Amid a soaring road toll, a Victorian Liberal MP is pushing for new laws that would require drivers to keep their car headlights on during the day in a bid to save lives and prevent injuries.
Upper house MP Nick McGowan says the proposal is “common sense” and would not cost anything to immediately implement. He also wants Victoria to lobby the federal government to make daytime running lights (DRLs) mandatory on all new cars.
What are DRLs?
DRLs are additional lights that activate automatically when the car is turned on, regardless of what time of day it is.
They turn on even when a car’s main lights are turned off.
DRLs have been mandatory for all new cars in the European Union since 2011 and in trucks and buses since 2012. They are also mandatory in Japan and Canada.
Australia is yet to make it mandatory for DRLs to be built into all new cars.
Do they actually improve safety?
Prof Stuart Newstead, the director of Monash University’s Accident Research Centre, said driving with your headlights on in the day could have benefits.
“If you put your headlights on, it’s likely there will be some benefit because you’re changing the vehicle contrast,” he said.
But he said it was not possible to measure the impact of using DRLs because of the difficulty in obtaining data about which cars have their headlights turned on.
Newstead co-published a study in the Journal of Safety Research in February that investigated the impact of DRLs overseas and called for the federal government to consider mandating DRLs on new vehicle models.
The study found DRLs reduced daytime multi-vehicle crash risk by almost 9%. During dawn and dusk, where visibility is reduced, the effectiveness jumped to about 20%.
Newstead said Australia could easily follow other countries in mandating DRLs for new car design. He said DRLs were superior because the technology did not require people to remember to turn on their headlights, and that most studies that have investigated DRLs have found positive benefits.
Dr Ingrid Johnston, the chief executive of the Australasian College of Road Safety, said there needs to be more research on the use of headlights as a stopgap measure for vehicles without DRLs.
She agreed that the downside of daylight headlight use is that it requires drivers to remember to turn their lights on.
“Drivers have their own rule of thumb of when they need to turn their lights on and it’s not always appropriate,” she said.
Johnson said Australia lags behind on vehicle safety standards compared with regions like Europe, and argued the evidence is “reasonably clear” that DRLs improve visibility and the judging of speed, particularly around dawn and dusk.
“This is not even in the pipeline for us and there is a long list [of] Australia design rules [that] are so far behind what is normal in Europe,” she said.
“We just rely on seeing these features more often on new vehicles coming into the country. That’s fine but it doesn’t give the impetus for change that making them mandatory does.”
Russell White, the founder and chief executive of the Australian Road Safety Foundation, said increased headlight use would help improve visibility for drivers.
“It’s the simple thing and cost-effective to do but it won’t dissolve responsibility from individuals to be more situational aware,” he said.
What do the politicians say?
McGowan said while DRLs won’t be a magic bullet, mandating their use will improve safety without costing owners any money.
“We can’t sit by and do nothing … when we have clear evidence that by simply turning our lights on we can reduce the likelihood of death or serious injury on our roads,” he said.
Daniel Andrews, the Victorian premier, isn’t ruling out such a move, saying he was happy to consider proposals.
He said the state’s approach would be guided by advice from Victoria Police and the Transport Accident Commission.
