What’s the best way to to be visible to drivers on Halloween – and on other dark nights? Many Halloween safety tips suggest flash lights, glow sticks or safety reflectors as equally viable options. We wanted to figure out how bright glow sticks from the local supermarket are compared to our funflector safety reflectors. This is what it looks like along a highway:
This is what we used : a thin multicolored glow necklace, a thick pink glow stick on a string, a thick green glow stick with a sword’s handle attached to it, 4 reflectors and two funflector wraps.
Glow sticks or safety reflectors for Halloween? For scale, the reflectors are about 2-1/2 inch across.
Interesting observations on glow sticks and safety reflectors:
When there are no cars around, the reflectors sometimes catch the light from a nearby traffic light. That’s why they give a reddish glow.
In the video, you can see how the light from passing cars only light up the lower half of the kids. That’s why it’s important to have reflectors low down. And you must have noticed the benefit of letting the reflectors dangle!
What you cannot see in the video is that the green glow stick, which was the brightest one, lasted less than 4 hours. The pink one had stopped glowing the next morning. The necklace, which only lid up half way around, kept glowing for several days. But you might have noticed that the necklace did not glow strongly enough to show up show up in the video…
Glow sticks are fun for kids to play with and they did light up a corner of a dark room. But, for traffic safety, you need to make sure they are significantly brighter than those we got.
Sadly, we now have a pile of glow sticks to add to landfill. The safety reflectors can be put on jackets and backpacks and provide safety for the whole dark season.
The glow sticks we bought lid up the corner of the room
This is the 7th year we celebrate Halloween in the US and I keep being surprised about longs lists of Halloween safety tips that circulates in media. When we look at statistics of what accidents actually happens on Halloween, there is one type that stands out: pedestrian accidents. Cars are the number one threat to trick-or-treaters and sadly, Halloween is the deadliest night all year for kid pedestrians. The graph below shows fatalities per day. Look at October 31st! The threat from cars and drivers is real. For every fatal accident, there are also about 10 seriously injured kids…
Child pedestrian fatalities by day of the year. How long did it take for you to spot Halloween? Klick on the image to get to the original article.
Let’s focus on the most important Halloween safety tips that make a significant difference:
#1 – Be Reflective (The Most Important Halloween Safety Tip!)
Here is what you need to know before buying reflector or reflective tape:
The power of reflectors depends on the reflective power per square inch and the size. A lesser quality reflective material needs a larger surface than a good quality material to reflect equally strongly back to the driver. There is no American standard that takes into account both the material and the surface, so we we follow EN13356, a European standard is for visibility accessories for non-professional use. All funflectors are made with 3M Scotchlite (one of the best reflective material on the market) and fulfill EN13356.
How many reflectors are needed for trick-or-treating?
One reflector can make wonders, but it may just as well be on the “wrong” side of the kid when a car comes by. We recommend at least two, one front and one back or one left and one right. We hang 4-5 on our kids, that’s still cheaper than most co-pays at the ER, less pain and more fun! If you use reflective tape, you also need to make sure it’s enough to be seen from multiple directions.
Safety reflectors increase your visibility the most when you hang them correctly – low and dangling!
#2 – Follow Traffic Rules
Most pedestrian accidents happen in the middle of the block. 1. Cross at intersections. 2. Use sidewalks and avoid busy streets without (or add another 3 reflectors to the outfit if you have to walk there). Practice, practice and practice BEFORE Halloween and supervise if your ghosts and goblins can’t handle it. With ADHD kids, you need to practice even more since they don’t always manage to judge the situation with approaching cars in safe manner. PRACTICE all year around!
#3 – Talk Safety with Kids
Studies shows that while most people talk about Halloween safety with their kids, only 1/3 do it every year. You need to talk about it several times in the weeks leading up to Halloween, not only when the kids are about to head out for trick-or-treating, too excited about costumes and candy to listen.
#4 – Educate Drivers
Here are some very good points from the State Farm Halloween Tips that you need to think about as a driver and talk to with friends and colleagues, especially those who don’t have kids at home. 1. Be alert for children and eliminate in-car distractions (cell phones, music, radio, friends,…) 2. Pull in and out of driveways carefully. 3. Slow down! 4. Practice extra caution at intersections and corners. 5. Discuss these and other driving pointers with your teen driver – or hide the car keys. Drivers ages 15–25 were involved in around one-third of fatal accidents involving child pedestrians on Halloween, according to the study.
— That’s it, Let’s Recap —
1. Use reflectors. If you don’t remember how many you need, just think that there can never be too many. 2. Follow Traffic Rules. You should know them, if not: study! 3.Talk Safety with Your Kids – start a week or two BEFORE Halloween 4. Remind Drivers, especially teen drivers, on being careful and alert every single minute they are in the car. So how about the flash light, tainted candy, ration the kid’s candy, inspecting candy and more? In our opinion, they are well meant, but draws attention from the real danger!
Days are getting shorter and we see (barely) more and more pedestrians who forgot reflectors. They pop up from nowhere along dark roads and on cross walks and makes driving safely difficult. Here are some common situations for when it would be a good idea for people to wear safety reflectors:
1. Walking your dog is a great way to get some daily exercise and dogs enjoy your attention. On days you take out your dog before sunrise or you come home late and take a walk during dusk or after dark, both you and your dog definitely need reflectors.
Dog with cute paw print reflector.
2. Commuting by bus, subway or train is a great way to save on gas and often you get some much needed exercise while walking to or from the bus/subway/train stop. It won’t be many weeks before it is dusk when you are on your way home or it is still dark in the morning.
3. Walking and biking to school is what we wish that every kid could do since they learn better from some fresh air and exercise in the morning. Middle and high school kids are old enough to walk on their own, but they don’t always perceive danger and risks they way they should. Some reflectors will make them more visible when crossing streets where they should’t early mornings and late afternoons.
One of our customers picked the brand new white kitten safety reflector for her floral purse.
4. Running errands – Are you also a time optimist when it comes to planning your errands? Things don’t always work out as planned so sometimes it gets dark before we finish and we are happy to have some reflectors dangling on my purses and jackets. How about you?
5. Walking along roads without sidewalks – Even if you are just walking over to borrow some eggs from you neighbor, if there is no sidewalk, YOU HAVE TO WEAR REFLECTORS – or lights! You never know when a drivers will want to pull over or need to dodge something in the road. Street lights are rarely strong enough to make pedestrians noticeable.
Traffic signals are designed to be intuitively understood. Maybe that’s why I never paid much attention to what traffic light signals for pedestrian cross walks really looked like – until I visited Berlin, Germany. There, the traffic light guys signaling “walk” and “stop” have a lot of personality and really popped out. The almost forgotten East German Pedestrian crossing lights got new life and are today Berlin icons. I tried to remember what the American guys look like until I realized there aren’t any, at least not where I live. Instead, white letters spell “WALK” and red letters “DONT WALK”.
Pedestrian traffic signals in Libertyville, IL says “DONT WALK” or “WALK”.
It turned out to be quite a story behind the Berlin “Ampelmännchen” (means “small traffic light men”).
In its native Sweden, H&M isn’t just a store for the latest fashion, it is also where parents get pretty good and inexpensive basic clothes for their kids. When I visit Sweden I usually get PJ’s (all cotton and no flame retardant chemicals) and outerwear (most with integrated reflective strips) and cotton socks. Sizes up to 180 (16 y) is a big bonus when your kids are tall!
Safety reflectors and reflective strips have been integrated in children’s outerwear for a long time, but what I found the other day is taking it a step (or two!) further. The entire fabric looked reflexive, so I had to take a photo with flash to see just how reflective it was.
Wow, look at this:
Same jackets without and with camera flash.
Had to buy this reflective jacket and can’t wait to get back to my Chicago suburbs and play around with them. Do you think drivers will be too scared to drive safely or relieved that they saw the pedestrian?
Every Swede grows up with “There is no bad weather, only bad clothes”. If they don’t get it from their parents, they certainly hear it from teachers all the way from preschool and up. Since kids in preschools and elementary schools go outside every day, they are expected to have rain clothes, boots, snow pants, hats etc on hand all the time. Good gear for bad weather is a must. Active Kids Club wrote about “polar bear moms”, but it is not just moms carrying on this Scandinavian tradition, it is engraved in society.
Good (reflective!) outdoor gear for bad weather.
In other words, drizzling rain is not an excuse for not biking to school or work. So where do you find good gear for all weathers in the US?
This is a guest post that I wrote for the blog The Swedish American Mamma* last year. Thought it would be neat to share here too, since it sums up where we come from. I’m a Swedish mom myself and also work hard to keep our Swedish heritage alive in my children. Scandinavian products help so I’m glad to have found the Swedish American Mamma blog! Another tricky thing is to keep some of the Swedish mindset and attitudes alive. And they can be surprisingly different, for example when it comes to being outdoors or safety.
No matter where in the Scandinavians countries you happen to be, midsummer means long nights that never get really dark. Where there is no midnight sun, dusk blurs into dawn without night in between. This is the time of year that many Scandinavians long for all winter and their love for summer and nature is deeply embedded in the culture. While Americans celebrate the end of the hot summer and a successful harvest with Thanksgiving, Scandinavians celebrate the arrival of spring and new life with music and dances. There are numerous Swedish songs about nature, and most of them are about spring and summer. The hymn “Den blomstertid nu kommer” celebrates the return of the “flower season” and is sung at most last-day-of-school celebrations in early June. Maja’s Alphabet songs, popular with schools and children’s choirs, are all about different plants found in nature. This one is about an ash tree and this one is about poppies.
Typical Swedish American Mamma – go outside every day is vital, no matter what the weather is like.
However, if you think Scandinavians stay inside during the cold and dark half of the year, you have deeply miscalculated their love for the outdoors. My oldest child started daycare in March, a time when there is nothing but wet snow and mud in the Stockholm area. With water proof boots, good snow suits plus vinyl overalls, the kids had a blast in the muddy yard. “There is no bad weather, just bad gear” is a phrase and an attitude that every Swede grows up with. There is a lot of truth in an article about polar bear moms, but I’m not sure we are quite that ambitious every day… In addition to their love for nature, Scandinavians are well known for their creative design. Combine that with the Swedish passion for traffic safety (just think “Volvo”) and you end up with fun colorful reflectors that make you visible to drivers when it is dark. However, the reflectors haven’t always been colorful or fun.
My mom wearing a hard reflector, typical in Sweden until late 1990’s.
When I went to school in the 70’s and 80’s, we all had reflectors. Recently, someone told me that insurance companies handed them out. Reflectors are cheap life savers, so that makes a lot of sense! Those we had were made from hard, clear plastic and came with a string and a safety pin. We pinned them inside our jacket pockets and while out in the dark, they were dangling at knee height to notify drivers about our presence. The strings easily got tangled up with keys left in the pocket and the reflectors made an annoying clanking sound whenever they swung into other things around you. In the late 90’s, 3M launched a patented reflective vinyl foil, that could be turned into colorful, lightweight soft reflectors. All of a sudden, people started to wear reflectors because they looked cool! No longer did they need to be hidden in pockets during day time, so the string was replaced with a short ball chain. A recent poll among Swedes shows that about 90% of kids and 50% of parents wear reflectors. About 30% of the Finns wear them as well. That prevents many nighttime pedestrian accidents!
In America, the concept of hanging reflectors on your jacket, backpack, purse, briefcase, stroller, wheelchair or dog is little known. At Halloween (the biggest danger for kids that night is getting hit by a car), reflective tape is frequently recommended, but how cool is that? So after moving to the US with my three grade school kids, I set out to launch a line of fun reflectors for the North American market under the trademark funflector®. To make it fun and cool to be safe all year around, we work with Swedish designers living in the US, to get the best from both worlds. Enjoy the picture gallery and stay safe!
Elisabeth
* Update 2014: Sadly, the Swedish American Mamma blog is no longer live which is the reason there is no link to it.
…is by far the most risky place for a pedestrian to cross a street. Did you know that?
Sadly, this month, three Libertyville students were struck by cars, while crossing roads at the middle of the block*. We were relieved to hear that none of them were badly injured. A look at statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration tells us that 76% of fatal pedestrian accidents occur between intersections. Assuming that most people cross streets and roads safely at intersections means that it is significantly more than three times as dangerous to cross streets away from intersections. We have brought up walk-to-school programs before on this blog and believe strongly that, as a society, we do need to get the next generation used to walking and biking more. For health reasons, for environmental reasons and to increase quality of life. Parents may think they do their kids a favor when they drive them to school. In fact, it has the opposite result. More cars lead to more accidents, more exhaust and less exercise. It is time to discuss investing in walk-to-school programs, not just more lanes for cars. We would like to see more parents teaching kids from an early age how to walk safely and we would like to see incentives to keep cars away from schools.
So what do kids need to learn before you can let them loose? Based on the statistics mentioned above , safety precautions can be boiled down to: 1.
Use cross walks! Don’t cross at the middle of the block. Cross walks at intersections are safer than cross walks in the middle of the block.
Use safety reflectors when walking from dusk through dawn. (70% of pedestrian accidents occur during the dark hours.) Those two pieces of advice would go a long way! However, from personal experience, we’d like to add this one:
Before crossing, even if you have a green light, look back to check that the driver in the right turn lane has seen you. Too many are on their cell phones and have no idea that you are there.
* In the article it is stated that the high school student crossed at an intersection. However, right there, the highway has no stop signs, no traffic lights and there is no pedestrian cross walk, which gives drivers a perception of being “in the middle of the block” although there is a small road crossing.
Last Friday night at 6.30, I drove my kids around. You know, picking up one here, dropping off the other one there and still make it to the jump-off of the basketball game of the third. There had been flurries in the air since lunch time so the highway way was slushy and slippery. Ten minutes earlier, at the intersection of two IL state highways, it was so slippery, I couldn’t get the car to stop until several feet past the stop line. Pretty scary considering I was only going 20 mph.
In the middle of the high way, I saw a guy, but only as a dim shadow against the glare from oncoming traffic. He crossed the four-lane highway with a cup in his hand, dressed all in dark. He stopped at the painted median strip, which is also used as a turn lane. That’s where I passed him. I hope he made it over to his car on the other side despite the fact* that:
– more accidents happen in the middle of the block than at intersections (73%)
– more accidents happen during the dark hours than at day light (69%)
– the road was very slippery and it was difficult to stop even at low speed
– visibility was poor
– it was Friday night rush hour traffic (23% more accidents occur on Fridays and Saturdays than on other other weekdays)
– he’s a man (70%)
I wish I had a video or photo of what I saw, but I didn’t want to lower this guy’s odds even more by being a distracted driver… Take a peak at the photos below and imagine snow slush on the road, snow flakes on your windshield and two more lanes.
A pedestrian crossing a dark highway with and without reflectors. The median strip is used as a turn lane for traffic from both directions and is not a safe haven for pedestrians.
I might just be paranoid, but I think I would have walked the extra 300 feet to the intersection and traffic lights and crosswalk. I also wear pedestrian safety reflectors, several if the weather is this bad. After all, every day, 11 pedestrians get killed in traffic and many more injured. For me, it is more important to see my family again than trying to save a minute or two… What would you have done?
Long ago, I used to come home from work, kick off my shoes, turn on the stereo and cuddle up under a blanket in my couch. A huge window, facing southwest, framed a stunning garden and the sunset this time of year. Late January and early February, I would come home right after sunset and hit the “blue hour”.
Blue hour on the lake Drevviken, Stockholm. January 12 at 3:40pm.
The best ones where those with a clear sky and snow on the ground. The far north location of Stockholm made sunset slow and the blue hour lasted long enough to wind down from a busy day in the office. Now with kids and in Chicago, (same latitude as Naples, Italy), I need to be observant to catch the blue light. It only lasts for a couple of minutes before it gets pitch black. Often, I only notice it on days when I happen to drive my kids to their activities during those precious blue minutes.
The blue hour (minutes) in Libertyville IL, January 2, 4:46 pm. Did you notice how the sky is still bright, but the road and side walk are not?
The blue light gives you opportunities to take spectacular photos that cannot be made any other time of the day. Miklos Andrassy has few basic tips at his bluehoursite.com. Just don’t think you can take any more daylight photos that day! Even very good cameras are not as good as the human eye at compensating for the blue light.
Winter blues medicin – fun pedestrian safety reflctors and long walks!
The blue hour is also treacherous from a traffic safety perspective. It often falls during rush hour, both in the morning and evening. Since the human eye is trained to compensate for the dimming blue light, we easily think it is not yet dark and forget that others might not see us. It is not uncommon to see drivers without headlights on and it is very common to see pedestrians who think they are as visible as in full day light. So here we go again: Wear some reflectors! They might save your life!!! Our loyal readers know to get our fun-to-wear pedestrian reflectors at our webshop. If you are a new to this site and pedestrian safety reflectors, you can learn more from our blog posts on traffic safety or on our info page. Take care, Elisabeth
Blue hour at the lake Drevviken, Stockholm, February 6, 4:45pm
Polar bear during the blue hour at Brookfield Zoo, Chicago, December 28, 5 pm.
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