2 ms·
As someone who uses both verbal alerts e.g. "passing on your left!" and bell dings, I've found that the human brain is quicker to process the "ding" than the ve
by MarkusWandel 5y ago
As someone who uses both verbal alerts e.g. "passing on your left!" and bell dings, I've found that the human brain is quicker to process the "ding" than the verbal cue. At the relative speed of pedestrian vs. cyclist this matters. I think it's simply that "ding ding" is a standard alert with a preprogrammed response, whereas spoken stuff needs to be interpreted first.
My personal optimization is also to not make noise at all, if I can clearly and safely pass without warning i.e. the pedestrian is not moving erratically and there are no small children. On rare occasion this elicits anger from (usually elderly) pedestrians though.
- lmm 5y ago> As someone who uses both verbal alerts e.g. "passing on your left!" and bell dings, I've found that the human brain is quicker to process the "ding" than the verbal cue. At the relative speed of pedestrian vs. cyclist this matters. I think it's simply that "ding ding" is a standard alert with a preprogrammed response, whereas spoken stuff needs to be interpreted first. For some humans, sure. The trouble is that maybe 1/3 of people simply won't process the "ding" at all, which makes it so unreliable as to be useless in practice, IME. (You can ring repeatedly and people eventually notice, but overall that's less effective than saying something).
- MarkusWandel 5y agoIt's the headphones. 100% of the time if I call out or ring the bell and get no reaction, it's because they've got earbuds in. That's OK if at least they're behaving themselves. People who walk onto a busy bike path without looking and with earplugs in are the real menace.
- lmm 5y agoNot my experience. A decent chunk of non-headphone people ignore a bell too.