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Originally Posted by rkbharat What reports? I am kind don't agree on this. Can you please share the source? |
Just search for "Night Driving" on the internet and you will get hundreds of relevant reports. You can go through them and come to your own conclusion.
I am including couple of extracts from such reports here.
1)
Driving improvements to night vision In a bid to reduce the annual death of more than 50,000 people and the countless severe injuries on Europe’s roads, future onboard night vision systems have been developed that highlight unexpected obstacles and improve driver visibility.
The system, developed by a team of carmakers, automotive suppliers and university researchers under the IST programme’s EDEL project, is expected to increase safety by highlighting unexpected, sudden events; improving visibility of road signs; assisting drivers on unknown roads and the timely detection of obstacles invisible to the human eye under night driving conditions.
The 30 per cent of road accidents that happen at night involve half of the people killed on the roads. Darkness is a major risk factor: while drivers travel just 28 per cent of their miles at night, 55 per cent of all motor fatalities occur after sunset. Ninety per cent of a driver’s reaction depends on vision, which is severely limited at night. Depth perception and colour recognition are also compromised after sunset. Other dangers besides reduced visibility include fatigue, drowsiness, blurring of peripheral vision and impairment in judgement of distances and movements.
[The numbers behind these statistics do not reveal how many accidents occurred because of lack of visibility at night, but introducing an effective and easy-to-use system to enhance the driver’s perception would help prevent accidents and ultimately reduce fatalities and injuries for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. For example, a pedestrian wearing dark clothes is only visible at a distance of 100 feet to a driver using low beams
2)
Official accident and traffic density statistics on Swedish highways were used to compute the relative risk (Odds Ratio - OR) of being injured or killed in a traffic accident at different times of day. After removing accidents due to alcohol 10344 accidents remained for computations, and the period 10:00h-11:00h was used as the
reference pointThe highest total risk was seen at 0400h (OR=5.7, Confidence interval = 5.6-5.8), with an OR of 11.4 (Ci=10.3-12.5) for fatal accidents at the same point. The same pattern was exhibited by single vehicle, head-on, and "other" (e.g., turning off the road) accidents, whereas overtaking and rear-end accidents did not show clear 24 hour patterns. Retaining alcohol-related accidents approximately doubled the nighttime peak for total accidents. During the winter, the peak of total accidents occurred at 03:00h (OR=3.8, Ci=3.5-4.0), five hours before sunrise, whereas the summer peak occurred at 04:00h (OR=11.6, Ci=11.3-11.9), shortly after the early summer sunrise and with consistently higher nighttime risk than for winter driving. It was concluded that early morning driving is several times more dangerous than driving during the forenoon. Apart from alcohol the effect seems related to sleepiness, but not to darkness.
Also see the attached Doc file.
These rep[orts are of developed countries, Think about our highways.