Hello and welcome to the first blog post accompanying my YouTube channel - The Ethical Optician: advice information to help you get better eyecare and eyewear.
Today I'm going to talk about glare particularly in reference to night driving, but its obviously relevant to pedestrians out on the street or people on bikes etc.
When people talk about glare everyone gets very obsessed about car headlights, particularly modern car headlights. People say “they're too bright” and “they're not properly aligned” and I agree, there is an issue with modern car headlights - the designers of cars seem to be thinking about the driver rather than the whole road environment. But, in our experience a lot of night driving glare is made a lot worse because people are not wearing the correct spectacles for driving when they drive. Now that's either because they haven't had an eye test to see if specs would help or they do not wear that they have been advised to wear.
We often hear the excuse among lines “oh, I don't need glasses for short journey because I know I'm going I don't need to see the signs” - which I tend to respond, “yeah and what about spotting whether the child is going to cross the road or whether that's cyclist is going to to come around that parked car” or something like that.
So, the advice here is that if you find yourself complaining about glare at night, the first thing you need to do is book an eye examination because we need determine whether it's a health problem with your eye particularly in the clear media of the eye. What do I mean by the clear media? I mean the cornea and the lens which are both supposed to be clear but if they're not clear then any haze will cause glare glare/dazzle - not just at night, but in low sunlight.
The most common thing we think about in terms of disturbance to the media is cataract (a future vieo will come on those) but, for example if your eyes drying out your cornea will not be as clear too. We need to work out whether there is a health and then after that we can then look at whether there is an prescription. We find that some people say “oh, well I don't need to wear them, I pass the number plate test”. We say that’s all very well, but the legal limit is really not that stringent.
I tend to advise that if you don't wear your specs for driving and you have an incident, then the least worse outcome is that you would feel bad that you weren't wearing them knowing that your vision was better wearing them. Worse outcomes are deaths and serious injuries.
To summarise: if you find yourself complaining about glare, first of all take responsibility for yourself and make sure your eyes are healthy, make sure that if you there is a prescription that makes your vision at all clearer in the distance that you wear them whenever you drive. That will mean you're doing everything yourself to minimise glare. Yes you need an ranti-eflection coating on your lenses yes you need to keep your lenses and windscreen clean etc etc, but do everything you can first before putting it all on car designers - who as I said at the beginning do have something to think about.
