Is headlight glare making it harder for you to drive at night?<\/p>\n
Well, the federal government wants to know.<\/p>\n
Transport Canada is asking Canadians about vehicle headlights and glare at night through a new survey.<\/p>\n
Daniel Stern, a Vancouver-based vehicle lighting and regulation expert, said headlight glare is definitely getting more intense compared to a decade or two ago. Stern is also the chief editor of Driving Vision News, the technical journal of record for driver vision and vehicle lighting around the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re putting out more light and they\u2019re providing wider beam patterns that spread in a wider angle across the road, and they\u2019re getting smaller, and they\u2019re getting bluer,\u201d Stern explained.<\/p>\n
\u201dAnd all of those things make them significantly more glaring.\u201d<\/p>\n
The technical change at the centre of it, he said, is the adoption of LEDs as the light source, rather than a glowing filament or an electric arc from the past with halogen headlights. Headlights have been growing bluer and bluer over the last 40 years or so.<\/p>\n
Marketers and stylists \u201cabsolutely love this,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a very visible sort of keeping up with the Joneses indicator, right? Is your car new enough to have the bluest headlights? If your headlights are bluer than your neighbours, well, your car must be newer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Glare and how can it be attributed to crashes<\/p>\n
Stern said glare falls into two categories: discomfort glare and disability glare.<\/p>\n
Discomfort glare, he said, is the kind that makes a person throw their hand in front of their eyes, like when you first turn on the lights in the morning. Whereas the latter is the kind that degrades a person\u2019s ability to see.<\/p>\n
Stern described disability glare as if a \u201cmonster pickup truck with five light bars and high beams\u201d comes around the corner, \u201cyou\u2019re completely skewered.\u201d<\/p>\n
That, he said, is a \u201cshort, straight line between glare and a crash.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s discomfort glare that is spurring most complaints, Stern said. But discomfort glare is \u201ca lot harder to draw a line between the glare and the crash.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, he said one word comes up an awful lot when people talk about headlight glare: distraction.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know that distracted driving is unsafe,\u201d Stern said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn fact, it\u2019s so unsafe that if a traffic police officer sees you faffing with your phone, you\u2019re going to get a ticket even if you don\u2019t cause a crash because that\u2019s distraction and distraction causes crashes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stern said that if changing regulations starts from the \u201cpretty solid basis that distracted driving is known to cause crashes and headlight glare is known to be distracting, maybe those two pieces can be put together in a productive way.\u201d<\/p>\n
B.C. councils taking notice<\/p>\n
Vancouver city council, in January, unanimously passed a motion to write to the federal transport minister, urging the government to address \u201cexcessive headlight brightness and glare.\u201d The motion also called for the federal government to update national vehicle safety standards and enforcement mechanisms.<\/p>\n
The Vancouver council motion says headlight glare has been linked to reduced nighttime visibility, delayed reaction times and increased collision risk.<\/p>\n