Mark Stoller and his wife, Andra, moved to Falcon with their family in 2007. Both are U.S. Air Force veterans and enjoy life with their daughters, extended family and adopted rescue dogs in Latigo. Mark is fortunate to have his wife and daughters as his muse for topics, people to meet and places to investigate.
Headlights hazard
By Mark Stoller
I’m not going to lie. Lately, I’ve turned into an angry driver. Working the nightshift means I drive to work in the dark during the winter months.
Why? Why do the oncoming headlights have to be so unbearably bright? I feel as though the inside of my eyes are seared by the oncoming beams.
It’s a fact that car headlights are getting brighter. The motor industry is continually boasting about how it has improved headlight performance “… to keep drivers safe.”
Meanwhile, eye specialists say the downside of new headlight technology and performance is that the vision of oncoming drivers is increasingly impaired.
The 1990s marked the debut of two types of lighting that have since gone on to dominate the headlight market — High-Intensity Discharge (HID) and Light Emitting Diode (LED).
HID headlights consist of two electrodes that support an arc of light within a tube and are commonly known as xenon. LED headlights are charged, glowing electrons.
Further innovations in headlights produced the emergence of the laser light. The laser light works by generating concentrated light and turning it white with a lens. This new technology has been confined to luxury Audi and BMW models.
Lumens is the measurement of how much light is emitted from a bulb. Traditional halogen lightbulbs are 1,300 lumens, LED bulbs are 1,600 lumens, HID bulbs are 3,000 lumens and the newest laser bulbs are 6,400 lumens.
The human eye has evolved to allow it to adapt to a wide range of light levels, from bright sunlight to almost total darkness. The problem with LED headlights is that they are incompatible with dark-adapted human eyesight — particularly for older drivers — they are too bright, too blue, too concentrated and blinding over too long a distance.
The bluer spectrum of light from LED and HID headlights disables the night-adapted vision of the human eye to a much greater extent than that of conventional halogen headlights. The bluer the light, the brighter the human eye thinks it is.
Your eyes have a built-in UV defense: the cornea. Blue and violet light, because of its shorter wavelength, have more energy and pass through the cornea at sub-455-nm wavelength that can damage the photoreceptors in your retina.
So what can you do to stay safe when your night driving vision is impacted by the bright headlights?
Ensure your windshield and personal eyeglasses are clean of film and dirt from inside/outside to reduce light scatter; increase the brightness of your dash lights to constrict your pupils; add supplements, such as lutein and zeaxanthin, to strengthen and reduce light sensitivity in your eyes; look down to the right side of the road with both eyes or close only your left eye until the offending lights have passed to preserve night vision; and lastly, purchase protective eyeglasses to avoid glare from oncoming headlights.
There are a variety of glasses and lenses that aid in reducing the effect of the glare from headlights. A company called Zenni sells prescription glasses ($50 to $60) with UV protection and filter for nighttime driving; yellow tinted, UV400 protection, wrap-around driving glasses are available on Amazon for $17 to $30.
I purchased, from Amazon, the “Night Driving Glasses for Men Women Fit Over Sunglasses Anti-Glare Polarized HD Night Vision Glasses” for $18.
I look very octogenarian when I wear them over my prescription glasses, but I feel they make a big enough difference in taking the extra bright, piercing lights and reducing it to a more tolerable level. My sight picture is clear and I can see red/yellow/green/white in their distinct colors. I’m less angry when I wear them.
