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Re: the TRUTH about Daytime Running Lights !!!!!!



Paul Lu (CindyLu@Mindspring.com) wrote:

: >If every car having "notice me" lights on in front is so distracting,
: >then why aren't you also opposed to tail-lights at night?  After all,
: >every moving vehicle is also supposed to have them on, and their only
: >purpose is signal "notice me!" to other drivers.
:
: Bob, you are comparing apple to orange here.
:
: In the night, you don't see a car in front of you without
: its rear light.

Not true.  After all, (full-strength) headlights illuminate your field
of view, don't they?  Tail-lights at night (and turn signals and brake
lights at any time of day, for that matter), have only one purpose:
to shout "notice me" to other drivers who ideally would have noticed
the other vehicle anyway.  But we don't live in an ideal world, which
is why these sorts of vehicle lights sometimes come in handy as
additional measures of safety.

BTW, I noticed that you've totally avoided my original point, which
was to rebut the bogus zero-sum "people shouting in a room" analogy.

: If DRL is so good, here is a hardball question for you:
:
: Why is the rear light "just a pair of small red bulb?"
: Isn't a set of DRL much brighter and draw more attention?

This seems obvious: the situation where you see the other vehicle's
headlights or DRLs in front of you is when it is approaching you in a
lane of oncoming traffic, but the situation where you see its
tail-lights in front of you is when you are overtaking it while
traveling in the same direction.  Do the math:  the closing time for
the two vehicles in the first scenario will be an order of magnitude
briefer than that for the second scenario.  Having the headlights be
brighter than the tail-lights compensates for the shorter closing time
by making the headlights visible from a greater distance.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Goudreau			Data General Corporation
goudreau@dg-rtp.dg.com		62 Alexander Drive	
+1 919 248 6231			Research Triangle Park, NC  27709, USA


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