livedarklions

I have mild red-green color-blindness. I used to think that I couldn't wear sunglasses because they made it impossible to read traffic lights. After a little reading, however, I found out that grey-tinted sunglasses don't have that effect on my kind of colorbindness, but that any other color tint will. This checks out irl.

I bring this up for a couple reasons. One is that colorblind people are more prone to traffic accidents when driving, so I suspect there may be a similar effect with bicycling, and second, it is very common for people not to know they are colorblind. If you've never been tested for it, there are several tests online that you can administer yourself. I didn't realize it myself until I took a test in a college science lab class.

I suspect it makes it harder for me to spot obstructions on the road as some items just don't contrast with the ground as well for me. I'm super careful about the road ahead as a result.

Any other colorblind riders? How do you deal with it?

John_V 

_ForceD_

Dan Burkhart 

I would think that horizontal traffic signals would be more of an issue than vertical. At least you know red is on top.
EDIT: Think I was typing this as the poster above made his submission. There are places, like Quebec for example, where horizontal lights are common.

Lemond1985

Saw lots of horizontal traffic lights in Texas, I think they're all set up that way there. And they swing around on cables too. Weird. I guess it's to keep the frequent hurricanes from knocking them down.

jimincalif

CAT7RDR

My red-green color blindness has not presented any issues with road cycling. Red and green blend with each other when objects are close together. It kept me out of potential law enforcement and military careers.

On the other hand, I have to pay particular attention when hiking to watch for rattlesnakes on the local trails. They blend into the adobe dirt. I have walked over two rattlers basking on the trail.

fietsbob

My (Late) Father was colorblind, he , I recall , once commented, at a traffic stop, about the Blue light ...
on the overhead R Y G traffic lights.


..

livedarklions

If I'm wearing brown, blue, yellow or green lenses, I literally cannot tell which light is on, so position is irrelevant. For reasons I don't understand, it filters out the light I need to distinguish the brightness of the lights.

With gray sunglasses, I am able to distinguish the colors of the lights as well as the brightness, perhaps even better than without sunglasses.

BTW, part of why people can have this without knowing it is because they really have no basis for comparison. I can tell whether something is red, yellow or green, but I have no direct way of knowing how the contrast I'm perceiving compares to a "normal" person.

livedarklions

I swear this company chose their livery just to mess with my head:

TRUCK TRAILER Transport Express Freight Logistic Diesel Mack Peterbilt Kenworth Volvo Freightliner: YELLOW ROADWAY Volvo Day Cab Truck Dry Van Double Trailers, YRC Yellow Roadway Trucking Company Tifton Georgia

jimincalif

If that's yellow, my colorblindness is worse than I thought!

delbiker1 

I am color blind and it has gotten worse as I have aged. I drive a school bus and that requires a physical examination each year. Them exam includes both vision and hearing. When I am shown the color charts I can see some spots but cannot see the numbers as a whole. The examiner simply points at something that is the color red, color green and color yellow. I have no problem with that. Various shades of red, blue, and green and gray I evidently do not see correctly. When I was married I cannot remember all the times my ex asked my if I was really going to wear those color combos together. Not a problem anymore.

ironwood

There are lenses available to correct color blindness. Try Google. Also in my case, a pair of cheap yellow or orange eyeshields enabled me to pick out reds and green where before I saw something like grey.

livedarklions

There's a lot of different kinds of colorblindness. Anything yellow or orange would definitely make my problem worse, I've proven that to myself by running a couple of red lights before I understood what was happening.

I know about and am skeptical about the colorblindness lenses--the results they claim don't replicate, and they actually won't make the glasses correction strong enough for my nearsightedness prescription so it's a moot point for me.

TheRef

They are orange!

honcho

Mild blue-green colorblindness uncovered during a military entrance physical. There is a specific configuration of traffic signals, when combined with a particular type of street lighting, that can cause me no end of problems unless I am paying close attention. In Washington, DC and some other urban areas I have visited, some vehicle traffic signals are mounted on poles on street corners and not over the roadway. To make matters worse, DC has some somewhat low and decorative street lighting. I have see the street lights as the same color as the green light of the traffic signal and, failing to pay attention to the location of the actual signal, I have started to enter intersections on what was not a green signal. Color confusion is only part of the problem, most of it I attribute to not driving regularly where the pole mounted signals are common and the lower height street lighting. I normally have no problem recognizing and obeying signals mounted over the roadway.

livedarklions

I actually found that before because I did want to make sure it wasn't my colorblindness. I didn't know about the "Yellow Taxi" connection although it was not THE Yellow Cab company.

BlazingPedals

I deal with it by being observant. I can tell red from green, but can't always tell red from amber. Amber is always in the middle. Red is at the top or on one end in the case of a 3-light display. In the case of a single blinker, red always has a stop sign to augment the light.

When in doubt, slow down and take clues from other traffic. Treat it as a stop sign if you must.

Edit: I only see about half the numbers in those color vision tests. A few of the screens will look like different numbers depending on your color vision. So I might see a 6 where someone with normal vision would see a 14. Others are just a mess of dots to me.

Milton Keynes

When I was a kid I could tell the numbers in the circles of dots. When I went through military enlistment processing, that's when I found out that I had gone colorblind. I could see the number in the very first one, however I failed the rest of them. Then they put me in a dark room with a small light that would be either white, green, or white, and I failed that test too. They still let me enlist but they put me into radio because my ears were perfect.

I can tell most colors apart just fine but I have a really hard time with brown/green. In anything other than very bright light, I can't tell those colors apart at all. Clothes that are hunter green look brown to me.

But when it comes to traffic signals, I can easily determine red, yellow, or green, so I never have a problem with driving or biking. Now if they were to introduce a brown light, I might have problems.

jimincalif

Yup, same drill for ROTC. First the number books, failed that, then the Farnsworth Lantern test, same little light in a dark room. I remember the name as they referenced my failing the test in the rejection letter. This was around 1975.

Milton Keynes

Oops, I meant either white, green, or red.

alcjphil

I am not colour blind but I am very interested in this thread. Our sight is useful but without the input here I might not have understood how much we rely on colour in our daily life. I can remember many years ago my nephew was visiting us. We had a small place and we had a portable washing machine that we kept in our kitchen. He couldn't understand why we didn't use it to wash dishes. He also thought that our television was broken because the pictures were in black and white. He didn't know that our "dishwasher" was a washing machine for clothes and he had never watched anything but a colour TV. This thread has been very instructive.

Darth Lefty 

Imagine my dismay when I discovered I had a green tail light.

Joking... my color blindness is mild and really manifests in browner shades of green and red. I have no trouble at all with primary colors or traffic lights. I'm sorry for people who have more serious problems.

Maelochs

I would have thought this would be a joke thread ... instead it turns out we need a "Colorblind Cycling" forum page.

markjenn

From what I've read, companies claim to have lenses that correct color blindness, but none truly do. Some lenses may shift the perception of color to a color blind person one way or the other such that that they may do a bit better in distinguishing colors in certain situations, similar to how certain sunglasses might improve vision for certain activities. But these glasses will never let you see like a person with normal color vision.

I'm moderately red-green colorblind, discovered in grade school. This has discouraged me from pursuing a piloting career (which may be a blessing), but not from flying as you can fly non-commercially with faulty color vision. Otherwise, it hasn't affected my life much, but I am occasionally befuddled distinguishing things that others see easily. (For example, some color-coded bar charts and the like can give me fits.) Traffic signals aren't much of an issue as I easily read the red and yellow signals, but I do occasionally find that the green signals blend in with background lights at night. I'm a little more cautious perhaps, but no big deal. I see some greens, like a lime, very vividly but the green of a fir tree is pretty subtle. Color blindness, especially red-green, is pretty common - I recall that about 8% of males have it to some degree, but it is much rarer in woman. But woman carry the defect between generations.

There is cutting edge research being done to come up with a color blindness "cure" using gene therapy and it has worked in monkeys. But work is moving very slowly and human trials haven't started yet. I doubt I'll see a cure in my lifetime.

https://www.neitzvision.com/research/gene-therapy/

- Mark