Great as it is to see Blaze’s Laserlights trialled for some of the hire bikes, proper infrastructure would be even better

Among the attractions of London’s city-wide bike hire scheme, like those elsewhere, is its fundamental sameness: use one of the machines and, once you’ve checked for a wobbly saddle or rubbing wheel, you know it will look and ride more or less exactly like its 11,000-plus fellows.

Until now. The bike scheme, now sponsored by Santander and so newly red rather than blue, has just announced it is fitting 250 of its bikes with a posh gizmo called the Blaze Laserlight.

We tested one of these just over a year ago. They’re in part a standard, if fairly bright (300 lumens), front light, with the usual mix of flashing and continuous modes. But it also features a green, laser image of a bike, projected onto the road ahead. The theory is that the shimmering outline warns other road users of your imminent arrival, improving safety, especially so in blind spot situations.

While the standard model clamps onto the handlebars with a bracket, with the hire bikes they’ll be built into the frame and not removable, just as well given the £125 price tag. They also dispense with the main beam – the bikes have their own smaller built-in flashing LED front lights – leaving just the laser, powered an internal dynamo system.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Blaze Laserlight fitted into a Santander bike. Photograph: Blaze

While 250 bikes out of more than 11,000 isn’t a lot – they will be as sought-after as the 101 bikes painted yellow last year to mark the Tour de France – Santander Cycles say the scheme could be expanded. James Mead, manager of the bike scheme, said:

We will be robustly testing both the technology, its effectiveness and peoples’ opinions of it during the trial and hope to make a further update later this year.

I have a lot of admiration for the team behind Blaze, co-founded by Emily Brooke, who came up with the Laserlight as part of a product design university project. Her company co-funded academic Rachel Aldred’s hugely worthwhile Near Miss Project for cyclists.



About the standard Laserlight itself my feelings are more mixed. It’s beautifully made, very robust, and the main beam is very powerful. However, it’s £125, and you can get very good 300 lumens front lights for about £50, even for £35.



It thus all comes down to how much safety dividend the laser element brings, all the more so, of course, for the Santander bikes.

On that point I’m agnostic, although I accept it’s hard to know for sure when you’re riding with it. As I mentioned last year, the main effect I spotted was brief confusion from cyclists I overtook, as my presence was heralded by a disembodied green bike symbol, or from pedestrians as I waited at a red light.



More widely, while this is a definite upgrade for the rental fleet it would be nice if, one day, cyclists in London and elsewhere in the UK didn’t need to engage in this never-ending arms race to be seen on the streets.



Build safe, cohesive, segregated bike lanes and suddenly the need to dazzle or laser your way to visibility amid a sea of speeding traffic is no longer so necessary. I applaud the efforts of people like Blaze, but in the nicest way it would be good to live in a nation where they weren’t necessary.



2pm add

The PR people for Blaze have subsequently been in touch to send me a study carried out by the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) into the efficacy of the Laserlight ahead of its use in the Santander scheme.

It’s a pretty big piece of work – 92 pages – and has some positive findings for the light system. It found that in static tests, with drivers sitting in a bus, car, van and tipper lorry, the Laserlight made the bike more visible at night in various positions around the vehicle.



This effect varied, for example with overall visibility increasing from 72% to 96% with a bus, and 78% to 83% for a tipper lorry. The report found the optimal distance to project the green image ahead of the bike was 7m to limit blind spots.

There is one key caveat to all this: while the tests mimicked various light and weather conditions, they were all static. The report notes:

Whilst the tests described in this report indicate the conditions under which the Blaze Laserlight can be seen, they do not ensure that the Blaze Laserlight will be noticed by drivers who may be concentrating on other events.

The TRL researchers also mentioned that it’s known that some animals can be attracted to laser lights, which could potentially cause them to run in front of the bike. That’s a new one on me – any Laserlight user had to swerve around cats?