Normally, a pedestrian is struck by a motor vehicle someplace in the world every 8 minutes. 5,600 people are mortally wounded each year by vehicles and another 80,000 are damaged – many while crossing streets or intersections. Nevertheless, just a small portion of these cases are people who spend much of their time near moving vehicles: road workers.
And this is credited largely in part to the simple implementation of protective vests. Safety vests are basically light weight vests worn over normal clothing, with bright fluorescent colors like orange or yellow, and often with specially designed reflective strips – all developed to make the wearer as visible to the human eye as humanly possible in as many situations and environments as possible.
The first element of safety vests making them visible is simply their color. In order to achieve a high degree of visibility, it’s clear 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 for example, the vests worn by road workers are typically 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 exact opposite on the color spectrum, making for the greatest contrast between the two colors, and therefore, the greatest visibility. This is the same purpose why many signs and signals warning of construction or boundaries ahead are painted in the same color. The color yellow, and most of its associated shades and hues will also be most likely to remain consistent between those suffering from various kinds of color blindness. These protection supplies come in all different types, shapes, and of course sizes.
The reflective strips found on safety vests may also be the product of much research. These are composed of retroreflectors, which reflect light with small dispersal back toward their source. Even so, 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, as opposed to a mirror which must be positioned correctly perpendicularly.
This really is generally achieve by arranging three mutually perpendicular mirrors to create a corner, much like three touching sides of a cube. This geometrical positioning enables light to be reflected in the direction of its source from any direction. Obviously in the application of clothing, the “mirrors” in question are extremely 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 basic applications significantly boost the visibility of those wearing safety vests, eventually making their reputation much more clear and greatly decreasing the risk of an incident.
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