Fashion is the opposite of eternity. But perhaps you can extend your own life a few days to eternity with the supposedly fashionable aspect of wearing a reflective vest.
Signal vests are not a fashion accessory. In contrast, they have the potential to do so in the dark season.
Maybe it’s the age that makes people shine, and the concomitant, at best eventually, maturity. However, this does not mean – not that we misunderstand – this prudent and mild radiance of advanced age, that wise, benevolent smile and shining deep inside that finds its source somewhere between heart and stomach and soul.
Meant is this bright orange in the deep street canyons of our city, and the flashing yellow with reflective tapes, which I now daily on the way to work to make me visible and at any cost, and that, although I deny myself any fashion conventions.
Safety vest over everyday clothing, tentatively fluttering in the wind, the elaborate test method of the European standard more than enough (at least the sewn hint), always committed to safety, always reflective, orange and yellow.
Because, quite honestly, back then, as a young road user, I just got on my bike. Dressed in black and thus almost invisible when it was still dark in the morning or the day did not really want to get really bright before clouding winter weather. As a cyclist swallowed by the darkness, thoughtless from today’s perspective, headless, daring even. Youngster just.
At some point, however, he then began, this desire for being seen, this desire for visibility far beyond the own driver, ignoring fashionable aspects, harshly thrown overboard, the own Rader-I ridicule of ridicule in orange.
And maybe it actually has something to do with age, with the onset of awareness of finiteness, always smiling softly on my porter with me driving through the deep street canyons of the city and whispering to me from behind that only survives, the most widely seen becomes.
“Take care of yourself,” whispered the reason, “take good care of yourself and shine well.” The reason, then, as the key to wearing the safety vest according to DIN EN ISO 20471, which, if you look around in today’s traffic once attentive, actually appears more often, in cyclists, pedestrians, dogs, the walk in the dark park.
But not because, as of July 2014, they must be carried by law in passenger cars, trucks, semitrailer tractors, multi-axle tractors and buses and coaches that are to be put into service on public roads.
In more and more countries is now the permanent wearing of safety vests on the bike duty. And while discussions are continuing in Germany about the introduction of safety vests for cyclists, in France the vest for pedals is already an integral part of the garment, at night or in bad weather, even during the day outside closed villages. Failure to comply with the prescribed duty must be considered as a fine.
But this should be taken into account: recent studies from the United Kingdom and the United States prove that wearing a signal vest does not increase the safety of the cyclist, the warning function in the general night glare of urban traffic even rather go down.
So maybe it’s the only subjective sense of security that gives me a beloved vest and makes sense, at least to me, as well as to all the other cyclists and pedestrians and dogs in the dark park, who meet me dressed in safety vests with reflective materials, and because it makes us shine. In orange and warn yellow vest in the deep street canyons of this city.