Typically, a pedestrian is struck by a motor vehicle someplace in the world every 8 minutes. 5,600 people are wiped out each year by vehicles and another 80,000 are injured – many while crossing streets or intersections. Nevertheless, only a tiny proportion of these cases are people who spend much of their time near moving vehicles: road workers.
And this is because of largely in part to the simple implementation of safety protectors. Safety vests are merely light weight vests worn over normal clothing, with bright fluorescent colors just like orange or yellow, and usually with specially designed reflective strips – all designed to make the wearer as visible to the human eye as humanly possible in as many situations and environments as possible.
The first component of safety vests making them visible is merely their color. To get a high level of visibility, it’s totally obvious to go for brighter colors like orange and yellow, but there’s some other reasons behind these choices. The backgrounds in which a wearer operates are crucial. On open highways as an example, the vests worn by road workers are generally a vibrant orange to contrast with the two most mostly abundant colors: the dark green of trees or landscape beside the road, or the blue sky.
Orange in particular is a complimentary color of blue – that is, its precise opposite on the color spectrum, making for the greatest contrast among the two colors, and therefore, the greatest visibility. This is the same purpose why many signs and signals warning of construction or obstructions ahead are painted in the same color. The color yellow, and most of its similar shades and tints are most likely to remain consistent between those suffering from various kinds of color blindness. These protective supplies come in all different types, shapes, and of course sizes.
The reflective strips found on safety vests will also be the product of much research. These are constructed of retroreflectors, which reflect light with minimal dispersal back toward their source. However, unlike a mirror, retroreflectors can reflect light back toward the source from an angle of incidence much greater than zero – meaning, the device doesn’t need to be pointed directly at the light source so as to reflect light back toward it, contrary to a mirror which must be positioned perfectly perpendicularly.
This can be usually achieve by arranging three mutually perpendicular mirrors to form a corner, much like three touching sides of a cube. This geometrical positioning permits light to be reflected in the direction of its source from any path. Of course in the application of clothing, the “mirrors” in question are incredibly tiny and made of reflective fibers or scotchlite, a material made of millions of tiny glass beads with a metal reflective surface painted on one surface.
Together, these two simple applications substantially boost the visibility of those wearing safety vests, subsequently making their existence much more obvious and greatly lowering the risk of an accident.
