Visibility Watch is our running record of the news that matters to riders for one plain reason: whether the people sharing the road can see you. This edition covers the fortnight of 17 to 30 August. The monsoon owned the headlines at home, rain made the news abroad, and two governments sat down with the numbers behind rider safety.
Himachal opened the fortnight on orange alert
On 16 August the IMD placed five districts of Himachal Pradesh on orange alert for heavy to very heavy rain, and the State Emergency Operations Centre counted 118 roads blocked across the state, 48 of them in Mandi and 32 in Kullu, as India.com reported.
Read that road count as a rider. Every blocked road pushes traffic onto a diversion, and a diversion means unfamiliar corners ridden in spray and fading light. On an alert day in the hills, the best call is often not to ride at all. If you must, get your braking done before the corner, not in it, and ride lit from the first grey of the afternoon rather than waiting for dark.
Then the warning went national
Three days later the IMD forecast heavy rain, thunderstorms and gusty winds across much of the country through 24 August: Jammu and Kashmir and the hills, then Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal, down to the Konkan, coastal Karnataka, Kerala and the Northeast (Business Standard, 19 August).
A week-long spell is not one bad ride, it is a stretch where every commute starts in doubt. Check the sky and the radar before you leave, not after you are soaked. Heavy cloud at 5 pm does what clear sky does at 7, so your lights need to be working long before the streetlights notice.
Delhi closed the fortnight under a red alert
By 25 August the capital was the story. Heavy rain put Parliament Street, Connaught Place and the AIIMS stretch under water, Gurugram and Faridabad sat under their own alerts, and Gurugram’s disaster authority asked offices and schools to work from home (Business Standard, 25 August).
Waterlogging changes where a rider can be seen as much as where a bike can go. Cars crowd the one dry lane, mirrors are streaked, and everyone is watching the water instead of their mirrors. Hold a lane position drivers can find, keep off the flooded kerb line, and assume the car behind has not seen you until its behaviour proves otherwise.
The UK spent the week on yellow warnings
The same fortnight, different hemisphere of habits: the Met Office kept much of England and Wales under yellow warnings for heavy rain, thunderstorms and flash flooding, and the motoring press reminded drivers of the basics, dipped headlights in rain, slower speeds, a clear windscreen (AOL UK, 20 August).
The reminder worth stealing is the first one. Lights in rain are not about you seeing the road, they are about the road seeing you. That is as true in Kochi as in Coventry.
MoRTH put side visibility on the table
The policy story of the fortnight came from home. The transport ministry is weighing a safety overhaul for two-wheelers that could enter the AIS-223 standard in phases: reflective tyres for side visibility, over-speed alerts, an acoustic alert system for quiet EVs, and leg guards, with an 18-month study alongside IIT Delhi and IIT Madras to test what actually works. The report behind it counts 81,740 two-wheeler rider deaths in 2024, with riders and pedestrians together near 67 per cent of all road fatalities (Business Standard, 25 August).
Notice what leads the list. When the government studies how to keep riders alive, it reaches first for ways to make them easier to see. Side visibility is the gap in most setups: your headlight speaks forwards, your brake light speaks backwards, and from the side you are a shadow.
Malaysia did the arithmetic out loud
Putrajaya wants road deaths halved by 2030, and researchers quoted by the New Straits Times (19 August) said the target is achievable only if the effort goes where the deaths are: motorcyclists, who make up about 66 per cent of the country’s road fatalities while being a far smaller share of the vehicles in crashes.
That imbalance is the whole case for visibility gear in one line. Riders do not crash more because they ride worse. They pay more when the crash comes, and the cheapest way to keep it from coming is to be impossible to miss.
What the fortnight adds up to
Six stories, one thread. Rain takes away the margin that daylight and dry roads normally lend you, and the people studying rider deaths keep arriving at the same fix: be seen earlier, from more angles. We wrote a full guide on how to be more visible on your bike at night and in the rain, and a companion piece on why hazard lights are the wrong tool for riding in rain. If your bike still runs stock lighting at the rear, our STROBE V7.0 Pro kit adds a pair of red pods with 20+ selectable patterns and a Brake Mode that fires when you press the brakes, at Rs 1,399 for the pair.
Ride like the rain is hiding you, because it is. Be visible. Be home.
