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Bicycle lighting standard WHS-2015

Introduction

Bicycle lighting standards that I've read are poorly devised, don't include explanations of why the rules are a certain way, and they are not free. They are a sort of tax on businesses who need to abide by the rules for products (otherwise they may not sell their products!). These rules are either already paid for by government in which case this is just a tax to keep people in some publishing business at work doing useless administrative work, or made up by some organisation which wants to profit off of them. I have devised this standard as an example of how things should be done.

Further, standards and regulations (and import tariffs on all sorts of products) are used in trade negotiations and/or to keep competition out. Countries trade the rules (in regulations and which products to have import duties on and how much), for something else they want to get... The theory of one of the readers of my website on bicycle lighting, that the 70 cd above the horizon rule in BS-6102-3 was set to avoid German competition (who design for the German limit of 200 cd), could be true. So rules in standards are used like a weapon... Imagine if the BS6102-3 elaborated for all rules, why they are there, and it said "This 70 cd limit has been designed such that German lamp makers won't bother with designs for the UK market and leave our companies alone"... It would be unacceptable to politicians from Germany! This is another reason why standards should be free to examine by everyone, and should explain all rules... If they do, then this type of nonsense can't happen.

If rules are explained, it will also make possible open discussions, suggestions for improvement, etc.

This will be a free, open standard, superior in concept to anything else out there, and an example of how rules should be made, and and what should be in them. This includes logical reasons, explanations for every requirement!

This is the standard that bicycle lighting should be developed for, and that governments should use as the standard as required by law... So not some need-to-pay-for-it DIN or ISO standard.

And lighting for cars should follow similar rules...

The relationship between law & standard

The law can be written to refer to a standard where technical matters are dealt with. A standard could be included in a law... But some technical matters are needed to understand the law, so there is a dependency... By referring to a standard, that standard can be updated when needed without needing to change the law, though in reality there is no difference of course [ I mean that updating the standard as referenced by the law would be no different than changing the law, and thus using a different updated version of the standard would need to be dealt with in law, by the law makers. So there is no advantage in offloading the technical parts into a standard to try to make things less complicated or even to allow progress without burdening law makers. The only advantage is modularisation, somewhat. And this is why e.g. UK law refers to versions of a standard... ]. By referencing a standard, it becomes part of the law and therefore should be freely available. A law is made by (or rather, approved by, installed by) governments, a standard can be devised by anyone. So therefore my 'law' is like an outline of what should be in a law, with more details dealt with in 'the standard', which is a standard simply by saying it is (fun isn't it :)):

I will give a concept of a law for bicycle lighting as an example, also because in reality laws and standards are dependent...

Concept of a law and the more detailed 'standard'

I've finished most of it, including how to properly define/measure glare (although limits on what really blinds are difficult to determine without more testing, so for now I'm using mostly the car values converted from lux/cd to cd/m^2, to give a guide).
There are some choices to be made which I will probably leave in there as a discussion point.
- So this standard is mostly finished w.r.t. reflection, power sources, light sources, lamp sizes/mounting height. There are several options for mounting height, allowing more room for lamps that would otherwise blind...
- What still needs some work: beam patterns, measurement process, add more references, add example pictures of white surface reflection from red-retro reflectors.
- After some more input, there needs to be a separation of the specifications/requirements, and explanations/discussions.

Bicycle lighting standard WHS-2015 preliminary version 2 (2015-4-3)

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