Being visually impaired: Riding my bicycle in the dark.

Between the age of 10 and 14 I lost my central vision and I was diagnosed with an eye-condition called Stargardt’s disease. Nowadays my vision is about 5% but that is just a number. It depends completely on what you do with it! I am now 24 and I pretty much do everything a normal sighted person does :)

So, I live in the Netherlands where it is very common to ride your bicycle to get from A to B. I am not allowed to drive, and I’m sure that I don’t want to with such a bad vision haha. I do, however, ride my bicycle a lot since it is one of the few transportations I can just do without asking for help or anything. Besides, it’s healthy and it gets you outside haha. I even have one of those bikes (see the picture of me) that can go really fast, it was a gift from my boyfriend so that we could make trips together :)

                             

(This is not my regular bike but I am so proud of having this bike that I just put it in here haha)

I want to share with you today some of my experiences and thoughts when riding my bicycle in the dark since my contrast vision is also slightly damaged, this makes bicycling in the dark a bit more challenging. 

Do you ever have that feeling when you are outside in bright sunlight and you have to drive through a dark tunnel, when entering that tunnel you are still blinded from the sunlight which makes it hard to see anything? Well, hold on to that feeling and multiply it by 10. Then you know how I feel when riding my bicycle in the dark and not just in a tunnel haha. 

When seeing like this I have to be very alert at ALL times, it cannot happen that I am the reason for an accident and I am very well aware of that. So when I don’t trust my biking skills, I won’t do it. It has happened that at some places, it is so dark, that I don’t feel comfortable biking, knowing that there could be other people around me whom I might not see. When this happens, I will just go very very very slow or I will walk until it gets better again.

You might think why I don’t just get better lighting on my bicycle. Well, that is not really the problem here and if it could help, it should be one hell of a lamp haha.

                                        (This is not my street but it might give you an impression)

When I went to my pole dancing class last week, I hopped onto my bike and not far down my street I saw a car parked on the bike path (yes, we have beautiful bike paths). I was a little startled because I saw the car a bit late and I had to dodge the car fast. However, I had to react quick and also look behind me in order to find out if there was a car coming down the road. Because, if it was, I had to hit the brakes and wait for the car to pass, so I could go on the road to pass the parked car. It all went very fast and luckily there was not another car on the road. So, when I was just halfway on dodging the parked car, I realized that there was no parked car at all! My brain had played a trick on me, thinking that there was a parked car (since it happened before) but it was just a spot of very weird lighting from the lamppost and the shadow of a road sign. 

So, the other day, I was biking in the dark again because I had to go somewhere. I had to go down a certain road that has very bad lighting. Whenever I am in these situations, I feel like I could have missed something that could hit me at any time. Not a great feeling I must say, because you have to be extra careful on top of the extra carefulness I already have haha. When this happens, my shoulders are somewhere near my ears and I believe I make very weird faces because I have to concentrate on the road. And of course there are other cyclists on the bike path as well. Some of them have bad lighting on their bikes which makes it hard to see them. Not just for me but for everyone. So it has happened that I was biking like 2 meters behind a biker before I saw him and I had to react fast again to dodge him. I must say, this always when well and the biker in front of me never found out what was going on behind them.

These are just one of the many experiences I have with bicycling. You might wonder why I do it at all. Well, if I can’t ride my bicycle anymore. That would suck and I have a big peace of my independence taken away from me. But let me end with that I am always very careful and conscious of my biking skills. I will never actually put others in danger. And if I don’t trust certain situations, I will always find a solution! :)

I hope you found this an interesting read and maybe I have given you more insight in the life of a visually impaired person. 

Let me know what you think :)

@boosje123