Night Speed Limits

[1995hoo]

I turn my headlights on during the day if I'm on a two-lane road with passing over the center line. I've had that habit since I was learning to drive. Picked it up from my father, who picked it up on family trips to Canada when we were kids. I find its substantially easier to see an oncoming car if its lights are on, especially if it's summer and you get that shimmering mirage effect on the road.

I do not turn them on during the day on other sorts of roads unless the weather is bad. I will turn them on before sunset or after sunrise if the light is casting a glare, and in bad weather I do not use my wipers as the determinant. Basically I err on the side of turning them on if I'm in doubt, and if I have any trouble at all seeing other cars due to lighting or weather, I turn on my lights.

All too many people seem to think the sole purpose of lights is to help YOU see. I wonder if this is why we seem to have a plague of dark-colored SUVs being driven without headlights at night.

[thenetwork]

US 550 has reduced night speed limits, in an area with frequent wildlife crossings south of Montrose CO.

The Night Speed signs on US-550 are now gone.  Within the past few years, CDOT did a highway upgrade project on US-550 between Montrose & Ridgway in which they installed 10-12' high fencing on either side of the ROW with occasional dirt "escape ramps" and cattle grates at all intersections & driveways.  The ramps are designed so if there is a stray deer or other animal within the ROW, they can escape via the one-way ramps (high drop off to prevent/deter re-entry) to return to the open land. 

That being said, last time I was on CO-13 between Rifle and Meeker there were night speed signs.  But CDOT is becoming very aggressive in building wildlife barrier zones along major roadways where animal collisions and near-misses are an issue, so signs on that stretch of highway may becoming extinct as well in the near future.

 

[kphoger]

I turn my headlights on during the day if I'm on a two-lane road with passing over the center line. I've had that habit since I was learning to drive. Picked it up from my father, who picked it up on family trips to Canada when we were kids. I find its substantially easier to see an oncoming car if its lights are on, especially if it's summer and you get that shimmering mirage effect on the road.

I do not turn them on during the day on other sorts of roads unless the weather is bad. I will turn them on before sunset or after sunrise if the light is casting a glare, and in bad weather I do not use my wipers as the determinant. Basically I err on the side of turning them on if I'm in doubt, and if I have any trouble at all seeing other cars due to lighting or weather, I turn on my lights.

All too many people seem to think the sole purpose of lights is to help YOU see. I wonder if this is why we seem to have a plague of dark-colored SUVs being driven without headlights at night.

I do likewise on pretty much every count.

[J N Winkler]

I turn my headlights on during the day if I'm on a two-lane road with passing over the center line. I've had that habit since I was learning to drive. Picked it up from my father, who picked it up on family trips to Canada when we were kids. I find its substantially easier to see an oncoming car if its lights are on, especially if it's summer and you get that shimmering mirage effect on the road.

I can see headlamps improving the conspicuity of a dark-colored car, especially in open woodland.  My own car is white, but I do turn on the headlamps in broad daylight when I think I may be camouflaged (e.g. oncoming traffic blinded by snow).

All too many people seem to think the sole purpose of lights is to help YOU see. I wonder if this is why we seem to have a plague of dark-colored SUVs being driven without headlights at night.

I think always-on instrument panel lighting is a factor, since it removes difficulty reading the gauges as a cue to the driver to turn on the lights or, in the case of an unfamiliar car, pull over to the side of the road to research how to turn on the lights.  This works in conjunction with a lack of uniformity in lighting control design that has resulted partly from former luxury-car features like automatic headlamp control going downmarket before their basic ergonomics have been shaken down across the entire auto industry.

My 1994 Saturn SL2 (manufactured a year or two before S-Series cars were equipped with DRLs) is simple and old-school:  headlamps have to be turned on and off manually (no shutoff to protect the battery), and IP lights are on only when the headlamps are on.

In contrast, the 2005 Toyota Camry has DRLs and always-on IP lights and will not turn headlamps on automatically unless the lights selector switch (part of the turn signal stalk) is turned to "AUTO DRL" (or possibly "AUTO DRL OFF" as an alternate).  The IP lights do dim when the headlamps are turned on, but the difference in lighting level is subtle.  There is a headlamps-on telltale but since it looks nothing like the international low-beams symbol, it means nothing to a driver who has not read the manual carefully.  The lighting controls are arranged so that if one driver turns the headlamps to full manual operation, as is necessary to use the foglamps, and forgets to turn them back to "AUTO DRL," the next driver will likely have no idea the headlamps are not going to come on automatically until it is almost pitch-black dark.

The 2009 Honda Fit has DRLs (no option to disable that I can find without combing through the manual) but no automatic headlamp control.  Since it also has always-on IP lighting, it is possible to drive a considerable distance in pitch-black dark thinking the low beams are on and wondering why they are working so poorly.  It does have a headlamps-on telltale that looks recognizably like the international low-beams symbol, but the absence of it will not necessarily mean anything to a driver who has not seen it light up when the headlamps are turned on.  (When I borrowed this car for a trip to Colorado in 2012, I actually made the mistake of driving at night on DRLs only, despite downloading and skimming the manual.)

Wichita has just one commercial airport and its annual passenger numbers (about 1.4 million PATM, IIRC) amount to about 0.2% of the metropolitan area population, so I don't see a lot of cars (of whatever color) driving after dark without lights.  On the other hand, the Baltimore-Washington CSA has 9.3 million people while the three major commercial airports each serve several multiples of that (22 million PATMs each at Dulles and BWI, 20 million PATMs at Washington National), so the roads around you are full of people driving rental cars without any idea of how to work the lights.

One could argue that these people should be downloading the manuals for their rentals and reading them in advance so that they are fully up to speed when they are handed the keys at the rental car counter.  However, manuals for new cars these days run to about 300 pages (not including additional volumes dealing with GPS and infotainment systems), so realistically they are not going to get the information they need unless they have a checklist of basic vehicle tasks (such as turning on headlamps and verifying that they are on) to use as a study aid.  Moreover, owing to the rental car companies' bait-and-switch tactics, the car whose manual you downloaded and read is not necessarily the same as the car you get when you turn up at the airport.

I know of no good solution to this problem short of standardization carried to a high enough level that study of a manual is not necessary for basic operation of the vehicle lighting system.  We are not there yet.

[roadman]

I think always-on instrument panel lighting is a factor, since it removes difficulty reading the gauges as a cue to the driver to turn on the lights

I confess that, in the first few months I owned my 2012 Focus, I would ocassionally forgot to turn on my lights at night by thinking "Oh, the instrument lights are on, so the lights are on."  Fortunately, I never drove very far before I realized the lights were not on. 

[cjk374]

If you're gonna have a night speed limit, why not have a rain one too? Or an ice one?

Alabama has wet speed limits on US 231 and 431 south of Huntsville, but the goog's images apparently aren't new enough.

The one on US 431 "going over the mountain" (from California Street to Hampton Cove) are the only wet speed limits I know of around here.

I saw signs posted for 60 dry/50 wet going up one side of the mountain, but can't remember where...I could swear we were northbound headed to Huntsville.

[UCFKnights]

Personally, in my car, the instrument lighting is bright during the day (when headlights are off) and goes to extreme dim lighting at night which prevents glare from it, so its real easy to tell if the headlights are on. Dim IP = lights on. Bright IP = sun is out, more light required to make it easier to read. When I drive my other car that just has backlighting tied to the headlights, I find I can't tell during the day if they are on (although at night, it is obvious)