Should Bicycle Lights be Required when Bicycling at Night?
Using a law to require safety gear such as bike lights seems like a good idea at first glance. But there are many reasons why such a requirement is problematic.
Many cyclists don't use lights because they easily break. Or rust from rain. Or batteries lose power. Or the lights are stolen. Or it is easy to forget them (particularly when you start a ride during daylight yet the ride unexpectedly ends at night). Or they are sometimes expensive. Or they get lost in the house or garage.
Bicycling is already much more inconvenient or difficult than driving a car in our pro-car society, and this requirement adds to that imbalance (thereby encouraging more driving and less cycling). For this reason, a bike light requirement worsens public safety and harms public health by reducing the frequency of bicycling – or punishing cycling by the increased threat of having to pay a steep fine.
Requiring lights is a form of victim-blaming. Instead of blaming the victim, we should be promoting effective safety tactics such as safety in numbers (ie, increasing the number of cyclists), and insisting that streets be designed to obligate slower, more attentive driving by motorists (engineers have almost single-mindedly designed roads for high speeds and inattentiveness for over a century).
Note that I am NOT suggesting that bicyclists not use lights at night. There are very strong reasons why bicyclists should use lights at night.
The question I am asking here is not whether bicyclists should use lights at night. Of course they should. The question, rather, is whether we should use the power of law to require the use of lights.
What I am suggesting in this essay is that mandatory rules for bicyclists to use lights are counterproductive.
All of the above also applies to bike helmets. I am okay with people voluntarily choosing to wear a helmet, but I strongly object to mandatory bike helmet laws. Studies show that when such laws are adopted, bicycling frequency goes down, for the reasons I point out above.
Let us avoid a double standard when it comes to safety and convenience. If our society does not have the wisdom or leadership to avoid a mandatory light or helmet requirement for bicyclists, we should require motorists to abide by the same rules. Motorists must wear a helmet while driving (after all, head injuries are far more likely when driving a car), and must carry out to their car and attach car portable headlights and brake lights each time they drive a car.