Riding in the winter means riding in the dark more often than not, particularly if you commute to work and back. Visibility is therefore a top priority for the winter cyclist.
For road riding you need a couple of rear lights and a front light. I recommend two rear lights because that means one can fail without you becoming invisible. Redundant front lights are a bit less important for a two reasons: you are going to see it if your front light goes out and you are less likely to have someone drive into the front of you. That said, if you have room on your bars a spare is a good idea because even if you ride on well-lit roads your front light is the main thing stopping other road users from moving out into your path from side streets.
The two rear lights I have are quite different to each other. One is a Knog Gekko, which clamps around the seat post, and the other is a Blackburn Mars 4.0, which is mounted on a bracket supplied with it. I usually set the Gekko to a flashing mode and leave the Mars on solid mode. I bought the Mars because it has orange lights on the sides as well as the red light to the rear, and I figured more lights would probably be better than fewer.
My front light is a Cateye EL320. It claims to have over 1000 candlepower, but you soon learn that isn’t a lot when you’re trying to illuminate the road ahead of you at night; that said it is plenty for showing other road users where you are. One difficulty with illuminating roads is that they’re often made of black tarmac, and black isn’t reflective. A more significant problem is that roads are flat and parallel to you, so the natural reflection angle of light from something mounted to your bike takes the illumination away from your eyes. When I built-up my XC bike I had a rather brighter light with an external battery pack, the modern equivalent seems to be something like this. It’s about 8 times more expensive, and about 12 times brighter; so I suppose one can argue that it represents better value 
.
As well as active illumination it pays to fit some reflective material to your bike. If you have drop-bars, bar-end reflectors are pretty effective and don’t occupy space you were going to use for anything else: you should also consider fitting white bar tape, or even glow-in-the-dark bar tape.
The last, but by no means least important, aspect of visibility I want to talk about is making sure that you can see others. I habitually cycle in glasses to keep the bugs out of my eyes, and at night I use transparent lenses. My preferred set of glasses are Rudy Project Ekynox frames for which I have red-tint and clear frames. Unfortunately these seem to have been discontinued and you can’t get replacement lenses any more. For a while I couldn’t find my clear Ekynox lenses so I bought some dhb Pro Triple Lens Sunglasses as backup. I now keep the dhb’s equipped with either the clear or mid-tint lenses (whichever isn’t in my Ekynoxes) so I can switch quickly.
What’s your favourite visibility tip?
@visibility tip:
Moving or flashing things attract attention better than static. So…
I put reflective tape on the backs of my cycling shoes. Some shoes and overshoes have this built in. Pedals are supposed to have reflectors for the same reasons, but most of us use SPDs which don’t.
@road illumination:
For the last couple of years I’ve been riding with a CatEye doubleshot mounted on my cycle helmet. This throws a beam way down the road, and I can direct it where I want, near for surface, far for signage, at cars that don’t dip headlights, round corners, etc. (However, in last night’s fog, the back glare meant I had to turn it off and rely on the lesser illumination of the handlebar mounted one)
Another thing I thought of after publishing the above: it’s worth paying attention to the visibility of your hands and arms.
Driving to the supermarket a couple of days ago we found ourselves behind a cyclist who was doing pretty-much everything Pete and I have mentioned, and more: he had a highly reflective tabard on as well as front and rear lights and reflective patches on his helmet. He was, however, wearing a top with full-length black sleeves and black gloves: although he was being well-behaved and signalling his intention to go right at the next junction it was very hard to spot that.
Basically I’d recommend he gets some white gloves. Surprisingly there are no hits for “reflective gloves” and only one for fluorescent gloves.
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[...] By Phil, on 2009-12-22 I’ve not been cycling outside for the last few weeks as my aforementioned front light really isn’t bright enough to convince my wife that it’s safe for me to do so. And of [...]