For you bicycle commuters who ride up State Route 305 in the early mornings in the dark, I thought I would share with you some perspective from the driver’s point of view as it relates to your safety and visibility.

The bottom line is that biking red lights on your bike are OK, but wide reflector strips on your jackets or backpacks are much more visible reflecting off the headlights of our cars.

As an FYI, neon green jackets are great in the daytime, but might as well be black jackets in the dark.

There is one rider who lights up like a Christmas tree who is tall, sits very upright on his bike and wears a jacket with lots of roughly 1-inch strips of reflectors on the back of his jacket.

Reflective piping on jackets is pretty worthless from a driver’s perspective as it’s just not big enough to light up.

Additionally, while this is pretty obvious, if you wear a backpack or shoulder saddlebag over your reflector jacket, I’d suggest you put reflector strips on your bags, otherwise in our eyes, it’s just a black hole.

Finally, if you ride hunched over your handlebars, I’d suggest putting reflectors on surfaces that our headlights will see – like your butt!

When I read in the Review about another bicycle rider being hit and flown to Harborview while they had “proper lighting devices,” but were still “hard to see” according to the driver, I thought this perspective might help.

Jim Footh

Day Road