staying safe


Over the past few years, equine high visibility apparel has come on in leaps and bounds, as new fabrics come into play. Equisafety prides itself on being at the forefront of design, enabling these new technologies to be used. In our opinion, horse riders are the most vulnerable users of our roads and protecting ourselves in the best way possible is important. Did you know that the human eye sees differently depending on the levels of light. In daylight we use CONE cells which are sensitive to colour and during night, we use ROD cells that are sensitive to light. The colour to which the human eye is most sensitive is yellow/ green, as it can be seen 1.24 times faster than red……………. Okay, we just need to buy yellow then – we hear you all say!! NO, Yellow is still the best colour to wear during daylight hours as drivers can see this colour quickest whilst travelling at speed. However, Red/Orange is more efficacious during dawn and dusk as it is perceived as a ‘danger ahead’ colour. However, although high visibility/ fluorescent colours are obviously very important, what is probably more significant is the ‘Shape and Size’ of you and your horse, as well as other attributes that help to catch drivers’ eyes… We’re not talking about big bottoms here though, we’re talking about Biomotion. Have you ever arrived home and thought ‘how did I get here’? We seem to fall back on our subconscious decision-making process and only move into conscious action when we see something that catches our attention, like a flashing light or retro-reflective fabric/tape that’s caught the head lights. In normal headlights you can see retro-reflective markings at 1,000ft. That gives a driver 10 times the distance he would normally have to react and avoid a pedestrian or horse rider on the road.


Using reflective material or LED’s on parts of you and your horse that are constantly moving is the best way to improve your safety, including items such as leg or arm bands.


The Mercury range is perfect for dusk to dawn riding


Efficiency in hi-vis apparel


LED Tailguard features red lights www.theequinesite.co.uk


Filtering all the information we see in an average street scene is a big ask on the brain. Due to the way our mind works, we quickly make sense of our surroundings - it only takes 100 milliseconds for a driver to perceive a person and know what that person is doing. You will also know if it is a man, woman or child and whether they’re young or old. In numerous studies, drivers spotted pedestrians with strips of retro-reflective tape attached to points known to invoke the perception of bio- motion, significantly better than a pedestrian using any other approach to visibility. As such, Equisafety is striving to harness the full power of biomotion in the products it designs. We mentioned earlier that a driver could see retro-reflective markings 1,000ft away in normal head lights. However, remember that a pedestrian’s environment is darker than the driver’s field of vision. Therefore the pedestrian’s eyes are much better adjusted to the darkness. Experiments have shown that pedestrians (not wearing high visibility or reflective clothing)


thought drivers could see them quicker than they actually could. In fact, pedestrians thought a driver could see them at between 300 to 400 feet, but the drivers didn’t actually see the pedestrian until he was within 100 feet. This is called a ‘Double Blind Situation’. It is actually very difficult to make judgements of distance if the object is moving towards or away from you. The Equisafety Mercury range is perfect for dusk to dawn riding as the amount of retro- reflective fabric used is perfect for standing out brilliantly to all drivers. Rule 51 of the Highway Code advises horse riders to wear a light showing white to the front and red to the rear. With this in mind Equisafety’s range now includes items that feature strips of LED lights which strobe across the product, offering the driver the opportunity to access another viewpoint in his peripheral vision. These products contain white or red lights depending on where they are worn. White lights are always worn when moving towards oncoming traffic and red lights are worn at the


rear to signal to drivers that there is a vehicle in front. Why red? Well first we associate it with a warning and secondly red has the lowest impact on your vision at night, that is to say, your eyes recover their night vision faster when they’re exposed to red light. Therefore, the Hatband features white lights on the front and red on the back; the breastplate has white lights and the tailguard has red lights. Find out more at www.equisafety.com


LED Hat Band features white lights Equine Page 13


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