Submitted by lil_layne t3_y0dqj7 in askscience
I’m just curious about this since I am someone who lives west to my workplace and will pretty much always face right at the sun when I either commute to or from work everyday. It seems like it is much harder to drive when facing the sun commuting at these times and I’m curious if there is any data out there to support this if more accidents are caused by this.
Had cataracts forming in my left eye due to East then West travel. Along with sun spots on left side of my face and left forearm. Had to use a 'sleeve' and full patch block on my left cheek/forehead to defeat the Sun affects.
20 years commuting into the sun. Cataract surgery will most likely be next spring.
Just curious, did you regularly wear sunglasses during your commute?
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Videos of people driving in thick fog would contradict your assumption.
As they say in California drivers ed...the thicker the fog, the quicker the car.
Surely driving in thick fog is dangerous, and it's every driver's duty to get out of dangerous situations as quickly as possible.
When you have poor visibility people have a tendency to lean forwards towards the windscreen in a subconscious attempt to see anything a little better. And when they do that, they also tend to step on the accellerator a little harder.
This also happens in blizzards and during rain at night.
If they happen to see the rear lights of a car in front, they tend to 'glue themselves to it' and rear-ending those who drive safely.
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It could be that drivers going away from the sun get hit by reflections of sunlight from really unexpected angles, flashing and temporarily blinding the drivers who see it.
I’ve actually heard of some bad accidents caused by the rainclouds suddenly parting and the sun blasting through from a late afternoon angle.
I actually have no idea. Conjecture is fun.
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That's just a lawyers' website advertising their services and doesn't have any data, that I can find?
2nd paragraph:
“According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, sun glare causes approximately 9,000 accidents per year, and is the second environmental-related reason drivers get into crashes, with the first being slick roads.”
I was hit by a left-turning car while riding my bike through a lighted intersection last year when the sun was low in the sky behind me. The guy never saw me because the sun glare against his windshield made everything beyond his hood invisible.
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Naturally, I come across this when I'm away from work for a few days and have no access to research I did on this topic. There are studies, but they aren't great -- definitions for 'sun involved' are broad enough you can't actually claim the sun was involved or not and there aren't any controls.
Numbers are from memory, but what I recall from a few papers which dove deeper into it was if the sun is within 25 degrees of what you're looking at (the study came from tunnel exit design in Spain, you don't want a tunnel exit pointing at the sun) you can have issues with sun glare. This angle increases with age.
If I remember I can try and dig up some cites in a few days.
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You've got to have something seriously good going on to make me pull off to the left to visit your gas station.
Easier to make a right turn than a left through oncoming traffic. Most people would stop at the one on the right. But coming the opposite way, the other one would be on the right, so more people coming from that direction would stop at that one. This is assuming prices are the same of course. Similarly, if there are two gas stations on the same side of the road but on different sides of the intersection, more people will stop at the one before the light as opposed to the one after the light, even if they're going that way.
No real study to cite but my buddy owns a few gas stations and is real picky about locations, infrastructure and demographics when buying stores.
Generally speaking its human nature to do what's more comfortable for you, so most people will choose the more comfortable location
I'm curious what your buddy who owns a few gas stations thinks about the impending transition to EVs. Is he/she expanding their holdings, looking to sell in the next few years, transition to charging, or going to ride it all into the ground?
Long way from gas being out the door. Havent really discussed it as the walls arent really closing in on him in that regard just yet.
Even still, he makes as much selling knick knacks and vendor items as he does selling gas, so i'd imagine worst case scenario he just converts into a liquor store/convenience store.
Edit: Still expanding. Added a burger counter to one, huge snack and soda zones, nicer coolers and better shelving, cool lights, beer license at one of them. I'm sure if the stars were to align he would buy another one, even given the threat of an EV future
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I once read a study about this kind of subject where there were and abnormal amount of traffic accidents near Paris and it was concluded that sunlight coming through the trees at particular angles at a particular time of day was triggering epileptic fits in some drivers. It’s been forty years since I first came across the study. Would not know where to begin now.
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Slightly tangentially, there was a report in World Medicine (when I was a lad, so some time ago) about a man who had an accident driving home, he couldn't remember the accident at all, it was thought to be retrograde amnesia, but then he said he often arrived home without remembering the drive. It transpired that he drove past a stand of trees, and at a particular time of day, the sun shining through the trees could cause a strobing effect in the cockpit of the car inducing a mild seizure - he had no prior history of epilepsy, but further studies showed that he was susceptible.
Not very scientific, but I recall hearing that the accident rate is higher during sunrise on the Schuylkill Expressway on the part of the road called the Conshohocken curve. Unfortunately I'm struggling to find an article to back that up.
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They need to do studies for intersections where the road is lined up directly east to west. I nearly got hit by 10 cars that couldn't see their light was red, but still ran the light because "everyone else" was passing through so it must be green. Luckily I saw they were not slowing down so I didn't go despite having the green light.
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Ok, my followup. There are some further citations I stumbled across while making this list which I need to track down, but these are some nice ones which I was able to obtain.
Much of what I found when I looked into this a while back were studies with poor methodologies and no real dig into the numbers. There's a paper by Sudeshna Mitra titled “Sun glare and road safety: An empirical investigation of intersection crashes" which looked at crashes in Arizona, but had the bizarre premise that peak hour traffic at intersections were the same for all legs in the AM and PM, i.e., you wouldn't have higher traffic east in the morning, and then west in the afternoon. Having spent several summers doing intersection counts that's just wrong. But it's the first paper I came across that looked into the issue.
A better series of papers come from Japan, with the downside that I could only find one that was in English. (Hagita, Kenji and Kenji Mori. “The effect of sun glare on traffic accidents in Chiba Prefecture, Japan.” Asian transport studies 3 (2014): 205-219.) These authors dig more into collisions and glare, focusing on sun position and collision types. They also point out weaknesses in earlier papers, including Mitra. This is a good one to read and is the only one with a focus on actual crash analysis. I wish I could read their other papers as they appear to go into it in more detail, but again, Japanese. :(
Another paper comes from Spain and focuses more on the when and why the sun can be a problem. They came up with the ‘cone’ of interference for sun glare. If you’re under 40 and the sun is within 19 degrees of your focal point the glare will interfere enough with your vision to be a problem. The angle increases with age, and they use 25 degrees for drivers over 60. (Jurado-Piña, Rafael et al. “Methodology to Analyze Sun Glare Related Safety Problems at Highway Tunnel Exits.” Journal of Transportation Engineering-ASCE 136 (2010): 545-553.) Of interest is their solar graph for the year, showing sun position by altitude, allowing you to place your cone in relation to the sun position for the year to see if you’re designing a future road problem. These authors have done other papers with focus on this graph for road design. Well worth a read.
I only have the cites in front of me at the moment, so numbers are from memory.
This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!
ComprehensiveGas8769 t1_irtm6mr wrote
From the data it seems like those in your situation have a higher propensity to develop cataracts and/or minor sunburns on your retinas. Ironically it was found that there’s actually less accidents facing the sun than away from the sun. I assume it must be that people are more careful when they can’t see well versus can see well.