COULD BIOMOTION LIGHTING BE THE FUTURE OF BIKE SAFETY?

A little over 4 years ago, my co-founder Tim was in his final year of Industrial Design at RMIT. If you don’t know Tim, then know this: he is a complete bike nut. So much so that he dedicated every subject he could to creating products that made cycling safer.

After exploring some wild bike light ideas (including drone theatre lighting and mobile smoke machine holograms), Tim stumbled upon some research from Clemson University about biomotion. Remarkably, this concept was supposed to make cyclists visible up to 5.5 times sooner than regular lights. Just as remarkably, it wasn’t being referenced or utilised in commercial bicycle lighting. This discovery ignited a four-year-long obsession in Tim, which let’s face it, continues to this day.

What is Biomotion anyway?

Before going further, I want to explain what biomotion is and why it’s captivated Tim as much as it has. Simply put, biomotion refers to the movement of living things. This applies to all living organisms, but in our context, human movement specifically.

Thousands of years of evolution have hard-wired our brains to recognise human movement very quickly. The GIF below by Gunnar Johansson, a Swedish psychophysicist who pioneered biological motion perception, illustrates this beautifully. With just a few key points of information, our brains effortlessly fill in the gaps using form and motion to create a comprehensive picture.

Why Lumens Only Tells Half the Story

Which brings us back to bike lights. The thing about your average tail light is that it's a single point light source. It’s usually the only thing keeping you visible on a bike, especially at night. Current lighting standards suggest that the only way to make that light more effective is by making it brighter through increasing its lumen output. Consequently, bicycle lighting has become an arms race to see who can produce the biggest and brightest light (potentially blinding other road users and causing crashes in the process).

But lumens only tell half the story. According to Johansson, a single point of light, no matter how bright, is still just a single point of light—cognitively no different from a tail light, motorbike light, or stop light. This makes it challenging for people who drive (even the ones paying attention) to identify cyclists amid the sea of red dots, especially without other points of information to help paint the picture.

Working with Our Cognitive Bias, Not Against It

This is where biomotion lighting challenges the norm of 'brighter is better'. It offers a different way of understanding visibility - one that isn’t confined to lumens. Highlighting someone’s movement works with our cognitive bias, not against it. To be clear, this idea is not new. Pedal reflectors on bikes and reflective strips on workwear are brilliant examples of biomotion at work. The issue is that bicycle lighting just hasn’t caught up to this yet.

The reality of making cycling safer with a better bike light, is messier and more complex. We’re battling cultural, psychological, environmental, and emotional biases. The empathy we have for one another often disappears when we get on a bike or behind a wheel, and when we see each other as obstacles instead of humans.

And the Obsession Spreads…

This story may have started with Tim’s obsessive journey, but now it ends with my own.

Since co-founding Project Flock with Tim and bringing the Flock Light—the first Biomotion Tail Light—to market, I too have become obsessed with biomotion, but for different reasons. I’ve spent over 15 years in architecture and the built environment, thinking about how to make our cities safer, healthier, more human-centric, and less car-dominated. And where I’ve landed is… well, among other things, biomotion.

If we want to encourage more active forms of mobility and see healthier, more sustainable cities, then our safety systems need to serve the most vulnerable members of our road community. We’ve surveyed and spoken to hundreds of cyclists recounting crashes, collisions, close calls, and even lost loved ones. What we’ve learned is that our safety systems are currently letting them down.

Let’s be real, highlighting a cyclist’s biomotion isn’t going to solve global road trauma. But if we want to change our current road culture, we need to challenge our assumptions about what it means to be safe and seen. We need to figure out safety systems that allow us to work together to get home safe, not against each other.

Highlighting humans as humans - as radical as that sounds - is a pretty good place to start.