Jason Bleazard <dml@bleazard.net> wrote:
: At 05:52 PM 1/15/2004, Jon wrote:
:> There
:> is certainly no arguing that a vehicle with its lights on is
:> more visible than one with the lights off (under most
:> circumstances). However, this is an advantage that should be
:> exploited carefully; not employed en-masse. If everyone has
:> their lights on, the advantage is lost.
: You do raise a couple of good points, but there's just one small hole in
: your logic. By turning your lights on, you aren't trying to be more
: visible than other vehicles. You're trying to be more visible than trees,
: embankments, garbage cans, or whatever other background visual clutter
: there might be. It also helps differentiate the vehicles that are driving
: from the ones that are parked along the side of the road.
My contention is that by making everyone turn their lights on,
you essentially create a "new background" - a sea of waving,
bobbing lights which can make it difficult to pick out an
individual vehicle. The human mind is such that it attempts
to "make sense" out of what it sees, which is where we get
things like optical illusions. With such a cluttered background,
vehicles which truly need to stand out (and do so via having their
lights on) such as motorcycles or emergency vehicles are at a
severe disadvantage because they are now no different than
everyone else - they can just blend into the background. This is
especially true for motorcycles; at least emergency vehicles
have auxiliary lighting they can use and school busses, etc. are
fairly large and hopefully hard to miss, but a motorcycle has
no such advantage. I can easily imagine a scenario where there
are a group of cars approaching an intersection, with a motorcycle
a fair distance ahead of them. If that bike blends in, the risk
is fairly high that someone is going to try to enter the
intersection without even noticing the bike. I sure don't want
the guy on that bike to be *me* when it happens! :-)
--
-Jon-
.-- Jon Steiger ---- jon@dakota-truck.net or jon@jonsteiger.com --.
| 1970 Barracuda - 1990 Dakota 'vert - 1992 Ram 4x4 - 1996 Dakota |
| 1996 Intruder 1400 - 1996 Kolb FireFly - 2001 Ram QC 3500 CTD |
`------------------------------------ http://www.jonsteiger.com --'
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