In these fractious times, at least we can all agree on one thing: how much nicer it was when bicycles were slow and merely annoying. Back when bikes were propelled by honest toil: Wear that helmet, ring that bell, run that red, and there’ll be hell.
Then came the zeal of putting electricity into places it was never meant to go. We woke up one morning to discover that marauding youths on e-bikes had taken over the Story Bridge and were upending rubbish bins.
Their reign of terror is finally being regulated, but just as we tamed the Frankenbike, a new menace rolled into view.
After a night ride that took in the Coronation Drive bikeway, I arrived home dazed and convinced that I’d suffered retinal bleaching. Unhelpfully, a medical friend downgraded it to “intraocular scatter”, which sounded tone-deaf to my suffering. So retinal bleaching it is.
Count me gullible, but I thought the defanging of e-bikes would allow decent folk – people like us – to reclaim our streets. I was wrong.
Meet the all-singing, all-blinding matrix LED bicycle lights that have retina-melting outputs beyond that of a car and sell online for less than the price of a KFC family bucket. Attached to a bicycle handlebar, they give the impression that Suncorp Stadium, lights ablaze, has somehow come loose and is pedalling straight towards you.
How did commuter bikes end up with special-forces lighting? Technology, culture and – because they’re bicycles – a regulatory ho-hum and a shrug.
Some blame the Americans, which seems to fit the moment. Others say we should have copied the Germans, which rarely fits the moment. Instead, we followed the Brits, and so we did almost nothing. Bike‑light rules are set by Queensland and the other states, but they’re all based on the same federal template that’s barely been updated since the 1960s.
In the same way that bicycles were largely tame and overlooked until batteries and electric motors turned them into monsters, the retinal searing that is now the nightly curse throughout the land came upon us slowly … and then very quickly indeed.
We don’t permit car drivers to get about on their high beam blinding oncoming drivers. The logic is clear enough – it’s blinding, and therefore unsafe.
Attached to a handlebar, they give the impression that Suncorp Stadium, lights ablaze, has come loose and is pedalling straight towards you.
Pedalling at 25km/h, even mild glare wipes out seven metres of vision, while strong glare gives you a milky haze and a cricket pitch of blindness. And all this in the pursuit of “better lighting”.
The Americans invented night mountain biking in the 1970s and needed lights bright enough to turn entire forests into daylight. Their $400 halogen rigs trickled into commuting.
Not having ridden at night for a few years, I didn’t realise that welding goggles were essential for after-dark eye protection. Coming towards me was a conga line of tactical lights, the kind probably sold under categories like “Optical Suppression” and “Visual Acuity Denial”.
The first blinding light seemed brighter and more disconcerting than any errant car high-beam I’d ever faced, so no surprise to learn that 20 bucks from Temu will arm you with enough visual acuity denial to blind a Roman legion, should you encounter one, or twice the lumens of a car headlamp and none of the optics.
Filled with recent knowledge of how regulators had seemingly put the pedal back in velocipedes, I thought I must be missing something.
Had technology snuck up again and flipped the world on its head?
Australia slavishly followed the UK’s 1960s bike-light rules; a minimalist white front, red rear, visible from 200 yards. No beam pattern, no cut-off, no glare control.
America treated bike lights as tactical gear and worshipped lumens, even if it meant bathing every other road user in your light.
Now meet the Germans – the sensible guys in the room.
Straßenverkehrs‑Zulassungs‑Ordnung looks like something you might see on an unrented roadside billboard, followed up with “There, made you look”.
Better known as StVZO, it’s the Germans’ road traffic code, and it simply treats bicycles as vehicles. That means bike lights must have proper optics: cut-off beams, glare limits, light measured by what illuminates the road, not strangers’ corneas.
Most of the “2000 lumens” people are so proud of is literally being fired into the sky, hedges and other people’s retinas, not the road ahead.
Our regulatory stutter and splutter when high-powered e-bikes appeared should have taught us something. But we’re now awash in the blinding glare of unregulated stadium lights that blind cyclists nightly.
Keen for another night-time bike ride, I’ve gone on Temu and bought a full-face welder’s helmet – $21.30. I may not be able to see the road ahead at night – which some would say comes with its own hazards – but no more will I be retinally bleached.
It’ll have to do until retinal bleaching and visual acuity denial are consigned to the Frankenbike scrapheap as well.
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