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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that this will only be used by those bikers who already care about their safety and behave according to traffic rules.

The fucktards driving at night in full-black clothing, without lights and reflectors, music blasting in their ears and wearing no helmet on the road, instead of the bike lanes, will not take notice of the spray (or the fact that their behavior is endangering themselves).

Now guess which group of bikers gets hit by cars more often?

(Disclaimer: I had multiple last-second-saves with said fucktards while peacefully driving around)

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In London some leaked TfL research suggested that women were killed far more than men because women obeyed the traffic laws more closely, and so found themselves crushed by left-turning trucks more often when they could have got out of that situation by breaking some rules.

Can this be found online? I'd love to read that.

I ride an almost entirely black bike with no reflectors and often no lights. Mostly because I don't use it at night unless I have no other choice. I'm interested by this paint for that exact reason.

Your assumptions don't really hold up that well.

As someone else who has also nearly hit one of these fucktards (on a two lane road with a 60mph speed limit), perhaps his assumptions are not wrong, but you are an outlier.

Perhaps it's sharing too much, but the only thing that saved his life was a car half a mile in front of me making an emergency swerve that clued me in to something abnormal in that area - but I thought it was a deer and was about to resume normal vigilance by the time I caught up with the biker. An oncoming train was in just the wrong spot to let me see him by his reflectors.

His assumption holds up perfectly well. When I was in High School I had job where I drove around and made deliveries on Friday nights. Nothing sketchy, but I was out after dark a lot. During my two years doing that job, I almost hit cyclists a dozen times because they were wearing all dark colors, had few or no reflectors, no bike light and were riding on roads with no street lights. I never saw a single cyclist with a bike light (which is required by law in my city) the entire time I had this job. This has changed in the last couple years as I have seen several bikes with lights, something I am pretty happy about because I'm a cyclist too. My bike is white, has no reflectors (its a mountain bike primarily for trail use) and I refuse to ride at night because I know exactly how invisible I would be.

FWIW The Hurt Report[1] didn't find any link between motorcycle colours and crash numbers. I'd say that doubly applies to bicycles when you consider that even a small motorbike still has a fairly significant showing of coloured fairings. Reflective jackets on the other hand...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MOTORCYCLE_ACCIDENT_...

A motorbike is mandated to have lights and cops enforce this, in contrast to bikes where most cops tend to let Darwinian evolution happen.

> The fucktards driving at night in full-black clothing, without lights and reflectors, music blasting in their ears and wearing no helmet on the road, instead of the bike lanes

But is that the target audience of this spray? If people can't be bothered to take care of themselves, accidents may happen. Sucks. It's a self-solving problem, though.

(And as for the helmet, what the hell? Maybe it's a Dutch thing but helmets on bikes are weird.)

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