The writer on Freakonomics talks of using high beams to drive in the rain. That’s a great way to bounce the light right back into your own face.

The other thing that might be mentioned here is how fast a car will turn on its high beams after passing you, or you them. I like to play this “quickdraw game,” and I have never been outdrawn yet.

John
Number one Google hit for “best driver in the world”

I myself was specifically instructed to look at the reflective paint line marking the right edge of the lane as a guide. I imagined that this rule fostered in fellow drivers a “don’t be like those jerks who might blind you” ethos, i.e. that the strategy for coping with the improper brights of others is a reminder to not use improper brights oneself.

Kare Rumar’s paper states: “drivers very often dim too early from the visibility point of view. Research clearly shows that visibility for both opposing drivers would improve if they dimmed their high beams at shorter distances. These findings underscore the fact that the fear of late dimming, as illustrated in the dimming legislations in all U.S. states, is exaggerated.”

I find that, in a two-opposing-cars situation, the driver who dims first encourages the second driver to reciprocate. When I drive, I dim my lights earlier than strictly necessary to remind the oncoming driver to do the same; by the time the other driver gets the hint and dims, hopeably the separation between cars is still ample enough to avoid being blinded.

So maybe the combined benefit of not blinding the oncoming driver AND improving the likelihood of not being blinded in return is indeed larger than the benefit of keeping your own brights burning. Besides, as a loss-averse person, I value not being blind much more highly than I value driving with brights instead of dims.

Next, I’d like to see if people dim less quickly/often when faced with oncoming lowbeams instead of oncoming highbeams, and also if drivers who sit high in tall vehicles are less likely to notice blinding effects and therefore are less likely to dim their own lights.

The above is a link to a collision report between an overturned semi-trailer and a freight train, rural Australia, 2006.

One of the factors of the collision is that the freight train engineers had “dimmed” their locomotive’s headlights shortly before the collision due to a motor vehicle passing on an adjacent road.

The detailed report outlines a raft of minor, preventable errors that occured prior to the collision, however the official category the Austrlaian Transport Safety Bureau placed this incident in was “accident”.

It seems like a pretty obvious case of self-interest at work to me.