My personal feeling is that they are distracting in so far as they cause people to notice the bike, which is intended affect. They are distracting in the same w

My personal feeling is that they are distracting in so far as they cause people to notice the bike, which is intended affect. They are distracting in the same way that emergency services flashing lights are distracting. Personally, at night I use 2 lights, a steady light and a flashing light, and in the day I have a flashing light on (the change in brightness is more noticeable in the daytime than a steady light). I've seen the epilepsy caused by bike lights thing mentioned a few times, but never by anyone who has directly experienced it (the author of the article you link, and indeed the person she links to, don't appear to have). In the absence of any hard numbers, my intuition is that the number of people suffering from a bike-light-induced-epilepsy incident would be much lower than the number of people suffering a hit-by-car-when-not-using-flashing-light incident, due to the lower number of suffers than cyclists and the requirement to come across a cyclist with light flashing at an appropriate rate, in their direction, with sufficient brightness. I'm happy to be proved wrong of course, and I do have an open mind on that. Edit: Having read the 8 flashes a second figure mentioned below, and looked it up on other sources online, I no longer have an open mind on the issue! Edit2: Ok, thats not strictly true, I always have an open mind about everything, but I'll need some hard numbers to pull me the other way...!