Blinded by the Light

Are LED headlights causing more car crashes?

Like the average American, I’m not getting any younger, so my eyes don’t deal as well with blinding headlights as they used to.

From Ringer:

Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars

The crusade against bright headlights has picked up speed in recent years, in large part due to a couple of Reddit nerds. Could they know what’s best for the auto industry better than the auto industry itself?

By Nate Rogers, Dec. 3, 2024, 3:30 am PT • 22 min

Are motorists getting blinded by by the light?

Perhaps. Traffic deaths in the U.S. have gone up over the last decade, although not in most other advanced countries. But, weirdly, pedestrian deaths are up far more than motorist deaths. As I wrote a year ago:

Since 2009, the worst year of the Great Recession, pedestrian death rates per 100,000 people increased 63 percent by 2022, while motorist (driver and passengers) death rates per capita have gone up only 10 percent.

And most of the increase in pedestrian deaths are at night. From the NYT:

Evidently, brighter LED headlights haven’t been doing a lot of good at keeping drivers from running over pedestrians even though they presumably give you more time to react to a jaywalker. Perhaps LEDs are actually increasing pedestrian deaths by temporarily blinding drivers so they don’t see jaywalkers step off the curb behind the new car that just went past?

But the evidence is mostly that pedestrians are walking worse than they used to: Asian pedestrians haven’t been getting themselves killed more often, while black pedestrian deaths are way, way up during the Ferguson and Floyd Effects:

So, I dunno.

One of the experts quoted in the Ringer article on LEDs seems a little nuts:

“We’re all like human experiments,” said Mark Baker, when I called him to talk about his nonprofit, the Soft Lights Foundation, the mission of which is to advocate “for the protection of people and the environment from the harms of visible light radiation emitted by products that use light-emitting diodes.” Baker’s concern is with the broader integration of LEDs in society, but he shows up regularly in the headlight world, having recently organized a petition that gathered nearly 60,000 signatures demanding that NHTSA limit headlight intensity. Unlike Morgan and Gatto, however, this isn’t a nights and weekends gig for him.

Baker was working as a middle school math teacher in Northern California and thought of himself “as a regular person” before the mass implementation of LEDs. Then the world shifted while he was in traffic one day around 2016. He remembers looking at a Cadillac that had daytime-running LEDs—the non-primary headlights that run at all times on many modern vehicles—and “when my brain saw this light, I couldn’t look away,” he said. “Even though it was intense, I was drawn to it, and I started to feel a presence I’ve never felt, like evil.” As LEDs became more common, Baker became overwhelmed and had a mental breakdown, ending up in the hospital. He was diagnosed with mild autism spectrum disorder—which he says explains his hyper-fixation on bright lights—and couldn’t go back to work because of the LEDs in his classroom.

When I spoke to Baker, 59, he was living in a sparsely lit rural area that he moved to with his partner, where he had been focusing on the Soft Lights Foundation since founding it in 2021. Baker told me he’s heard from a variety of people with various diagnoses—epilepsy, photophobia, migraines, lupus, autism—who struggle with LEDs. “I’ve got a guy that calls me from time to time wanting to commit suicide because of these LED lights in the Blue Ridge [Mountains],” he said. “We know that individuals are highly individualized. Each of us is going to react differently.”

Baker is among a group of people who feel that NHTSA, which is responsible for regulating automotive safety, should have adjusted the rule book to accommodate LEDs before they were allowed in new cars. This was how NHTSA approached previous fundamental changes to headlight technology, Baker points out. As headlights went from circular to rectangular and from sealed beams to replaceable bulbs, the rules and accommodations changed with them. “Well, when LED headlights came out,” Baker said, “they skipped all that. They just started selling cars with the LED headlights.”

On the other hand, if LEDs tend to drive the nuttier members of society even crazier, well, we should bear that in mind.