Comments on: Daylight Saving Ends; Bike Tech Shop Opens

By: Matt Waters

Matt Waters — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:16:19 +0000

You are dead on. Both your assessment about the lack of pertinent & factual data available & the need for a good on-line bike store for that has that information. Specifically the hi-tech & ebike items. Why should anybody need to go to a 1/2 dozen sites to buy an $80 product or spend a day trying to purchase an ebike kit?

I very recently started e-bike website in conjunction with a small bike shop at my residence where I sell & install a few e-bike kits a year. I’m also an Amazon associate so the other week I decided to spend a few hours & put up a page for a few e-bikes kits. About 6 days later I finally caved in & published what I had which is nowhere near complete. Not only is Amazon pretty much worthless for useful information outside of books & Kindles there is probably only about a dozen sites I could comfortably recommend for both accurate & detailed information & the quality product to go with it. Perhaps I’m to honest & or too detailed but a year ago I thought the Internet was a huge & wonderful place. It is unfortunately becoming a cesspool filled with plagiarized & re-spun data, specs, & reviews from anybody with an Internet connection, domain name & keyboard. It’s horrible. I guess my frustration is showing.

Any way keep up the good work I usually rotate between this site & utility cycling as one of the four links I’ll keep in the side bar of my blog

Thanks again for the good work.
Matt

By: Gene @ BU

Gene @ BU — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:33:23 +0000

Back to lights – The description should address if the light meets state operating codes. In New York the lamp on the front must emit a white light visible during hours of darkness from a distance of at least 500 hundred feet to the front and with a red light visible to the rear for 300 hundred feet.

A standard measure for comparison should be how bright a front lamp is at 500 feet and rear light at 300 feet in darkness and the width of the bean.

If a light can’t meet state codes, then what good are they on a commuting bike?

By: Paul S.

Paul S. — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:30:42 +0000

This is really awesome news. Though I’m happy with the set of lights I have now, getting standard info I could use to compare them was very difficult.

I do a significant amount of riding on bike trails after dark. I’ve noticed that I get blinded now and then by oncoming bikes with very bright lights. It would be handy if you could indicate if a set of lights would fall into this category and whether or not they’re easy to dim for oncoming traffic.

Thanks for the site!

By: Ted Johnson

Ted Johnson — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:57:26 +0000

Good idea. We don’t have our own lumens meter yet but we’ll probably need to get one. Some manufacturers only tell you how many watts the light will convert. Not the most useful thing.

We have plans to provide a standard set of specs across all product types to make it easier to compare products side-by-side and find the right one for the user.

By: Evan

Evan — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:43:49 +0000

How about including power (watts) and output (lumens) for all lights? Normally the cheap ones list watts and the expensive ones list lumens, so it’s impossible to compare. Not provided by the manufacturers? Maybe you could do some investigative journalism…