BICYCLE saFETY eQUIPmeNT

GLOVE

The most-used bicycle safety equipment aside from helmets is probably the glove. Gloves protect the skin on the palms of your hands when you fall on pavement. Some are padded to protect the hands from compression stress from the handlebars on long rides. They keep your hands warm in winter. When you ride through a patch of glass they let you stop and wipe the glass bits from your tires before the glass penetrates the tread fully. (Don't try this while still moving!) Gloves are highly recommended. We like the washable ones for summer use. For winter we find that the ones with non-breathable membranes get wet on every ride, and have to be dried out thoroughly before another use or they turn rancid inside. Down mittens are the warmest thing we have found for winter, but they also get wet


                            MOUTH GUARD...............

                                                                                            Many contact sports use mouthguards to protect the participants. That includes boxing, football and many others. There is evidence that blows to the chin do a lot more than mess up your teeth. Energy transmitted by the jaw joint can be channeled straight to the brain, producing the same effects seen in fighters when they are hit too hard. A good mouthguard or jaw-joint protector stabilizes the jaw by engaging both the upper and lower teeth. That can be expensive, or just a few bucks from a sporting goods store for a "boil and bite" that conforms to your teeth after heating briefly in boiling water. Most riders find a mouthguard confining because it can interfere with mouth breathing, spitting and shouting at dogs, cars and pedestrians. There are designs that have central vents to minimize those problems.

FLAG,,,,,,,,


Low profile recumbents and others who are concerned about being out of sight in traffic often use a bike flag. Long distance tourists favor them for increased visibility on highways. They are readily available at big box retail stores as well as bike stores, usually in orange or white for high visibility




ACTIVE LIGHT........


There is no substitute for active lights if you ride a bicycle after dark. No reflective device or material can achieve the visibility that electric lights can achieve. We use the largest headlights we can, plus the typical blinking rear lights that identify a bicycle as a bicycle, and always have some redundancy to accommodate the notorious unreliability of bike lights.


Active lights unfortunately require active maintenance, but we think no rider should be without them at night. Horns We don't find that horns do much for safety on a bicycle. Your voice is faster to react and adapts better to different situations. The primal scream produces good adrenalin-based reactions in motorists and is probably your best defense in most bike/car situations. It requires no evaluation by the driver, since the panic in your voice is obvious, and it can move a car over a lane almost instantly. Curse words will not improve on that, by the way, since you will get a quicker reaction when the motorist is scared, not angry.