colour rendition with cool white sucks.
Not necessarily. There exist cool white light sources with excellent color rendering.
High CRI is irrelevant as what you need is simply a good colour rendition of the colours you need to be able to see well. Neutral white at normal CRI does that well.
"Neutral white", "high CRI", and "normal CRI" are not quantitative, they're relative and thus not very useful terms.
Better than neutral white might be needed to be able to properly read number plates, but this depends on the colour of such plates.
How are you defining "better than neutral white"?
As to research being needed, I think Scheinwerfermann's attitude is incredibly disrepectful towards what people experience, and saying scientific research is needed is bogus.
Er...no. The human visual system is notoriously unreliable. We humans are no good at accurately assessing how well or poorly we can see; objective measurement shows our subjective impressions are virtually always far skewed from the reality. "Science" means
knowledge, and that is exactly what's needed. Not what you or I or anyone else think we understand of what we think we're experiencing. This is why lighting technical standards are defined in objective terms, not subjective ones.
I or anyone who can objectively analyse can do that without being given a research grant
Objective analysis is a type of that scientific research you were just dismissing as unnecessary. Moreover, objective analysis requires time, tools, and resources. Those things all cost money, whether from a research grant or another source. I suspect that phrase "objectively analyse" does not mean what you might think it means. What do you think it means?
which, produces stuff that I consider mostly garbage in this and related fields, as being usually of the kind that when I read it, I already knew it from analysing "what if" scenarios, or even is the kind of stuff that makes me think "No poop Sherlock!"
It's difficult to make sense of this. Please clarify.
but then, it's mostly a psychological field and research therein is often not worth much.
When you say something like this, it makes you look like you don't know much about the field of human factors. There are psychological aspects, but they aren't dominant or overriding. Even if they were, there's a great deal of psychological research that's robust, repeatable, and reliable.
I have experiences that perhaps he considers 'anecdotal' but they are not.
Oh, dear. You don't appear to know what "anecdotal" means, either. Your experiences (and mine, and everyone else's) are, by definition, anecdotes. They are not knowledge, and they are not science.
What matters is whether a person knows himself, how he thinks, knows and not distorts what the situation was before etc.
You don't appear to have a clear understanding or firm grasp of how the human mind works. It does not work the way we might wish it did, as a video recorder and analysis computer. For that reason, science and facts trump opinions and guesses, every time, no matter how sure the guesser or opiner is that he's being all objective and analytical and self-knowing and stuff.
I grant that many people are not so good at analysing
Even the best analysts among us are still human.
but just saying "your evidence is anecdotal" about anyone's statements is just BS
Anecdotes aren't evidence, which is why nobody's saying "your evidence is anecdotal". That appears to come from your head, as the result of your "analysis" of this discussion; thank you for vividly illustrating and confirming exactly what you set out to refute.
Position of lamps is governed by what you need to achieve so again this is not an issue, colour is set by laws so is not an issue
Position, lit area, and colour are all regulated, but regulations are not the eternal unchanging word of God. They are updated and amended from time to time in accordance with our ever-improving state of knowledge, based on research to understand the facts and build the science.
shape could be of use if not car manufacturers are doing all kinds of weird shapes
Outside the North American market, there is an example of shape being used to encode a message in the vehicle lighting system: UN Regulation 48 requires that trailers be equipped with
triangular red rear retroreflectors. No other shape is permitted on trailers, and no other vehicles may have triangles.
so conspicuity is not given with any shape you make unless the shapes of those in cars are mandated to be simple (squarish).
Er...what? You appear to be saying that conspicuity is a function of lamp shape, and that "simple (squarish)" shapes give better conspicuity than other shapes. Where is your evidentiary support for these claims?
Flashing certainly gives conspicuity but attracts attention too much
And where is your evidentiary support for this claim?
2 taillamps above each other could work for bicyles, as being not-a-car but tests would be needed.
Tests...? You mean like...scientific research? Or some other kind of tests? (Also: there have been plenty of cars over the years with dual over/under taillamp designs)
The big problem is not the reach of car headlamps (which in StVZO is max. 70m btw
StVZO does not specify a maximum headlamp beam reach.
more than about that range is not feasible, it will blind oncoming traffic too often
This is definitely not necessarily true -- and there's good quality research (dang it, there's that pesky word again!) to prove it.
But reach is not that important for accidents
It's not clear whether you're talking about car headlamps or bicycle headlamps or motorcycle headlamps or what with this comment, but for cars and motorcycles at least, beam reach (seeing distance) is actually one of the aspects of headlamp performance most causally linked to collision likelihood. Again...research versus uninformed opinion, here.
Accidents seem to be mostly caused by 'crossing the streams' (car going to the right when a cyclist or moped rider or even motorcycle rider, or even another car, to his left wants to go straight on).
Evidence to support this claim?
For pedestrians, retro-reflective angle-bracelets when walking on a road where cars drive would be useful
No "would be" about it -- retroreflectors on the arms and legs are
known (again, by -- wait for it! -- scientific research) to reduce the risk of pedestrians and bicyclists. We even know what configurations tend to work best: retroreflective lines following the leg and arm lines through the knee and elbow bends.
Taillamp brightness/conspicuity required depends on attitude of drivers, not on what they really see.
There is no basis in reality for this random guess.
we've used fairly pathetic 0.3W bulb taillamps in NL, which along with 0.6W were used a lot, give not much light but motorists see them anyway.
Bicyclists and motorcyclists have long been stuck with grossly inadequate lighting because of technological limitations. Now those limitations are being lifted with the advent and evolution of LEDs. That doesn't mean yesterday's pathetic lighting was adequate -- the death and injury statistics (oops, there's more science!) show they clearly were not.
they were and still are standard and there were never excessive numbers of accidents because of cyclists supposedly not being visible.
This, too, is wrong. There are far too many car/bicycle and car/pedestrian crashes. A major reason for that is inadequate conspicuity.
Motorists not 'seeing' ambulances and police cars shows what's going on when it's going wrong: Not paying attention
You're guessing -- incorrectly -- that drivers simply aren't paying attention. This really isn't what's going on at all. A fundamental thing to understand is that just because an object is within an observer's visual field, doesn't mean the observer will see it. Here, go read
this; you may learn something from it.