Bicycling through city streets at night entails swerving around pot holes, dodging careless drivers, and crossing your fingers. Bike lights are crucial for any serious urban cyclist, but most products on the market do a poor job of illuminating the asphalt and alerting motorists to the presence of bicycles. Revolights, an innovative Bay Area-based start-up, hopes to, well, revolutionize the world of bike lighting.

Revolights are basically blinking LED bulbs mounted to the front and rear wheel-rims. Like a car, the lights are white in the front and red in the back. What makes them special is a small magnet also installed into the bicycle’s fork, which communicates with the LED system—mostly indicating the bicycle’s speed. As the cyclist accelerates, the lights are programmed to blink in clusters as they reach either the front or back (white and red, respectively). At cruising speed, Revolights’ timing makes an approximately 2-foot-long, solid band of light. (Watch the video below.)

Revolights solve a number of night riding problems. As Fast Company’s Alissa Walker points out, they can help “drivers to understand the full length and size of the vehicle.” Further, “the light doubles as a headlight for the biker improves upon most bike lights which just flash or shine without much assistance to the rider.” These two elements are critical: According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s 2008 report on bicycle safety, 58 percent of reported bicycle accidents are collisions with motor vehicles (70 percent of those on account of inadequate side visibility, the report claims) and 30 percent of accidents are personal falls. In other words, this is an area that is in dire need of innovation. Optimistically, Walker speculates that, “[b]y mimicking the light arrangement on a car, it also might help drivers to see bikes as a car’s equal.”

One downside is the battery life, which is a mere four hours for the front light and a little longer for the rear. But according to the project’s Kickstarter page (funding is still open), they plan to develop Revolights that are powered solely by wheel rotation.

Source: Fast Company 

They’re big. You can’t see around their wide loads and double doors. Acceleration isn’t really their modus operandi. Chances are you’ve been cut-off or nearly run over by many. They flagrantly linger in bike lanes and no-parking zones. They are, of course, semi-trucks—the universally despised, sluggish bullies of the interstate highway system.

But truckers get a bad rap; outspoken voices don’t often come to their defense. Someone needs to set the record straight. “Let me tell you a little about the truck driver you just flipped off because he was passing another truck,” writes fleet manager Dan Hansen for Minneapolis’ Star Tribune, “and you had to cancel the cruise control and slow down until he completed the pass and moved back over.”

Hansen’s op-ed chronicles the day-to-day life of a long-haul truck driver, focusing on the tragic—nay, Dickensian—career of one of his former employees. His portrait is sympathetic in a drive-1,500-miles-in-another-man’s-shoes sort of way.

Although the job is romanticized and mythologized, the pay isn’t glamorous. “Most of these guys are gone 10 days, and home for a day and a half, and take home an average of $500 a week if everything goes well,” writes Hansen. And, he says, the rising costs of overhead are only compounding the stress: “[T]he best these trucks do for fuel economy is about 8 miles per gallon. With fuel at almost $4 per gallon—well, you do the math. And, yes, that driver pays for his own fuel.”

Hansen urges us to show compassion, or at least patience, for the working class folks who support America’s economic infrastructure:

Everything you buy at the store and everything you order online moves by truck. Planes and trains can’t get it to your house or grocery store. We are dependent on trucks to move product from the airport and the rail yards to the stores and our homes.

Every day, experienced and qualified drivers give it up because the government, the traffic and the greedy companies involved in trucking have drained their enthusiasm for this life.

Source: Star Tribune 

Image by ex_magician, licensed under Creative Commons.