droo <03dakotacc4.7_4x4@comcast.net> wrote:
: 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.
[...]
:> 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."
There have definitely been implementations of DRLs which are
VERY annoying - high beams at 80% for example. That is a stupid
idea which has the potential to blind or at the very least,
distract.
Anyway, that wasn't really my point - DRLs have gotten better
in recent years so the blinding issue isn't as severe as it once
was. My point was that the brain will tend to get "tunnel vision"
in stressful or confusing sitations. The mind blocks out
distractions and things it considers unimportant to the emergency
at hand. A sea of bobbing and waving lights is exactly the sort
of distraction that the brain is so good at blocking out.
Although this sea of light will probably not be blocked out
completely - there will always be a recognition that there are
a bunch of cars "out there, in that general direction", it may
fade into a "mass" and individual vehicles could be missed.
Granted, this exact same thing can happen with a group of cars
at night, or even during the day when nobody has their lights on.
At night, a motorcycle will blend in with a group of cars just
like I have been saying it can do during the day in a sea of DRLs.
However, that's no reason to take away the advantage of that vehicle
for 12+ hours per day.
--
-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 |
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