Priorities — The importance of good lights

Cyc­ling can be an obscenely expens­ive sport.

It’s not uncom­mon to spend $10, 000 on bikes and equip­ment. Oh — and thats just the road bike.

One area of the cyc­list psyche that fas­cin­ates me, is that even after such a sig­ni­fic­ant invest­ment, we’ll delib­er­ate over buy­ing the $69 flash­ing rear light or the $39 ver­sion — just to save a few pennies.

You’ve just spent your life sav­ings on a bike after all and lets face it — that’s twelve more skinny latte’s at ‘cafe racer’ on a Sat­urday morning.

All in the mind

Argu­ably, the most dan­ger­ous time to be rid­ing in traffic is at night.

A vast major­ity of your time will likely be spent rid­ing in the dark, if you’re a com­muter or a com­pet­it­ive cyc­list. Rid­ing to and from work or to the morn­ing bunch rides.  Even on the foot­path, ped­es­tri­ans and other cyc­list need to see you.

Under these cir­cum­stances then,  it would be fair to say that the single most import­ant pur­chase you’ll make — is an invest­ment in the best lights money can buy.

If your life depended on it — wouldn’t you spend another $10k just on the lights?

As ridicu­lous as this sounds — it makes per­fect logical sense that if you had a budget of $10k for a bike and equip­ment (shoes, hel­met etc) — then a large por­tion of that money should be spend on a lights. As an insur­ance policy, not only for your per­sonal saftey but so your bike doesn’t get trashed.

The sad truth is — logical sense means noth­ing when it comes to buy­ing. As the great sales­man says:

“People dont buy for logical reas­ons, they buy for emotional reas­ons” — Zig Ziglar

This would explain why we pri­or­it­ize the car­bon frame, deep dish wheels and aero­dy­namic hel­met over items that will save our life such as lights and reflect­ive clothing.

Your friends will admire your awe­some new bike — I would haz­ard a guess, they’ll fail to com­mend your intel­lec­tual prowess for attach­ing 4 flash­ing LED lights to your rear seat and helmet.

So you get my point hope­fully. The pur­pose of this blog post is to point out that some­thing so simple and obvi­ous can often be overlooked.

In the next post, I’ll look at the types of lights avail­able, an award win­ning Mel­bourne com­pany who has cre­ated the light of lights and the dif­fer­ence between ‘see­ing lights’ and ‘being seen’ lights.

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