NYC’s Citi Bikes piloting Blaze’s biking safety projection lights

Hardware Battlefield competitor Blaze is continuing to score deals that see big deployments of its tech across large urban fleets, this time with New York’s Citi Bikes. The new U.S. partnership (via Engadget) follows an arrangement with London’s Santander bike share program, which saw all 11,500 of those operating in London kitted out with Blaze’s tech.

Blaze’s bike lights work by projecting an easy to discern, green outline of a basic bicycle icon ahead of the bike itself, giving motorists, pedestrians and others sharing the roads an early heads up that there’s someone biking in their vicinity. This is a huge help for cyclists in general, since simply making car and truck operators aware of their presence can really help avoid accidents.

The Blaze Laserlight will be equipped on 250 pilot cycles to start this winter, with the dual aims of increasing general safety, and helping encourage higher ridership numbers among women, since research has shown that women are more likely to ride when there are more safety features in place, according to Citi Bike’s note announcing the news.

London’s use of Blaze has paved the way for this NYC expansion; Citi Bike cites stats on heightened rider visibility and rider confidence in their own safety resulting from the UK deployment as big reasons for trailing Blaze in their own system.

Citi Bike has over 10,00 bikes in its overall network, so if this pilot produces positive results this could be another big win for Blaze.