EU: Harmonisatie

A reader gave some helpful information: For travel if in a foreign country, it seems that for lighting you only need to have some sort of red rear reflector, red rear lamp, white or selective yellow front lamp: http://www.ctc.org.uk/cyclists-library/regulations/international-traffic.

So even for long stays it seems questions of what is allowed/required by the rules in another EU country are moot as long as your bike abides by the rules of your own country. And I suppose it was never a problem to know if a bike was road legal in Germany as all approved equipment has K-numbers, so if it has those you're OK. The need to know about the technical stuff is therefore probably not present, but I would still like to know, and these rules, as all rules in a society, should be freely available, also to counter possible abuse (read bribes and lobbying). One case in point is that in StvZO/TA, unless I overlooked something, only HID headlamps may have asymmetric beam. Why not halogen? If correct, this must be the result of manufucturer-lobbying giving people an incentive to buy such annoying headlamps. Another case is special approvals such as the Edelux + SONdelux dynamo. The latter is not StVZO approved in large wheels (559mm or 622mm) except in combination with the Edelux. Why? Why not with other headlamps? How does such a special approval get granted? We need to know! All approvals should be public, and if there's a special approval the reasons why this has been granted should be made clear.

Last modified: Tue Mar 12 23:47:04 CET 2013