On Fri, 16 Jan 2004 17:01:15 +0000 (UTC), <jon@dakota-truck.net> wrote:
> 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! :-)
>
>
I can't think of anytime in my experience of driving that I had a problem
like that. And that's during night time driving. And with regards to this
happening in the daytime, you make it like the DRL's blind you and you
can't see the rest of the vehicle. Which isn't the case. You can still see
it. DRL's are attention getters that make your brain go "what's that bright
thing?". Then you look and "oh, it's a car."
-- -Droo
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Feb 01 2004 - 16:29:50 EST