Cone colors

[Michael Gira]

Maybe a silly question, but...

Any thoughts on the difference between using red cones compared to white cones?

How about issues with using alternating colors (such as red for heelside and white for toeside)?

One pyscho-social issue I've thought of is that when setting cones in a public place like a park, red cones signify danger and therefore arouse more fear and opposition from the general public.

[Steve Collins]

It's not a silly question. Cone visibilty and they way people respond to the color is important.

I like white cones. For me, they make it easier to focus on the space between the cones. They are also easier for me to see at dusk, given the contrast.

I have a spot that is basically a public street. I use orange cones to direct cars away from my course, at both ends. The course is then set with white cones, which, incidentally, the car drivers do not seem to see well. That may be due to their size, since they are considerably smaller than the cones drivers are used to seeing. It probably also has something to do with the fact that white objects in the road do not trigger a sense of alarm, like red and (especially) orange do.

I suspect Vlad will have some valuable input here.

Interestingly, police have occasionally driven by while I was skating and have not stopped. (skateboard racing in LA County is essentially illegal). My assumption was that they approved of the orange safety cone markers and weren't concerned with the "invisible" white cones. Who knows? Maybe they were just looking for real crimes to bust.

[Tom Mangelsdorf]

I use the red/toeside, white/heelside as a training tool for tight slalom. It helps me figure out what I might be doing wrong if after a run I turn around and see that I've knocked over 1 white cone and 7 red cones.

Red cones look prettier in photos.

White cones are higher visibility.

I skate at night sometimes. There is a dead-end, dark, unlit road near where I live. With just a little moonlight, the white cones are nicely visble. The red cones disappear into the black road.

[Ramón Königshausen]

My cousin who used practice with me was partly colorblind. No, no. He was able to see the red cones, sure! But he had some difficulties to find (dark) red marks on dark asphalt. So I had to use yellow, white or another bright color so that it didn't take him like ages to figure out where the marks were.

When will there be blue and yellow cones? And will they only be available on the Swedish market? Or how about cones with stars an stripes?


rmn

[Toby Warg]

There are green Seismics.



Not pretty..

[Dominik Kowalski]

green=not pretty....

I think it's a marketing stratergie....you kick a cone, it gets tossed into the wild, and you cannot find it anymore. After a while you see that your amount of cones are shrinking, and then you have to buy some new ones again and again.....right?

[Jani Soderhall]

There are green Seismics.

And the red were replaced by orange, a color invented by ConeRacing.com.

/Jani

[Wesley Tucker]

Why cones are not ORANGE and YELLOW will always be a mystery to me.

[Pat Chewning]

For all of the races where I am the timer, I always insist on having the RED cones on the right (as you go downhill), and the WHITE cones on the left.

Why?

Because the most commonly used spreadsheet (Dan Gesmer's) color-codes the racer's lanes with red and white backgrounds, and the timing program (Chronocone) takes RIGHT and LEFT inputs for the racer's names from the spreadsheet.

In the heat of a fast-paced race, it is easy to get the wrong person into the wrong lane. By color-coding the spreadsheet and the courses consistently, it can help avoid errors.

-- Pat

[Tom Mangelsdorf]

green=not pretty....

My daughter has a bunch of the green ones. ABEC 11 stickers look great on 'em. Not that it has anything to do with the functionality of the cones themselves ... I'm just sayin.

[Pat Chewning]

Maybe a silly question, but...

How about issues with using alternating colors (such as red for heelside and white for toeside)?

Alternating cone colors obviously doesn't work for dual-lane racing: It makes it incredibly difficult to tell how many cones were hit in each lane, and it slows down the re-setting of the course.

Even for single-lane racing, I think the cones should all be the same color -- makes it easier to see when a cone is out of place.

[Karl Floitgraf]

Alternating cone colors is really important in practice because I like to set super techy and charge into the course, when your flying it's alot easier to go "RED RIGHT WHITE LEFT RED RIGHT WHITE LEFT" than anything else. It helps me get more power on each pump, run cleaner and think less while I'm skating.

It even works in dual practice- one course is White and red and another is orange and green. No problem.

[Tim Robinson]

Technically , the brightest colour to the human eye is a yellow/green (550nano meters i think??) Its half way between red and violet.
BMW and Alfa with there spider back in the 1970's used that colour not just for the groove factor. Here in Aus our road markings used to be that colour for the same hi vis reason.

[Colin Beck]

Resurrecting this old thread...Tim, I guess that hi-viz yellow/green colour is basically the colour of a tennis ball.

Last weekend we ran a dual-lane race where each rider only got a single run in each round. The rider with the faster qualifying time could choose which course to to ride on.

Everybody chose white.

I'm pretty sure the courses were identical and that the preference for white was based on the ease of seeing the white cones compared to the orange cones.

[Brian Ellison]

to me, the green cones pop out the most on the black top i skate on. i use whites when it gets darker though

[Joe Boyle]

I like orange / green alternating cones, orange toeside. It means you can see where you are going wrong, and you can see where the cones are out on a hybrid, and you get good visibility, and they look pretty awesome, and they match my wheels. and my shoes. and one of my favourite skating hoodies. It's all good really.