491–500 of 618 posts
Is there an interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act where using this bicycle bell to circumvent the computer system used in your headphones for active noise cancellation would be a federal felony in the United States?
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A horn or bell is mostly for telling other people "hey I'm here, stay out of my way and dont suddenly cross into my path" My opinion as a cyclist is that I should basically only be using my bell on pedestrians when the pedestrians are wandering onto the bike lane. If im cycling through a shared space, I find it extremely rude to ring the bell, because it feels like I'm telling people to get out of my way, but they ha…
>My opinion as a cyclist is that I should basically only be using my bell on pedestrians when the pedestrians are wandering onto the bike lane. If im cycling through a shared space, I find it extremely rude to ring the bell, because it feels like I'm telling people to get out of my way, but they have just as much right to a shared path as I do. The culture around this varies a lot. I'm in Melbourne, Australia. Virtua…
On the other hand, I've been angered by dog owners when running who just take up the entire pavement. A couple of weeks ago, I had one guy coming towards me force me to come to a complete stop when I was running flat out, because he couldn't be bothered to control his dogs. He was in the centre of the pavement, and the 2 dogs were at the extreme edges with tight enough leads between him and the dogs, so it'd have tripped me up if I'd tried to jump them. He knew full well I was heading that way, but in the 10 seconds since we had made eye contact, he was clearly determined not to reign his dogs in, and it was only when I was stopped and so he had to reign them in to continuing walking past that I was able to keep using the pavement.
Coincidentally, I bought a 12v car horn yesterday with the intent of wiring it into my ebike's power supply with a little button on my handlebars. Not because of other cyclists or pedestrians wearing (anc) headphones but because modern cars are so heavily sound-proofed they don't hear a bicycle bell anymore. A recent incident with an inattentive taxi driver in a brand new EV nearly flattening me prompted me to want t…
> I bought a 12v car horn yesterday with the intent of wiring it into my ebike's power supply Putting an aerosol fog horn (available from boating supply shops) in the bikes water bottle holder is much simpler, louder and more effective.
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Speak for yourself, I can tune out a steady beep much easier than the sound of a seagull being strangled to death. (That's what the ones around here sound like anyway.) On a more serious note: the loud beeping backup alarms were DESIGNED to be annoying and difficult to miss. I would not be surprised in the least if a study showed these "less annoying" backup alarms correlating to a higher number of children being run…
There have been studies and those resulted in the less annoying backup sounds. These sounds are essentially harsh white noise, which has one significant difference to the beeping: it's level drops off differently with distance, meaning you can blast it louder and people who are really in the wrong spot will notice better it means them, while people who are not meant will not be annoyed or fatigued by it. Two noise so…
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You may not care about fancy bells but you will care about loud honking close to your ears in my very recent experience from the streets of Shanghai. You don't have absolute priority just because you are a pedestrian. > Why can't the cyclists slow down when they see that there's a human obstacle in front of them? Because if the space is limited and they actually want to get somewhere, they just don't have time for th…
> they just don't have time for that? They for sure have time for that. When I drive my car can't use that as an excuse.
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I don't mean to disagree that there are situations where this is useful. I'm just trying to offer the perspective from a situation where the root cause as I see it has been fixed (to a high degree). The OP seemed to suggest that people wearing ANC headgear should stop doing so, but both the bell and the ANC-wearing pedestrians are a non-issue in my lived experience. It would be a shame if these "cyclist-pedestrian AN…
These things take both time and massive political will. As somebody living in a city that's quite bike friendly, all things concerned, but still not close to Dutch or Danish levels of biking safety, I'll take any "technical solutions that try to solve social/political problems" I can get to make my commute safer. Also, anything that makes biking feel safer will make more people try commuting by bike, which in turn in…
This is btw also why cyclist's rights organizations (e.g. fietsersbond in NL) should be _against_ mandatory use of helmets. Helmets make it less convenient to cycle and reduces perceived safety, in turn reducing the amount of cyclists and as a result _actually_ making cycling less safe (and the vicious circle ensues).
Even only suggesting that it would be beneficial to use a helmet has this effect apparently, hence the organizations are only willing to state that they are "not against the use of helmets".
Just an interesting second order effect I think. You want to always be careful to optimize for the absolute number of safe rides, and not solely for the relative number of safe rides that might significantly reduce the absolute number of safe rides.
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Right? This feels like an "arms race" similar to scraping vs. anti-scraping; countermeasures will be developed, likely due to the action of actors entirely disconnected from what you're doing, but to block something else in the ecosystem... and you'll need to re-engineer your approach entirely. Rinse and repeat. (The amount of innovation in anti-anti-scraping that's resulted from "sneaker bots" - automated scalping o…
I don't see why this would become an "arms race." There's no particular competitive value in filtering out this ONE sound.
Coincidentally, I bought a 12v car horn yesterday with the intent of wiring it into my ebike's power supply with a little button on my handlebars. Not because of other cyclists or pedestrians wearing (anc) headphones but because modern cars are so heavily sound-proofed they don't hear a bicycle bell anymore. A recent incident with an inattentive taxi driver in a brand new EV nearly flattening me prompted me to want t…
These days our family cycles a lot for commuting. It’s really easy to observe that people in vehicles treat us far better if we look like humans, wearing normal street clothes, rather than wearing high-viz or, far worse, cycling gear.
The bike bell is for polite notice, not alarming. The best alarm system you have is your voice, which is variable volume and tone. For ultimate effect slap the panels of cars, as it is very loud inside the vehicle.
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There are a lot of runners on mixed use paths wearing headphones these days. They are an absolute danger to overtaking bikes. A bell they would hear would be useful.
To me, in a path with no priority to the bike, the only danger are cyclist who think they have priority and can overtake people at speed. Being able to get the attention of runners improves the situation, reducing the speed while circulating on a mixed path solves it completely. If you wanna go fast get on a bike lane or the road.