Lezyne Deca Drive 1500XXL Report

On Monday, February 20, 2017 at 12:43:56 PM UTC-8, sms wrote:
With all the rain, last week was the first time we were out at night and
I got to see the Lezyne Deca Drive 1500XXL
http://www.lezyne.com/product-led-perf-deca1500xxl.php in action on my
wife's commute bike.

Every time I looked in the mirror I thought that there was a car behind
me. This is because she still had her 1300 lumen 4C light on her
handlebars as well, even though I told her to leave it at home. The two
lights looked about equally bright (The Lezyne light was measured my a
reviewer at 1390 lumens, there is no independent measurement of the
Duracell light, but they probably don't lie as much as some of the
lights coming in from China).

This is really an incredible light for the price (now about $92). There
are very few lights with this level of output, that don't have fake
lumen claims, and that are all-in-one (no separate battery pack), that
are not plastic, and that are less than $100. We were off of the unlit
MUP before it got completely dark, but I have no doubt that it would
been sufficient. I think that I have finally convinced my wife to give
up her 4C 1300 lumen light. C cells were getting to be more than our
electric bill.

On the negative side, the Lezyne light doesn't come on and off as easily
as the 4C 1300 lumen light with my custom mount, and it does not have an
adjustable spot/flood beam. The mount is also not able to be adjusted
for slightly curved handlebars, like the custom mounts I have made for C
and AA diameter flashlights.

https://www.probikekit.com/cycling-a.../11170762.html
10% discount for first order.

About STVZO:
STVZO is all about vehicular cycling. It treats bicycles as a vehicle for transportation on public thoroughfares, sharing with motorized vehicles. In that regard, STVZO is much more lenient than the motorized headlight standards across the EU and US.

Some of you describe a particular STVZO light model as representing the full capabilities of the STVZO beam. In practice, nearly all STVZO lights are cheaters that barely make the minimum brightnesses, then drop off drastically. The lower and wider area of STVZO are unrestricted, up to just less than the maximum brightness.
My STVZO design is within 10% of max brightness B at the A and C spots, despite A and C needing only half the brightness of B. D is barely less than B. E, F, and G require barely brighter than the H line, but my STVZO is still within 75% of max brightness.
So the real problem with STVZO is that its too lenient for dimness where it needs to be more restrictive for max brightness, and too restrictive where it needs to allow an overall range where max brightness is allowed.
As it is now, the specs don't say where in the beam the B spot shall be measured from, if the beam has an overall broad region where the brightest lux value can be measured.
Using the Supernova as my reference, they have one of the broader B regions but still have stray hairs shooting upward above the horizon, just barely under 2 lux at 10 meters. So any more brightness would exceed the 2 lux limit at the horizon.
My STVZO has 1 lux at the horizon, with already 50% more brightness at the B spot than Supernova. If fully developed form, this will be more than _double what Supernova outputs at B, and for total lumens, with the same broad fill as described above.
So the problem is not with STVZO, its with how other companies are approaching making the beams compliant.

On 2/22/2017 4:04 PM, Doug Landau wrote:
On Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 11:49:39 AM UTC-8, wrote:
On Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 4:48:35 PM UTC+1, sms wrote:
On 2/22/2017 1:04 AM, wrote:

Exactly and beside that I survived another dark season without getting hit. I must be doing something wrong.

Yes, you're not living in the U.S..

I don't want to live in the U.S. I don't even feel welcome since you elected that idiot of a president.

Everyone wants to live in the U.S.



You call this living? After all the various business and
personal taxes, permits, licenses, fines and fees, you have
your property tax(ouch!) then sales, gasoline, tire,
utility, liquor etc taxes. And that's only some taxes.

Then there's the torture of licensing and permitting which
is endless- oy! And paperwork- do you have any idea how much
paper it takes to import a pallet of bicycle parts? If it
was half that much trouble to move Heroin, we wouldn't have
much of that here!

Seriously not everyone wishes to live here. Illiterate
jihadis looking for a relief check, free rent and ample
targets, sure. Close friends with businesses in Japan for
example (where taxes and regulation are painfully worse)
enjoy short visits but are not at all interested in living here.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

On Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 12:03:59 PM UTC-5, jbeattie wrote:
On Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 8:09:47 AM UTC-8, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 2/22/2017 10:48 AM, sms wrote:
On 2/22/2017 1:04 AM, wrote:

Exactly and beside that I survived another dark season without getting
hit. I must be doing something wrong.

Yes, you're not living in the U.S..

I _am_ living in the U.S. I think Scharf's and Joerg's paranoia is
nuts. I commuted by bike, including at night, from 1977 until I retired,
and I still ride at night a lot. My experience matches Lou's and Tim's..

Some motorist passed me this morning with 6 inches of clearance at maybe 40mph, which is rare but not that rare on part of my commute, and in a place where I really should take the lane but can't because of the arrangement of new post-freeze pot holes. Long story, but the bottom line is that I got ****ed and somewhat scared by the pass, but thirty years ago, I wouldn't have thought twice about it because my whole commute was that way. I just lived with it. No bike lane, no shoulder and just a fog line on a fast-moving arterial. I lived. Would I want that today? No. My tolerance for a lot of things has diminished over time along with my sprint and mental acuity. Some things strike me as scarier than they used to when not a whole lot has changed, except me.

Apropos of that, I was riding in this morning behind a racer who, rather than making a hard right into a separate bike facility that goes up a short hill and around a descending on-ramp, went straight. That meant he had to jump across merging traffic to get back over to the right side of the road.. I used to always do that. I boycotted the separate bike facility when it was first installed because it was inconvenient to make a hard right when moving at 25mph. It was out of my way and for weaklings.

I started using that facility after breaking my leg and riding in an ortho-boot because I had no sprint to get across the merging traffic. I've stuck with it because it's low stress. This morning, I watched the racer kid and thought "what the hell is he doing!" How things change. And sometimes things do change apart from me, like traffic volume. There are places that are plain scary, even for the young and mentally acute. The scariness-level on my commute changes drastically at rush hour. It's a whole different world than my usual post-rush hour commute.

Anyway, its hard to draw conclusions about whether people are over-estimating danger unless you know where they ride. And then you have to adjust for age, ability, acuity, etc. For the wobbly and infirm, parts of my various commute routes are objectively dangerous -- even in daylight.

-- Jay Beattie.

gnaw ura old hand, an experienced lawyer. we'll take your position as accurate.

goo.gl/s1n5gi

rain is yellow, flat cutoff, mounted on fork

with helmet light off/on

this assumes we slow in rain shortening the need for a long sight line into a search for cracks n potholes.

the cal road surface should be grrrrrripy this week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR3sOozCTZ0

On Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 2:33:22 PM UTC-8, AMuzi wrote:
On 2/22/2017 4:04 PM, Doug Landau wrote:
On Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 11:49:39 AM UTC-8, wrote:
On Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 4:48:35 PM UTC+1, sms wrote:
On 2/22/2017 1:04 AM, wrote:

Exactly and beside that I survived another dark season without getting hit. I must be doing something wrong.

Yes, you're not living in the U.S..

I don't want to live in the U.S. I don't even feel welcome since you elected that idiot of a president.

Everyone wants to live in the U.S.



You call this living? After all the various business and
personal taxes, permits, licenses, fines and fees, you have
your property tax(ouch!) then sales, gasoline, tire,
utility, liquor etc taxes. And that's only some taxes.

Haha you sound like my coworker. "Nice cube!" I said facetiously, after the move.
"You call dis cube?" he shot back.

On Wed, 22 Feb 2017 11:09:42 -0500, Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On 2/22/2017 10:48 AM, sms wrote:
On 2/22/2017 1:04 AM, wrote:

Exactly and beside that I survived another dark season without getting
hit. I must be doing something wrong.

Yes, you're not living in the U.S..

I _am_ living in the U.S. I think Scharf's and Joerg's paranoia is
nuts. I commuted by bike, including at night, from 1977 until I retired,
and I still ride at night a lot. My experience matches Lou's and Tim's.


Out of curiosity I did some research and while I have never seen any
guaranteed accurate statistics on the total number who ride bicycles
in the U.S. what I do find
https://www.statista.com/statistics/...ke-riders-usa/
is there are some 67.3 million riders.

The number of bicycle deaths, which seems to be pretty official
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/pe...facts/bicycles
was 817 (2015).

A common method or determining levels of danger is to count the number
of fatalities per some unit of users, and per 100,000 seems to be a
common denominator.

So bicycle deaths, in 2015, per 100,000 users was 1.213

In comparison, there were some 214,092,000 licensed drivers in the
U.S. in 2015 and auto deaths were 35,092 or 16.398 per 100,000 users.

A comparison with bicyclists it is 13.518 times more dangerous to
drive a car than to ride a bicycle.

It is also interesting to note that while the most common cause of
death in auto accidents is a bit more complex
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3400203/
states that "Of the deaths occurring during the 1.5 hours following
injury 52 percent were the result of head injuries".

It would appear that (1) bicycling is far safer than driving an
automobile and (2) auto drivers should wear a helmet.

--
Cheers,

John B.

On Wed, 22 Feb 2017 16:33:19 -0600, AMuzi wrote:

On 2/22/2017 4:04 PM, Doug Landau wrote:
On Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 11:49:39 AM UTC-8, wrote:
On Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 4:48:35 PM UTC+1, sms wrote:
On 2/22/2017 1:04 AM, wrote:

Exactly and beside that I survived another dark season without getting hit. I must be doing something wrong.

Yes, you're not living in the U.S..

I don't want to live in the U.S. I don't even feel welcome since you elected that idiot of a president.

Everyone wants to live in the U.S.



You call this living? After all the various business and
personal taxes, permits, licenses, fines and fees, you have
your property tax(ouch!) then sales, gasoline, tire,
utility, liquor etc taxes. And that's only some taxes.

Then there's the torture of licensing and permitting which
is endless- oy! And paperwork- do you have any idea how much
paper it takes to import a pallet of bicycle parts? If it
was half that much trouble to move Heroin, we wouldn't have
much of that here!

Seriously not everyone wishes to live here. Illiterate
jihadis looking for a relief check, free rent and ample
targets, sure. Close friends with businesses in Japan for
example (where taxes and regulation are painfully worse)
enjoy short visits but are not at all interested in living here.

Well, you could move :-)

You can move to a country where you cannot speak, read, or write, the
language, without free medical care of any sort, where you are
forbidden by law (without long and laborious legal proceedings) to
work or engage in business, are very unlikely to be able to be able to
ever gain citizenship status, and will be required to report your
residence to the government every 90 days.

Oh yes, and you will, as a matter of course, be charged a higher price
for much of what you buy than Locals ;-)


--
Cheers,

John B.

On 2/22/2017 6:49 PM, John B. wrote:
On Wed, 22 Feb 2017 11:09:42 -0500, Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On 2/22/2017 10:48 AM, sms wrote:
On 2/22/2017 1:04 AM, wrote:

Exactly and beside that I survived another dark season without getting
hit. I must be doing something wrong.

Yes, you're not living in the U.S..

I _am_ living in the U.S. I think Scharf's and Joerg's paranoia is
nuts. I commuted by bike, including at night, from 1977 until I retired,
and I still ride at night a lot. My experience matches Lou's and Tim's.


Out of curiosity I did some research and while I have never seen any
guaranteed accurate statistics on the total number who ride bicycles
in the U.S. what I do find
https://www.statista.com/statistics/...ke-riders-usa/
is there are some 67.3 million riders.

The number of bicycle deaths, which seems to be pretty official
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/pe...facts/bicycles
was 817 (2015).

A common method or determining levels of danger is to count the number
of fatalities per some unit of users, and per 100,000 seems to be a
common denominator.

So bicycle deaths, in 2015, per 100,000 users was 1.213

In comparison, there were some 214,092,000 licensed drivers in the
U.S. in 2015 and auto deaths were 35,092 or 16.398 per 100,000 users.

A comparison with bicyclists it is 13.518 times more dangerous to
drive a car than to ride a bicycle.

It is also interesting to note that while the most common cause of
death in auto accidents is a bit more complex
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3400203/
states that "Of the deaths occurring during the 1.5 hours following
injury 52 percent were the result of head injuries".

It would appear that (1) bicycling is far safer than driving an
automobile and (2) auto drivers should wear a helmet.

You had the nub of the problem in your first paragraph. No
one knows how many people ride every day or ride one day per
year. Nor any idea about miles per rider per day or per
year. No separation in the numbers between a food delivery
rider working evenings in a dense urban area against a
mother who rides the sidewalk a half block to the park with
her child.

I'm not disagreeing with your points, but with any set of
large numbers one risks an unintended mismatch between the
numbers and their meaning.

Some examples: There are about 100 million more firearms in
USA than automobiles+light trucks, yet fatalities are far
lower. Subtracting suicides, you're looking at something
just north of 12,000 per year. Auto crashes and deaths are
significantly rising, attributed by the insurance industry
directly to portable telephone use while driving. Car crash
deaths are now over 35,000 per year. What does that mean? I
have no idea but if more people carried loaded firearms
while texting and cycling we would likely have a big problem.

Seriously, who's a cyclist? I don't know. I do know that the
bulk of bicycles are not ridden after the first month.
High-mileage cyclists wear out everything and replace
completely shot machines regularly, bless them. They are
outliers.


--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

On 2/22/2017 4:49 PM, John B. wrote:
On Wed, 22 Feb 2017 11:09:42 -0500, Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On 2/22/2017 10:48 AM, sms wrote:
On 2/22/2017 1:04 AM, wrote:

Exactly and beside that I survived another dark season without getting
hit. I must be doing something wrong.

Yes, you're not living in the U.S..

I _am_ living in the U.S. I think Scharf's and Joerg's paranoia is
nuts. I commuted by bike, including at night, from 1977 until I retired,
and I still ride at night a lot. My experience matches Lou's and Tim's.


Out of curiosity I did some research and while I have never seen any
guaranteed accurate statistics on the total number who ride bicycles
in the U.S. what I do find
https://www.statista.com/statistics/...ke-riders-usa/
is there are some 67.3 million riders.

The number of bicycle deaths, which seems to be pretty official
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/pe...facts/bicycles
was 817 (2015).

A common method or determining levels of danger is to count the number
of fatalities per some unit of users, and per 100,000 seems to be a
common denominator.

So bicycle deaths, in 2015, per 100,000 users was 1.213

In comparison, there were some 214,092,000 licensed drivers in the
U.S. in 2015 and auto deaths were 35,092 or 16.398 per 100,000 users.

A comparison with bicyclists it is 13.518 times more dangerous to
drive a car than to ride a bicycle.

LOL, you can't compare users, you have to compare trips or distance.
Most "users" of bicycles aren't commuting, and aren't even going on
recreational rides of any real distance. In the UK and the U.S., the
cycling fatality rate per distance unit is more than 10x the auto
fatality rate per distance unit.

Remember, a large proportion of the miles traveled by motor vehicle are
on limited access freeways which have a very low fatality rate, but
almost none of the bicycling miles are on such roads.

On 22/02/17 15:02, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 2/21/2017 4:10 PM, James wrote:


With my very expensive, weak and much to harsh bright-dark border
vertically StVZO light, I've been mistaken for someone riding a
motorcycle, more than once.

I can also ride in the middle of a 2 lane road and see past the edge of
the road on both sides.

The anti-StVZO propaganda on this forum astounds me!

It's true that the regulation does not mandate super-bright lights. IOW,
a light that's relatively dim by modern standards can fit StVZO
requirement.

OTOH, there's nothing to prevent a luxurious amount of light from an
StVZO-compliant headlamp. I feel that's what I get from my best Busch &
Mueller headlamp. The lumen count isn't super-high, but it doesn't need
to be. The light is engineered to put the lumens where they need to go.

What do the anti-StVZO crew do when driving cars or motorcycles? Are
they among the jerks that mount lots of cheap auxiliary lights and
refuse to dim them for oncoming vehicles?



Bait.

--
JS

On 23/02/17 02:15, jbeattie wrote:
On Tuesday, February 21, 2017 at 8:03:01 PM UTC-8, Frank Krygowski
wrote:
On 2/21/2017 4:10 PM, James wrote:


With my very expensive, weak and much to harsh bright-dark
border vertically StVZO light, I've been mistaken for someone
riding a motorcycle, more than once.

I can also ride in the middle of a 2 lane road and see past the
edge of the road on both sides.

The anti-StVZO propaganda on this forum astounds me!

It's true that the regulation does not mandate super-bright lights.
IOW, a light that's relatively dim by modern standards can fit
StVZO requirement.

OTOH, there's nothing to prevent a luxurious amount of light from
an StVZO-compliant headlamp. I feel that's what I get from my best
Busch & Mueller headlamp. The lumen count isn't super-high, but it
doesn't need to be. The light is engineered to put the lumens
where they need to go.

What do the anti-StVZO crew do when driving cars or motorcycles?
Are they among the jerks that mount lots of cheap auxiliary lights
and refuse to dim them for oncoming vehicles?


I think the StVZO cut-off is too extreme for riding in a hilly
environment or even a rolling MUP with pedestrians. Total light
output from my LUXOS B is not enough on trail sections and in the
rain. BUT, that does not mean that I need a 2000 lumen search light
for road riding. I haven't tried the Barry Beam light and have no
idea whether it is any good, but the idea of a less radical cut-off
and more output seems like a nice compromise. A better shaped beam
for urban environments is certainly needed.

Lots of light and spew also have their place on the road under some
circumstances and certainly on trail sections and in rainstorms, so
having a high beam would be optimal -- but probably asking too much
from compact optics. Bicyclists would also have to turn off the high
beam when passing other cyclists, which is probably asking for too
much. My high beam is my L&M Urban that I use as a low-output pulsing
front "flash" but that I can pop up to 800 lumens for short trail
sections. It's a nice supplement to the LUXOS B. BTW, the LUXOS is a
nice light on a dry clear evening with its wide, moody light spread
with the art deco beam pattern (like the Chrysler building). It's
useless on a rainy night, but most lights are.


Yes, cars come equipped with high and low beam lights. A high beam
flood light could be installed with a bypass switch or change over
switch on your bicycle too. Most people don't want that level of
complexity on a bicycle, but there's nothing to stop you doing it.

--
JS