Authority tips on night time driving that will help keep you safe

• Make sure your vehicle is in good working order, especially your lights and brakes. Proper car care goes a long way with driving safety.
• Dirty, pitted, or fogged windshields and cloudy headlights will definitely reduce your already limited night vision and increase the glare of oncoming headlights.
• 85% of all information needed to drive is collected by the eyes. Your ability to collect needed information is severely reduced at night. Time is needed to recover from exposure to bright lights.
• At night, the eyes lose the ability to distinguish color, determine depth perception, and determine contrast.
• Drive with high beams wherever possible (visibility of 400-500 feet compared to 200 feet or less for low beams) without creating a traffic hazard for oncoming traffic.
• Glare recovery is a major concern at night. The average person needs 10 seconds to recover from glare. Recovery time increases as persons age. The average person will travel about 1/4 mile with limited vision when traveling at 60 MPH at night after experiencing glare.

• Look beyond the oncoming headlight beam (not directly into it).
• Reduce the illumination of the dashboard lights (eliminates glare into the eyes or onto the windshield).
• After experiencing glare from an oncoming vehicle, gradually let off the gas, look to the right slightly, resume normal driving after the vehicle passes, and do not blind other drivers with your high beams.
• Clean the windshield inside and out (smokers especially). Make sure the windshield washer reservoir is full and operational. Windshield wipers should be clean and free of defects.
• Clean the headlights or have them professionally restored (our department uses New Lite headlight cleaner on all our police cruisers and department vehicles- www.mdwholesale). Dirty or worn and cloudy headlights will decrease visibility by as much as 90%.
• Collisions between deer and vehicles are all too common in Broome County and the surrounding areas. These crashes result in injuries to people, thousands of dollars worth of damage to vehicles and often, the death of the deer. Most deer related collisions occur at dusk and dawn when deer are most active and are the result of poor vision due to dirty windshields and  cloudy headlights.

With permission from the New York Broome County Police Traffic Division's Traffic Safety Team.