Raise the Hammer

Honestly, It think the MTO and the bike industry itself are to blame for that.

I mean, most casual cyclists ride their bikes with the stock parts. That shouldn't be remarkable, most drivers don't add custom parts to their cars except for maybe like an iPod dock at most, and commuters have more disposable income and spend more time in their cars than the average teen-aged cyclist.

So, the point is that the default bike equipment is going to be the equipment that 90% of cyclists actually use.

And that equipment does not include all the various upgrades that are required for a bike to be legally ridden on public roads at night.

If somebody sold cars that couldn't be driven at night without modification, they'd be laughed out of the industry. So why do we accept this for bikes in Canada?

The MTO requires this:

a bike must have a white front light and a red rear light or reflector if you ride between 1/2 hour before sunset and 1/2 hour after sunrise and white reflective tape on the front forks and red reflective tape on rear forks.

I have never in my entire life seen a bike with white reflective tape on the front forks and red reflective tape on the rear forks... I have some white reflective tape I bought at MEC, but never got around to applying it to my bike. I've never even seen red reflective tape. Anywhere. Ever.

The MTO has completely failed to provide any leadership on this issue. At this point the only function this regulation serves is to provide a way to blame cyclists for night-time collisions. Has the MTO made any attempt to inform casual cyclists of this requirement? Do they give away packages full of reflectors and reflective tape? Do they mandate that all bikes sold in Ontario have all this equipment pre-installed? Have they sat down with their counterparts in the other 9 provinces/3 territories to synchronize bike lighting requirements so that manufacturers have a single nation-wide target for bike lighting? Have they done anything beside writing up a regulation and then post it to their website?

Comment edited by Pxtl on 2014-05-02 09:42:07