Do you know the visibility of a pedestrian in the headlights
Do pedestrians - and all of us, even avid drivers, ever come forward and play their part - do we need to wear clothes with reflective elements so that you are not accidentally hit in the dark? What reflective clothing to choose? How to wear it? Who will help her more: a child or an adult?
For children under the age of seven, the choice of reflective clothing is not bad. But to buy it for schoolchildren and adults is a problem. Reflective vests or reflective tapes can be found easily. There are bags for removable shoes and school bags with reflective stripes.
And now we'll put something reflective on adults and children. AND?
The jacket on the adult shone in the headlights, like a spotlight, but the stripes on the children's down jacket "smoldered" barely.
The decorations on the bag with the backpack reflected the dim light. Although there is a much more important nuance with them: you can easily turn into invisibility if you turn to the car sideways when crossing the road or go towards it, leaving your backpack and bag behind your back.
The same applies to reflective tapes. From the light of the headlights, it can be obscured in two counts. Therefore, if we wear flickers, it is better in pairs: one on the right hand, the second on the left.
And the vest is most effective. Like a jacket embroidered with bright reflectors: they are visible from any angle!
But do retro-reflectors help increase viewing distance? How much more will the driver have in terms of distance and, therefore, time to notice pedestrians in time and slow down? The bag with "sparkles" disappeared in the dark already 180 meters from the car - it will help to "win" only 20 meters. A backpack with a patch was lost in the darkness at 240 meters. The bracelets on the hands stopped returning light at three hundred meters. The driver stopped distinguishing the vest on the child at a distance of 320 meters. And the farthest adult managed to get away in a fashionable jacket embroidered with reflective stripes - 368 meters!
In other words, proper reflective clothing allows you to more than double the distance that a pedestrian is visible. But at a speed of 90 km / h, the "extra" 160-200 meters in a few seconds that the driver will have in reserve.
Interestingly, when adults put on the same flickers and vests instead of children, the visibility distance increased by 15-20 meters. And if you remove the reflective bracelets from your hands and put them on your feet, then the recognition distance is reduced by 80 meters. That is, the higher the reflector is located, the more noticeable it is! That is why jackets and hats with "luminous" stripes are much more effective, for example, trousers or shoes.
And clothes with reflectors are more effective than flickers - after all, non-removable elements are more reliable than removable ones: ordinary flickers break, forget and lose. Clothes cannot be forgotten or lost: if you don't get dressed, you will freeze.
Reflective clothing items work on slightly different principles than the reflectors known to all, that is, retro-reflective "mirror" traps.
First principle: fluorescent dye is applied to the fabric with the addition of a phosphor: a substance that can convert the energy absorbed by it (primarily light) into light radiation. And the second one - they glue or sew a reflective film on the fabric with a special layer of translucent polymer with the inclusion of glass microspheres. Its ability to direct reflection is explained both by the intense accumulation of light by microspheres and by the mirror-lens effect resulting from special treatment of the surface of the microspheres. And to increase the intensity of light reflection, a "mirror" reflective layer is placed under the microspheres.
