or to play with, or something in-between. Dad had 2 or 3 sons who all loved cars, and so by the time they were driving age, there were quite a few Porsches in circulation there.

And we always knew it, because those 911s are not quiet. And the sons would not be quiet either as they gunned their engines to show off their nice Porsches, in various states of souped-up or in-progress repair. It became a more or less nonstop parade of motors for a few years.

My parents never miss an opportunity to complain, and so there is plenty of traffic still to give them a chance. There is at least one resident down the way with an obnoxiously loud motorcycle, so Mom and Dad always cluck and chide and complain as that vehicle takes its turn on the street.

As for the noise, I get it. And I think the industry and the riders are to blame, motorbikes have been getting outrageously loud. Especially the fact that some newer bikes even come with exhaust valves that open at like 55-60 km/h is insane to me.

While I enjoy the hobby I cometely understand why Südtirol did what it did and I won't be surprised to see strict limits like these pop up elsewhere too.

Something about this generalization rubs me the wrong way. A person who modifies their motorcycle to be extremely loud does not care.

Could say the same for cars, which contribute to more noise pollution.

AFAICT, the noise is the point. The people with loud vehicles (and this includes the rattling bass and coffee can mufflers on low-end econoboxes) are selfish assholes, desperate for attention, often compensating for a failure in another part of their lives. "Loud pipes save lives" has zero data to back it up.

I don't, I ride electric. It's not just leisure rides, too, noise is just as important for daily commute.

If you don't modify the exhaust of a motorcycle, it's noise levels are not different than a car, and substantially quieter than a semi truck.

https://www.bumm.de/en/products/dynamo-rucklichter/produkt/3...?

https://www.bumm.de/en/products/e-bike-r%C3%BCcklichter/pare...?

Then there are also the people that think they need to be loud to be noticed. That has been debunked, but that doesn't stop people from feeling a false sense of safety and sabotaging their vehicle's sound deadening regardless.

There are plenty of rules regarding the noise these things are allowed to make, but until law enforcement actually enforces those laws, nothing will change. That's with the unreasonably high legal noise limit.

When I go read a book in the park, it's all very nice and quiet until a motorcycle arrives

When I want to sleep with the window open, if I hear any noise it's due to these motorbikes doing races at night.

If I was dictator for a year and didn't have policing resources to enforce noise control, I would just ban non-electric motorbikes

I can totally understand that bikers like to hear the engine and exhaust of their bike but physics and the design of motorcycles is not very accommodating to that.

My bike has the manufacturers default 94db idle exhaust.

It is 94db because anything louder than that is not allowed on certain nice Austrian roads, so the manufacturer set it to 94.

While driving i hear the wind noise on the helmet, the airbox, the drive train and a bit of the engine. I usually wear ear protection.

To be clear 94db is a lot and it is way more if you pull on the gas and i don't have one of those stupid valve controlled exhausts.

I am always astonished how freaking loud that thing is, when i hear it's exhaust echoing over open fields or while going through a tunnel at full tilt.

It just comes down to physics, the exhaust points not at the biker, so the noise is directed into the environment.

There is no engine bay covering the engine and gearbox so that is comparatively loud, also chaindrives are rather noisy as well.

For the exhaust to compete it must be incredibly loud, which of course is obnoxious.

Some modern (sports) cars play engine sounds via the stereo system, maybe someone can build something similar for bikers.

The big difference being left hand leaver on a motorcycle is the clutch, rear brake is right foot, on a scooter, no clutch so the left hand leaver is the rear break.

When I first got the scooter I was expecting the obvious accidental muscle memory confusion with the left leaver when swapping vehicles. For some reason it just never happened, never accidentally gone for the clutch on the scooter and never accidentally gone for the rear brake on the bike.

(Blipping the throttle accidentally should never cause an emergency unless other things are already going wrong: for example, if you are riding a bike whose power is way beyond your skill level or you are following someone too closely.)

As an avid mountain bike cyclist back in France, I hung to what seemed familiar - which worked well enough until the first sharp bend came... It came way too fast, I panicked, cycling reflexes took over, I shifted my weight back and pressed both handle levers hard - getting the (to a cyclist) very unexpected result of both disengaging the clutch and thus losing all engine braking while locking the front wheel hard (why did they put the front break where the rear, which helps me control slides, is supposed to be ?)... I was catapulted, followed by the bike... Nothing broken - just bruises, rashes and the flattened ego of a lucky idiot.

As a daily cyclist, being a motorcycle passenger on big engines always terrifies me: I'm on two wheels, with bicycle-like positions and trajectories... But everything happens monstrously too fast, my instincts for braking and acceleration are all out of calibration, so I always feel that we cannot possibly survive the next turn !

So, yes - I recommend not mixing bicycling and motorcycling.

When talking about triggering over a certain threshold before the clutch is engaged, I'm guessing you mean detecting the hand throttle being let go particularly quickly after a downshift blip? I don't have any real evidence for this, but based on how I think I use the throttle when riding, I feel like this would have a very high false positive rate unless you're deliberately using the throttle very gently in normal riding; or a high false negative rate if you tune it so it only activates on really aggressive throttle blips. It would probably be more reliable to just trigger off high vacuum once the clutch has engaged.

Also, I'm not 100% sure but I don't think my bike has any vacuum tubing you could tap into - it doesn't have a vacuum brake servo like a car. So you'd have to drill into the intake manifold to mount a sensor.

Why make such a definitive claim with zero evidence to back it up?

The justifications in that section are nonsense and seem to boil down to a skill issue on your part.

Sure, around the city a scooter makes sense for a lot of people, though I believe they provide a false sense of security. The lower barrier to entry also lowers the "perceived" risk.

Feeling safer !== safer

Personally, I feel much safer on one of my motorcycles than a scooter. But that's because I am extremely comfortable on a motorcycle and can make it do exactly what I want, when I want.

Any driver should know what a brake light means, I don't think that it's an intentional flash feature is important to know.

This makes it an arms race because the average driver loses sensitivity and then what used to be enough is now too subdued and unsafe (even if technically enough by law). Reminds me of how some regions require ad breaks to have audio not louder than the main production, while others are just straight up loudness wars on your ears

There's something to be said for setting a standard and keeping driving competence high and being less annoying to others including pedestrians.

(A bike is a slightly different story, it's harder to see how far away is a solo light. But then this is also a culture where half the riders believe that deafening bystanders is important for safety so sometimes hard to sympathize)

I have 2 bikes, both stock exhaust, both quiet. The older one with the Euro 3 and larger engine is more quiet than the one that is Euro 5 and has a small engine, but none is loud enough to wake anyone at night if I come home at that time. At the same time, a couple of neighbors with fancy Akrapovic cans will wake up the entire street every time they pass by.

Their owners manual for their braking light bar lists Patent # 10,363,865, but I don't know if this applies 1 to 1.

Actually in thinking about it, if you had access (digitally) to the current gear, you probably also have tachometer and velocity data as well through whatever that connection is anyway.

On the other hand, a motion sensor works for all bikes and is quite robust.

Or are you saying that you don’t want them to think you have a skill issue ?

I live in a semi mountainous area, where people driving automatics ride their brakes most of the way down the mountains. (Relatively small mountains, elevations ranging from 1,900-2,700 with the surrounding area around 1,000-1,100 elevation. So not the same necessity of engine braking as somewhere out west where the elevation is 3-6k average with mountains up to 12-14k).