For many years, Planet Bike has sponsored light give-aways throughout the US to raise awareness of the need for bike lights when riding at night. Volunteers and sometimes police go to popular bike paths after dark and hail bikers without lights. They are offered a free set of lights and while they are being installed they get a quick safety message on how lights make them more visible to car drivers that might otherwise run them down. The hope is that we reach a critical mass of cyclists using lights so that it becomes the norm and everybody goes out and buys a set of lights.

We’ve finally brought the program home to Madison. Working with the Madison Police Dept., Dept. of Traffic Engineering and Bike Walk Madison, we ran “Operation Be Bright” on Mon 5/16/2011. Lots of people were involved, but special thanks go to Officer Chris Masterson for getting the ball rolling, Steve Meiers of Traffic Engineering for keeping us moving forward and Robbie Webber of BikeWalkMadison for wrangling volunteers.

Robbie wrote about the event here and Channel 15 did a little story…