Motorcycle fatality rates have been trending upwards, not downwards[1]. Brake lights on helmets may illuminate one of the culprits: An ever increasing number of American trucks with poor visibility. Sitting on a bike, you're even shorter than a pedestrian and more likely to be completely out of sight. Perhaps its time to start regulating for better visibility, as Europe has done.

[1]https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcyc...

I helped Alex invent that product! I built the first prototype that helped him get funding and hand assembled some of the first PCB designs. My (old) name is on the patent.

I’m glad to see this was already posted. I wear mine when I ride my 1500w ebike around and I feel so much safer with it. It’s really bright too!

I have a smiley face rendered in retroreflective tape on the back of mine. I figure it's both bright and triggers the very sensitive human visual system for detecting faces. It's hard to say how much it helps, especially since I put it on basically the same time I started riding at all, but I don't often have people tailgating me. ed: and it was only a couple bucks, that's nice.

> moves the brake light up to eye level for people in SUVs

Sad that this would be needed. At that price it's insane to me. OP's article is about democratizing safety and keeping it at a low price, while this over engineered brake light is $160 plus tax. Then a 3350 mAh battery and it lasts only 8-12 hours. Crazy

I wonder if that's the one the author refers to when they say, "I purchased one of the few similar products on the market. To my surprise, it relied solely on a basic tilt switch, rattling excessively during rides despite claims of “advanced technology."

Does it use an accelerometer to turn on?

Is it safe in case of an accident? The helmet is quite round, and the not round shape may be a problem.

Californian motorcycle commuters are on another level in terms of risk imo. People are lane splitting at like 30mph over the speed of the rest of the traffic and absolutely no one checks for bikers before merging. It is a miracle more people don’t die on the 5 or the 101 every day.

Retroreflective tape on your helmet is also pretty good, and much cheaper.

There are some ridiculously cheap "smart" bicycle brake lights that already react to slowing down

I saw one of these last week and just assumed it was tied into the brake lights but it was always on.

That is a great tip. Thank you! I wonder if they’ll ship to the UK?

Thank you! This is cool. I hadn't seen it before.

Take a look into Lumos bike helmets: https://ridelumos.com/products/remotes-and-mounts

They started via a kickstarter in 2015: https://www.google.com/search?q=lumos+helmet+history

...they kindof "always" had reliability issues w/ detecting braking accurately, I think switching between the handlebar remote/sensor or phone sensors. It's an existing product with a direct analogue to your project goal, and minimally you could trawl for contacts within customer reviews or online reports to get some ideas about the good/bad in this problem space.

Beware of patents (as relevant), but it's a noble and useful project and goal.

I ride a bicycle, and I deliberately mount the rear light directly at the eye level of typical sedans and SUVs. It's not connected to the brakes, but I find that having the light pulse is enough.

I am considering adding a watchdog logic in the microcontroller that holds a mosfet gate, if there is any signs of failure in logic it would pass through the normal light signal.

EV's with regen braking and manual transmission vehicles are in the same boat: unless they light up when slowing, following drivers will be surprised. The bare standard IMO for all vehicles should not be to light up when brakes are applied but instead any time the vehicle begins decelerating. Adding flashing for a strong stop ~~ >0.75g would be a bonus. Given all the sensors and compute hardware on vehicles -- even bikes -- these days it should just be a software touch.

The Technology Connections YT guy has a whole piece analyzing tail lights and I agree with him.

I guess those situations where you are engine braking and a non-tailgating driver doesn't realize he's closing to an unsafe distance. Then one of a couple of things could cause a collision from this preventably-dangerous situation.

Def not a daily event but not unheard of.

I like a brake you can choose to tap without engaging proper brakes just to flash your lights backwards, instead of worrying about more smarts in the vehicle that can stop working or whatever.

In best cases this brake gives a bit of feedback when it engages the light but not yet engage the actual brake.

You are free to use this technique to signal "back off" whenever you're engine braking or before you brake or even when you're not even braking but don't like the tailgater

I agree with you - situational awareness is what keeps us safe, and not engaging with poor drivers but rather creating distance.

for braking, I use engine braking at stop lights, and can easily slow down almost all of the way without any brakes applied. Motorcyclists should definitely be taught to drag the rear brake when engine braking to let others know. Most people are unaware of how quickly a bike can slow down, or rather, how so little mass reacts much differently to situations (ex. even going downhill, unless in 5th/6th gear, bikes generally don't pick up speed coasting but rather slow down).

You're making an assumption that someone tailgating you wants to pass. That isn't really true. A decent percentage of drivers just want to tailgate someone.

only flashes on heavy braking, normal use is not affected

my US mazda cx5 center brake light flashes when you press the brakes.

Age is another differentiator. Take young men out of the equation and you get a much better picture.

Another interesting stat is that the majority of motorcycle crashes are single vehicle accidents, ie. the rider going down by themselves. While this can be equipment failure, in most cases this will be crashing due to riding too fast or above skill level.

So yes, riding very carefully at safe speeds and avoiding dangerous situations (I choose my routes to avoid situations where drivers are likely to be in their phone — mostly freeways and freeway-like streets in cities) will make bikes a lot more safe.

This sadly does not say anything because the kilometers driven is unknown in this statistic, right? So it could be that female drivers do not drive that many kilometers compared to males, which results in less accidents.

Also, is this accidents total men / women? Then it would not even take into account, that there are significant more male riders.

There are so many ways to die on a motorcycle that are outside of your control. Someone could not be paying attention, make a mistake, not see you, be drunk, etc.

I knew someone at a previous company that was here one day then gone the next due to a non-highway accident caused by someone else IIRC.

It's sort of like being friends with someone who plays low-chance russian roulette for fun in their free time.

It simply comes down to riding like everyone's out to get you. Another comment summed it up nicely by saying you essentially have to position yourself assuming no one has explicitly seen you.

I've done a decent amount of miles like that and I've barely had any close calls.

I'm with you, and at least here in Germany this is already the law, though it is only required if your deceleration rate is greater or equal to 1.3m/s² (it is allowed starting at a rate of 0.7 m/s²).

There are already voices against this, as the recuperation functionality of electric vehicles can repeatedly trigger this feature if the driver lets go of the gas pedal for a short time.

To respond to your second part: I don't need to cope. Motorcycles are sold to meet noise pollution standards just like cars.

Something about this generalization rubs me the wrong way. A person who modifies their motorcycle to be extremely loud does not care.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/noise-camera-tech...

The UK is trialling noise pollution cameras that mail fines to your home, same as for speeding. It's an externality whose days are numbered.

Id like to see this kind of brake light as the default for any vehicle, not just motorbikes.

As for the noise, I get it. And I think the industry and the riders are to blame, motorbikes have been getting outrageously loud. Especially the fact that some newer bikes even come with exhaust valves that open at like 55-60 km/h is insane to me.

While I enjoy the hobby I cometely understand why Südtirol did what it did and I won't be surprised to see strict limits like these pop up elsewhere too.

When I was a child, our suburban home was at the mouth of a dead-end but very straight street. It was 100% residential, 25mph, single lane each way, but many motorists abused it. We could often tell when someone was lost, looking for the freeway, looking for a through lane that would put them somewhere else.

When there was a high-speed crash into the barrier at the end, the car would often plummet into a ravine into the valley below. My mother tended to call this "taking the shortcut to Benihana" as that was the restaurant to be found at the bottom of the ravine (not an actual shortcut, but just a macabre sense of humor.)

Now we had some neighbors with a very picturesque home a few blocks down. They were from Switzerland, and Dad owned a Volkswagen repair shop a few blocks in the other direction. Since they worked frequently on German-engineered Volkswagens, they also worked on Porsches. And so it worked out that Dad would often bring home a Porsche to work on or to play with, or something in-between. Dad had 2 or 3 sons who all loved cars, and so by the time they were driving age, there were quite a few Porsches in circulation there.

And we always knew it, because those 911s are not quiet. And the sons would not be quiet either as they gunned their engines to show off their nice Porsches, in various states of souped-up or in-progress repair. It became a more or less nonstop parade of motors for a few years.

My parents never miss an opportunity to complain, and so there is plenty of traffic still to give them a chance. There is at least one resident down the way with an obnoxiously loud motorcycle, so Mom and Dad always cluck and chide and complain as that vehicle takes its turn on the street.

> how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?

If you don't modify the exhaust of a motorcycle, it's noise levels are not different than a car, and substantially quieter than a semi truck.

> Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?

I don't, I ride electric. It's not just leisure rides, too, noise is just as important for daily commute.

> Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?

AFAICT, the noise is the point. The people with loud vehicles (and this includes the rattling bass and coffee can mufflers on low-end econoboxes) are selfish assholes, desperate for attention, often compensating for a failure in another part of their lives. "Loud pipes save lives" has zero data to back it up.

> Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?

Could say the same for cars, which contribute to more noise pollution.

They simply don't care for the second part. Some even consider it a safety feature (to be known well in advance) and modify exhausts to be louder accordingly.

The amount of time me or our kids were woken up by some ferrari, maserati, chopper et al flooring it on purpose on nearby intersection past midnight has been many, punishment 0 nothing. After moving to rural countryside its one of many aspects I am certainly not missing from previous life and would have hard time coming back to lower quality of life in cities.

I have ridden motorcycles for 20 years and could not agree more. Defensive riding, assume distraction and reckless drivers, perhaps even willingness to bump into you “accidentally on purpose”. I have actually experienced the latter.

You'd only see it on newer bikes with ABS, they seem likely to have more sensors and "electronics" in the brake system. In that kind of system the deceleration could be inferred from existing speed signals. I wouldn't be surprised if ABS systems already estimate the engine braking torque directly.

Im surprised new cars dont just go off of a gyro decel reading, don't modern cars already have a gyro?

Busch und Müller has some products with brake lights

https://www.bumm.de/en/products/dynamo-rucklichter/produkt/3...?

https://www.bumm.de/en/products/e-bike-r%C3%BCcklichter/pare...?

Factory motorcycles aren't that loud. Most of the ones you notice are modified.

There's an annoyingly persistent group of motorcycle enthusiasts that enjoys making as much noise as possible. They actively dislike electric motorcycles because they're not obnoxiously loud.

Then there are also the people that think they need to be loud to be noticed. That has been debunked, but that doesn't stop people from feeling a false sense of safety and sabotaging their vehicle's sound deadening regardless.

There are plenty of rules regarding the noise these things are allowed to make, but until law enforcement actually enforces those laws, nothing will change. That's with the unreasonably high legal noise limit.

I live next to a main road in London. As technology progresses, cars have gotten quieter, but for some reason motorcycles feel like they're becoming louder.

When I go read a book in the park, it's all very nice and quiet until a motorcycle arrives

When I want to sleep with the window open, if I hear any noise it's due to these motorbikes doing races at night.

If I was dictator for a year and didn't have policing resources to enforce noise control, I would just ban non-electric motorbikes

Sadly noise sells.

I can totally understand that bikers like to hear the engine and exhaust of their bike but physics and the design of motorcycles is not very accommodating to that.

My bike has the manufacturers default 94db idle exhaust.

It is 94db because anything louder than that is not allowed on certain nice Austrian roads, so the manufacturer set it to 94.

While driving i hear the wind noise on the helmet, the airbox, the drive train and a bit of the engine. I usually wear ear protection.

To be clear 94db is a lot and it is way more if you pull on the gas and i don't have one of those stupid valve controlled exhausts.

I am always astonished how freaking loud that thing is, when i hear it's exhaust echoing over open fields or while going through a tunnel at full tilt.

It just comes down to physics, the exhaust points not at the biker, so the noise is directed into the environment.

There is no engine bay covering the engine and gearbox so that is comparatively loud, also chaindrives are rather noisy as well.

For the exhaust to compete it must be incredibly loud, which of course is obnoxious.

Some modern (sports) cars play engine sounds via the stereo system, maybe someone can build something similar for bikers.

Current electric motorcycles can already be pretty silent, to the detriment of pedestrians. Some have added artificial noises because of this, like ones already used in cars.

Unfortunately for bystanders, but fortunately for drivers, noise is one of the strongest way for motorcycles to signal themselves to cars.

I ride both regularly and I don't really have a problem switching between them. For me, the overall experience is so entirely different between the two, that my brain knows to treat them differently. Just like people who own riding lawn mowers don't really have difficulties driving their car afterward.

(Blipping the throttle accidentally should never cause an emergency unless other things are already going wrong: for example, if you are riding a bike whose power is way beyond your skill level or you are following someone too closely.)

I regularly swap between a scooter and motorcycle, owning both.

The big difference being left hand leaver on a motorcycle is the clutch, rear brake is right foot, on a scooter, no clutch so the left hand leaver is the rear break.

When I first got the scooter I was expecting the obvious accidental muscle memory confusion with the left leaver when swapping vehicles. For some reason it just never happened, never accidentally gone for the clutch on the scooter and never accidentally gone for the rear brake on the bike.

1991, first time riding a motorcycle... After a 15 minutes instruction course near the barn from which we extracted the 200 cm³ bike, off we were in Idaho's mountains. As a 15 years-old French person, the whole experience was exhilarating and it wasn't long before I started to relax and open the throttle a bit on the dirt track...

As an avid mountain bike cyclist back in France, I hung to what seemed familiar - which worked well enough until the first sharp bend came... It came way too fast, I panicked, cycling reflexes took over, I shifted my weight back and pressed both handle levers hard - getting the (to a cyclist) very unexpected result of both disengaging the clutch and thus losing all engine braking while locking the front wheel hard (why did they put the front break where the rear, which helps me control slides, is supposed to be ?)... I was catapulted, followed by the bike... Nothing broken - just bruises, rashes and the flattened ego of a lucky idiot.

As a daily cyclist, being a motorcycle passenger on big engines always terrifies me: I'm on two wheels, with bicycle-like positions and trajectories... But everything happens monstrously too fast, my instincts for braking and acceleration are all out of calibration, so I always feel that we cannot possibly survive the next turn !

So, yes - I recommend not mixing bicycling and motorcycling.

I standardize all my two wheeled vehicles to the motorcycle layout for this reason. It bothers my push bike friends to an amusing degree but it's much safer for me. Plus I feel I have greater control of the critical front brake with my most dextrous and strong hand.

I regularly ride both bikes and motorbikes and this never has been a problem, even though the lever that is the rear brake on the bike is the front brake on the motorcycle.

It's an interesting idea.

When talking about triggering over a certain threshold before the clutch is engaged, I'm guessing you mean detecting the hand throttle being let go particularly quickly after a downshift blip? I don't have any real evidence for this, but based on how I think I use the throttle when riding, I feel like this would have a very high false positive rate unless you're deliberately using the throttle very gently in normal riding; or a high false negative rate if you tune it so it only activates on really aggressive throttle blips. It would probably be more reliable to just trigger off high vacuum once the clutch has engaged.

Also, I'm not 100% sure but I don't think my bike has any vacuum tubing you could tap into - it doesn't have a vacuum brake servo like a car. So you'd have to drill into the intake manifold to mount a sensor.

> Scooters are vastly safer than motorcycles

Why make such a definitive claim with zero evidence to back it up?

The justifications in that section are nonsense and seem to boil down to a skill issue on your part.

Sure, around the city a scooter makes sense for a lot of people, though I believe they provide a false sense of security. The lower barrier to entry also lowers the "perceived" risk.

Feeling safer !== safer

Personally, I feel much safer on one of my motorcycles than a scooter. But that's because I am extremely comfortable on a motorcycle and can make it do exactly what I want, when I want.

Scooters are great in the city, but they are kinda boring when it comes to touring or hitting the twisties. My dad's 200cc Vespa is just about interesting enough to ride on hills, but anything below that is just yawn.

Any marginal safety benefit you're getting from riding a scooter is being completely erased by the disregard for basic road safety principles shown in the footage.

I agree, but the device has built in switch, if you mount it upside down, it won't flash

I had that on my Suburban in Texas. Not sure where it is illegal, but my car had that as a dealer option.

Many of them flashy lights are just flashy. Some underregulated regions you'll quickly get tired of every car being like a christmas tree trying to one up each other what patterns their stop or turning lights do or how bright they are (and for front lights just how bright they are and how many).

This makes it an arms race because the average driver loses sensitivity and then what used to be enough is now too subdued and unsafe (even if technically enough by law). Reminds me of how some regions require ad breaks to have audio not louder than the main production, while others are just straight up loudness wars on your ears

There's something to be said for setting a standard and keeping driving competence high and being less annoying to others including pedestrians.

(A bike is a slightly different story, it's harder to see how far away is a solo light. But then this is also a culture where half the riders believe that deafening bystanders is important for safety so sometimes hard to sympathize)

I don't think that matters, isn't the point just that it's more eye-catching than a solid (and much smaller than a car's) light?

Any driver should know what a brake light means, I don't think that it's an intentional flash feature is important to know.

This is an old problem that was solved and not solved. Most motorcycles in the past 25 years are decently quiet, unless you rev it up at night and everyone will hear it. But it is the same with the cars. At the same time, there is a significant number of motorcycles with non-street legal mufflers that add some decibels, you hear those even during the day at low revs.

I have 2 bikes, both stock exhaust, both quiet. The older one with the Euro 3 and larger engine is more quiet than the one that is Euro 5 and has a small engine, but none is loud enough to wake anyone at night if I come home at that time. At the same time, a couple of neighbors with fancy Akrapovic cans will wake up the entire street every time they pass by.

If anything modern motorcycles are sometimes a bit too quiet. The stock exhausts make them sound like cars when idling. And low-revving engines can barely cut through the traffic noise.

Thank you for your question, it does not hook with the engine RPM, but I did have an issue with the sample rate syncing with the engine rpm therefore picking up noise, I solved that issue with randomizing the sample interval with pseudo random numbers.

I've always felt safer in motorcycles compared to scooters. Something about the handling in scooters doesn't feel reassuring. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's more apparent when you ride on patchy, broken roads. It's much easier riding over bumps, zigzagging to avoid potholes on a motorcycle. Of course, I'm comparing motorcycles and scooters of similar weight. Riding a litre class machine is a different dimension altogether.

Every car would have to have the same brightness for their brake lights for this to work well. At night, cars in the US have their brake lights partially illuminated as running lights. On some cars these are so bright that it looks like they're actively braking.

Brightness would be hard to discern in the sun. Cars have center stop light strip, it would be cool if amount of illuminated segments would be proportional to deceleration. Probably not legal though.

If the binary isn’t working then you are following too close and no method is truly safe

We need an app that turns off drivers' phones when they are within 100m of a motorcyclist.

It's not the first per say. https://admorelighting.com/

Their owners manual for their braking light bar lists Patent # 10,363,865, but I don't know if this applies 1 to 1.

I was only thinking about bikes, but I lift/downshift in my BRZ all the time. I guess there is much less fear of being mangled by a cel phone user when I'm in the car. Looks like I will be ordering 4 of these.

indeed

That requires you to have a bike where the current gear is recognized digitally and the bike has a standard way of getting that data to an external device (or it requires you to put a sensor on the gear lever). For that matter, it requires you to have a bike with a manual transmission. There's lots of electric bikes, bikes with fully automatic transmissions, and bikes that simply don't have the electronics (not to mention a standard way to interface with them).

Actually in thinking about it, if you had access (digitally) to the current gear, you probably also have tachometer and velocity data as well through whatever that connection is anyway.

On the other hand, a motion sensor works for all bikes and is quite robust.

I don't think that would work in cases where rev-matching is used.

I’m trying to understand this comment - are you saying that there’s an advantage to drivers behind you not thinking you’re braking? As in - you don’t want them to think you’re coming to a complete stop when you’re regulating your speed?

Or are you saying that you don’t want them to think you have a skill issue ?

I live in a semi mountainous area, where people driving automatics ride their brakes most of the way down the mountains. (Relatively small mountains, elevations ranging from 1,900-2,700 with the surrounding area around 1,000-1,100 elevation. So not the same necessity of engine braking as somewhere out west where the elevation is 3-6k average with mountains up to 12-14k).

thanks for your comment, the device is self leveling, I live in a hilly Scotland, it keeps adjusting itself with the slopes and only reacts to sudden changes.

Agree and currently it's a dealbreaker to me, however I'm certain it will become optional in the future iterations.