Blinded By the Lights: Feds to Study Vehicle Lighting Effects

The lights atop your ambulances and fire trucks are your friends—aren’t they? They help alert other drivers to your presence, warn them you’re in a hurry, prompt them to get out of your way. A benefit to everyone’s safety, right?

Perhaps not. As providers continue to die in vehicle crashes, some are questioning even the most basic premises of emergency-service driving. What if such lights disorient other drivers, and actually decrease the overall level of safety on the road?

A new research project is aimed at shedding some light on the issue of lights. The U.S. Fire Administration, with funding from the Department of Transportation’s ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems) Joint Program Office, will work with the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) to study the effects of emergency lighting on other motorists, and find ways to mitigate any risks it might pose.

The project has its genesis in the Fire Service Emergency Vehicle Safety Initiative, a joint USFA/DOT effort to reduce the number of firefighter deaths on America’s roads (about 25% of all on-duty fatalities). In examining issues of human performance, technology/vehicle design and operations, participants discovered that motorists may be disoriented by use of emergency warning lights.

The lighting study will look at such technical aspects as flash rate and lighting design (covering incandescent, halogen and strobe lights, as well as light-emitting diodes [LEDs]), the status of affected drivers (normal, drowsy, impaired) and operational factors.

The project is estimated for completion in early 2005. Its results may be forwarded to national consensus standards organizations such as the National Fire Protection Association, and may also be incorporated in SAE standards. And in another step stemming from the Vehicle Safety Initiative, major national fire-service organizations will work to develop targeted programs for their constituencies to help implement the Initiative’s findings.

For more on the lighting project and the Fire Service Emergency Vehicle Safety Initiative, see www.usfa.fema.gov/inside-usfa/research/safety/vehicle.shtm.

—JE