Pretty dark out there, eh?

So it's winter now.  I mean, the calendar says "winter" next week but if you look at the sky you can see winter.  Yesterday, riding home, I realized that I hadn't seen the sun in four days.  Good thing I've got weekends free.

There has been a lot of cyclist-talk about winter and darkness, lately (http://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions) so I will dive into a little incident that I had this week. 

I was riding along the bike trail, night before last.  I was going a little fast, maybe--I was planning to meet up with a friend and wanted to get to my apartment first to eat a little supper.  It is dark out there in the middle of December.  I have a Planet Bike half-watt white light which illuminates the ground right in front of me--but no more.  That's mostly okay because I know the route pretty well, usually there's moonlight or just city-glow off of the clouds.  Maybe I should get a big, bright, portable sun like some of the other cyclists have... more than anything I dislike those because they blind me and ruin my night vision. 

So I'm riding along and I hear a squeal, ahead of me in the darkness.  Then there is a giggle.  Just as I'm touching my brakes, I notice two cyclists as I whiz past them.  They are on old cruisers with no lights at all.  Apparently they were riding two-abreast when I came around the corner and if one of them hadn't braked (the squeal I heard) and turned off of the bike trail there would have been a collision.

I have a lot of lights on my bike--mostly so that I am visible to others.  I have the white light that I mentioned earlier.  I wear one red flashy-light on the back of my helmet.  I have a silly-bright red Planet Bike tail-light on my seat post.  I have two spoke-lights on my wheels, also flashing red.  After this incident, I am planning to put another white light on my bike, maybe on my helmet. 

When I came around that corner, I didn't see them at all.  They could obviously see me, which is what saved us. 

I ride around a lot at night in Mid-Town Sacramento.  It's a grid of streets with lots of two-way stop-signs, a fair number of cyclists, and several one-way streets.  When I ride around Midtown, I don't worry too much about motorists.  What I worry about is the cyclist with no lights running the stop-sign, travelling the wrong way on a one-way street.  For this reason, I always look BOTH ways when I intersect a one-way street.  At some point, I just know it, I'm going to T-bone somebody and it's going to hurt. 

All I can do is keep looking!