It is an all too common misconception that yellow tinted or yellow polarized night driving glasses are beneficial for night time driving. The thought is, the yellow or amber color reduces glare and improves contrast. However, in reality, when driving at night or dusk in already limited lighting conditions, ANY tint further reduces the amount of light transmitted to the eye, and consequently, further impairs vision. The problem is compounded as the yellow tint gives the wearer the impression they are seeing better, when in fact the reverse is actually true.
“Yellow ‘Night Driving’ lenses have been shown to provide no benefit in seeing ability at night. They are even hazardous, because they give the driver a feeling of seeing better, which no one has yet been able to explain. Studies have shown that they actually impair visual performance and retard glare recovery. Many promoters have made unfounded claims for the ability of amber to improve night vision. They have employed mass solicitation, usually by mail. The Federal Trade Commission has correctly ruled that such practices are illegal since the lenses do not perform as claimed.” – Forensic Aspects of Vision and Highway Safety”, Merrill J. Allen, O.D., Ph.D., Et al.
While yellow lenses can be effective for foggy or hazy daylight conditions, they are not effective against headlight glare and should not be worn at dusk or night. If glare from headlights is a problem, the first step should be a thorough eye examination, as this could be an early indication of cataracts or other medical conditions.
“So-called night driving glasses are generally amber tinted eyewear meant to reduce the glare of oncoming headlights. While they may make the driver feel more comfortable, they also reduce the wearers visibility of the darker portions of the roadway.” – Sunglass Association of America
The best option for night time driving is a pair of spectacles with clear lenses and an AR coating. The AR coating is beneficial in two ways. First, it minimizes internal reflections within the lenses, reducing halo problems, and second, it increases the transmittance of light through the lens to the eye. However, it is important to note, if a patient does not normally wear spectacles, AR coated lenses, or any other type of night driving glasses will not improve night vision, as AR coatings only minimize aberrations that are inherent in ophthalmic lenses and night driving glasses will simply serve to introduce those abberations to the wearer’s vision.
Tips for optimal night time driving vision:
- Make sure eyes are examined regularly
- Always wear an up-to-date prescription
- Lenses worn should be clear with an AR coating
- Ensure lenses are clean
- Ensure windshield is clean
- Ensure headlights are clean and properly aligned
Responsible dispensers of ophthalmic lenses should discourage the use of tinted, polarized, or photochromic lenses in night time or dusk driving conditions and not participate in solicitation or marketing of so-called night driving glasses by irresponsible manufacturers.
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So let us evaluate the usefulness of your advise:
* Make sure eyes are examined regularly
* Always wear an up-to-date prescription
- The usual, “consult a doctor” cop out, notably coming from a service provider.
* Lenses worn should be clear with an AR coating – Actually useful advice.
* Ensure lenses are clean
* Ensure windshield is clean
* Ensure headlights are clean and properly aligned
Common sense here. You might as well add Tip #7 – Don’t be stupid. By the way, most modern vehicles do not require headlamp alignment, and even if they did, it’s the other drivers’ improper lights that cause most of the problem. You are better served having your headlamp lenses polished such that you have a clear beam yourself to focus upon, being less likely to be visually lured into glare.
Also, you fail to explain how night driving glasses will not improve night vision if the patient does not normally wear spectacles.
G.T.,
Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet, that I am aware of, when it comes to helping people with problems seeing while driving at night. This is why companies are able to make money selling “magic” night driving glasses that likely do more harm than good. This is also why we need to address the basics. While these points may seem stupid, its not all that hard to imagine people with dirty lenses, dirty windshields, and dirty headlamps complaining of night vision difficulties.
You are 100% correct about polishing headlamps. I recently had this done and difference was astounding.
Regarding drivers that do not normally wear corrective lenses, night driving lenses present the same set of problems. Any lens (clear or tinted) you put in front of your eye reduces the amount of available light and introduces aberrations.
-Keith
Great comments all. I am 62 year old male with good eyesight, no glasses, however i do no enjoy driving at night , the glare from todays extremely powerful headlamps is most annoying and dangerous and fatiguing.To help with you own eye fatigue i have found that by turning down your own interior dashboard lights , including your radio,(satellite or standard ), cd player, gps , well you get the picture,it reduces the amount of glare into your eyes dramatically, similar to having someone shining a light at you. You will find you are not squinting and your eyes feel better rested…………works for me and i was free.
Gordo
I’m an over-the-road driver who’s found wearing yellow tinted glasses at night to be a great help, and superb when it comes to rainy or foggy nights. For me, the yellow tint brightens the night, deepens contrast, and eases the strain which comes from the bright lights of cars coming your way. Say what you will about how they don’t help, or shouldn’t help drivers at night. But I’m the real thing, with a million and half miles behind the wheel of a big rig in the last ten years, and I find yellow tinted glasses to be a great help.
I have seen several different eye doctors over the years (changes in insurance) and they all informed me that I should use either a pink or yellow tint when driving at night because the muscles in my eye are slow to dilate. In the city, this isn’t too big of a problem. But when I drive through the countryside, there is little ambient light- therefore an oncoming vehicle is BLINDING because too much light is getting into my eyes. Other than this issue, my eyes have been declared perfect- no vision issues.
Just because peoples brights and multiple headlights bother us people who can see perfectly fine at night, does not mean we are going blind. It just means people are inconsiderate, and vehicle manufacturers build brighter lights these days.
I can see perfectly at night, I hardly ever use my bright lights, and I never use my fog lights, like many rude inconsiderate people do these days.
My problem is with the inconsiderate rude people in the world today that won’t dim their lights and the 4 to 6 headlight vehicle drivers. You cannot tell me that our eyes were ever meant to have to endure looking at such things.
If you cannot drive at night without being able to dim your headlights for oncoming vehicles, or you have to drive with more than your regular two headlights, then get off the road at night. Just because you’re blind, don’t blind me………
All of this is great info -esp for those who do have problems with night driving. I have been through the mill of differnt types of glasses (i.e. polarized, amber lens, tinting etc.) after being diagnosed with glaucoma and other acute eye conditions. It is good to know that the clear lens with the AR coating is really the best as I do not drive if I cannot see and neither should anyone else!!
Based on this article, I guess I should just give up night driving all together at age 52! I have tried all their recommendations in the article and they were of no avail, despite the fact that even without my glasses, I see 20/40 or better in each eye according to my eye exams. The only thing that gave me some improvement was a yellow lens. This is just a sad state of affairs!
I take issue with this article which is simplistic and wrong.
The Military, Airline Pilots, Shooting and Fishing enthusiats and most of all photographers commonly use yellow lenses for low light + glare situations.
I take it that you say all the above are fools with no sense and experience.
This very comment
>>They are even hazardous, because they give the driver a feeling of seeing better, which no one has yet been able to explain<<
in your reference just shows the ignorance of the paper writer. He is in fact actually saying: "There is an admitted widespread reproducible beneficial effect which must be nonsense because I cannot explain how it works and I know everything there is to know about vision."
Well try this for size:
Modern headlights are moving to the higher, whiter, bluer frequencies of the visible spectrum. We all have had experience of the nasty (and expensive) blue headlights found as extras on higher priced automobiles. Their glare is almost painful.
If illumination was low and even, then your statement about not reducing the amount of light entering the eye would be correct. But it isn't. The light entering the eyes from oncoming headlights and street lights is of far far greater intensity than the ambient light from the rest of the field of vision. It is this glare that causes the pupils to contract and lose discrimination in the remaining dark areas.
This is so easy to prove, any one can do it. Use your camera on automatic set so the exposure is fixed and the f-stop is automatic. Take a photo with light sources in the field of vision and with the same illumination another photo without the light sources glaring into the lens. In the first photo you will see details in the dark areas, in the second you will see less.
Now the blue-white part of the glare has poorer illumination ability that the yellow-white. It is well known that the lower frequencies penetrate the atmosphere better. The yellow filter reduces the blue-white and your pupils contract less so the *same* amount of light hits the retina, but it is of the more *retinally sensitive* and *atmospherically penetrative* part of the spectrum. The foeva of the retina is hugely more sensitive in the Cyan/Green/Yellow part of the spectrum than the blue.
A vertically polarized lens will entirely stop the reflected glare from a wet road. Unwanted light, that has no beneficial effect and just causes your pupils to contract.
A caveat though, the light in general cut off by grey polarized lenses with a yellow coating may be entirely counter productive.
The problem with Medical Specialists is that they are often quite blind to the world of Physics.
Remember what site this is. LM I would continue to wear the yellow lenses if they work for you as mine does for me. This site belongs to a company that makes eye glasses.
Of course they are going to plug an AR coating on glasses and beg you for your own safety to not wear those driving glasses.
If this company made lenses for those frames, then they would be hawking them!
All the tips they gave us were common sense and they had no answer for those of us who do not wear glasses or have contact lenses.
I will continue to wear my night driving glasses and not listen to a sales rep trying to sell me a pig in a poke.
Rose, we’re not “hawking” anything, only providing what we consider to be the best advise for our eyeglass dispensing customers. If you doubt the veracity of the article, please feel free to do you own research and look at the references yourself. As I said above, sometimes there are no magic bullets, as much as people would like to believe there are.
BTW, we do sell yellow lenses,
however we recommend them for driving in foggy / cloudy conditions or for activities such as shooting, just not driving in the dark.
-K
I read your article and the couple of comments. The thing is that I have had the AR coating on my glasses for driving and working on the computer. It is not the lights used by the citys for lighting the streets so we can see or the traffic lights, it is the cars, trucks and suv’s that have the as we call “blind them if you can’t find them headlight’s” in every shade made on the market. These are the lights that no matter what we do, still effect our driving? What do you suggest for us night drivers that see the eye doctor regularly and do everything else on your list of things to do?
“Responsible dispensers of ophthalmic lenses should discourage the use of tinted, polarized, or photochromic lenses in night time or dusk driving conditions and not participate in solicitation or marketing of so-called night driving glasses by irresponsible manufacturers.”
I agree with this statement except the part “photochromic lenses”. I am of view that photochromic clear lenses with anit-glare coatings could be used for night vision as these lenses change color only during the daylight but not during the night time.
Please clarify if i am wrong.
Thanks.
I think there is both truth and untruth to this article. The claim that “ANY tint further reduces the amount of light transmitted to the eye, and consequently, further impairs vision” is a quantifiable fact. Tinting does reduce light transmission, and less light transmission equals reduced ability to see cars/pedestrians/animals in poor light conditions.
However, the claim that “Yellow ‘Night Driving’ lenses have been shown to provide no benefit in seeing ability at night” is not one that I agree with. My vision is 20/20. I do not wear corrective lenses of any kind and have had my vision checked in the last 12 months. But when I drive at night I see huge “halos” or glare around every light source like headlights and streetlamps. It is much worse in rain, because those light sources and halos are reflected in the road, the windshield, and everywhere else. A brightly lit street at night with lots of oncoming headlights is almost blinding. I have recently started wearing very light sunglasses in those conditions. They are not yellow lenses, they are a relatively high (47%) light transmission amber sunglass (sunglasses that are almost to bright to be useful in the sun). The difference they make is profound. They remove a large portion of the glare and eliminate the problem of being temporarily blinded by every light that goes by.
So are my glasses safer than driving without them? Quantifiably, no. They do darken my view noticeably. But in practice, yes they are safer. Without them I am almost completely blinded in certain conditions- much more than I am by the general darkening the lenses provide. On a rainy night I can see much better with the glasses than without them. I still have to be careful, and in general I try to avoid driving in those conditions altogether. I can see why legally the “safe” advice for the average person is not to wear glasses. But for the times I am caught unexpectedly in the rain at night, the glasses make a huge difference for me.
I recently had cataracts removed from both eyes. No one in the above comments mentioned similar occurrence. Does having artificial lens affect whether night driving glasses possibly can help?
@chamika haththotuwa
It depends on the type of photochromatic lenses. There are 3 basic types that I’m aware of: Clear to Grey, Grey to Dark Grey, and Drivewear. The Clear to Grey would be ok in those conditions but I’ve found they tend to not be strong enough to be useful as sunglasses in full daylight. The Grey to Dark Grey never become clear and hence would impede night time vision. The Drivewear are tinted amber, polarized, plus they are supposed to react to all light, not just UV light like the Grey photochormatics.
You might want to try a supplement to reduce glare. The eye naturally filters out glare by nutrients found in the eye. However, a lot of people have low levels of these nutrients in their eyes so they cannot filter out as much glare. A glare supplement replenishes these nutrients in the eye allowing your eyes to filter out glare naturally.
I can recommend “Glare Guard for Eyes”. You should be able to find it by searching in goggle.
I sell eyewear for a living. The photochromatic lenses, Transitions, are useless in a car. Windshields have a small amount of UV protectant made into them and UV is what activates the change in the transitions lenses. No matter what the color of tint on the lenses.
I agree with Stamos, and point to the physics and physiology he references. My own experience is that wearing polarized, copper colored lenses at night significantly increases my eye comfort by killing the glare and cutting down on the blue frequencies. No longer are on coming headlights an impairment to my ability to see the road. It is an adjustment for eye (and visual cortex), but it happens pretty fast and I don’t notice any problems in how it affects my driving. I’ll be trying out polarized, yellow lenses with far less tint, as that seems like it would be about perfect. I am often on the road at night for long periods, and can not now imagine driving without sunglasses on. Quote from Stamos below that I feel bears repeating.
“Now the blue-white part of the glare has poorer illumination ability that the yellow-white. It is well known that the lower frequencies penetrate the atmosphere better. The yellow filter reduces the blue-white and your pupils contract less so the *same* amount of light hits the retina, but it is of the more *retinally sensitive* and *atmospherically penetrative* part of the spectrum. The foeva of the retina is hugely more sensitive in the Cyan/Green/Yellow part of the spectrum than the blue.”
In response to this site’s resident expert – it is understandable that you toe the legal line and are unwilling to admit – for fear of having your nether regions kicked in todays ‘Sue You Society’- that yellow or amber tints actually work at night.
I am a motorcycle rider.
I wear contacts as I am some slightly short sighted.
In the last 3 years I have covered 100,000 miles in all weather conditions day and night all year.
For night time riding I wear my clear visor but I also install my amber pinlock visor at the same time.
The amber pinlock visor is an anti mist insert (double glazing basically) that seals to the inside of my helmets clear visor.
The effect is radical! The glare and halo from all light sources is negated such that your field of vision and clarity of vision is enhanced. No longer am I forced to look away from the car approaching me when the glare and halo is blinding me. I can actually see the wing of cars (directly behind the light itself) as they drive by! Try that with just your naked eye…
This reduction in glare and halo when it is raining datsun cogs is even more pronounced. You have already reduced your speeed accordingly in these conditions but the ability to see up the road past the oncoming glare (that once used to hide the detail behind the oncoming vehicle approaching me) is reduced drastically. The relief is amazing – in these conditions eyestrain is minmized, clarity is enhanced, contrast is sharper and confidence is elevated.
And yes you do lose some of your visual acuity – maybe 5 or 10% in total of your distance ability when looking down the beam of your light source or to the outer edges of your vision into the darkness not penetrated by your lights but this trade off is without doubt wholly acceptable!
In essence you should be concentrating on on where your light beam is and not trying to look into the darkness anyway.
I also wear night time amber/yellow tint glasses when I succumb to having to drive my car and the effect is still the same.
I work in a R&D environment and am an eperienced engineering professional who understands the dynamics of light and the production of glare and halo.
I also the understand the subjective nature of ones own experience.
It is though my own experience that I call on when I suggest to anyone reading this that should you suffer from the difficult and variable night time driving conditions eperienced by the majority of drivers then source yourself a pair of suitable amber or yellow tinted lenses and try them out for yourself.
You may well be amazed but then again you may find that they do not work with your vision as it is.
Try them in all conditions before you make up your mind – put them on and take them off during a trip and note the differences.
Dont allow the ‘sit on the fence’ brigade to cloud your judgement when it is clear that you would not be reading or searching for information on topics such as this without reason or due cause.
It annoys me when these so called scientists are only willing to offer a modicum of information or blatantly deny the possibility because they are incapable/unable or unwilling i.e. cannot technically measure or are freely legally hamstrung and therefore will not take a personal stance and offer a balanced measured opinion that you or any other thereafter might wish to read/listen to and absorb/assimilate as you see fit.
It surely is about finding the correct balance for any given situation….
Try it out – if it works for you you will wish you tried it sooner!
If not then I wish you success if finding some other way of negating the issues/problems you have driving at night.
Regards
Pablo
PS: I am Irish and we just love a good arguement!
Great comment Pablo, I am going to try the yellow ones tonight. As the writer said there can be no magic bullet indeed and every single thing in front of your eyes will reduce the amount of light delivered. But the gain of being able to actually see something instead of switching from “see all” to “see nothing at all” on every blue lighted moron occasion or every rain drop stuck on your visor is priceless. I will also try to find some yellow/amber insert for the helmet so I can “switch off the tint”.
My direct, “real life” experience is exactly the opposite. The amount of glare reduction, with 80% yellow tint, is absolutely amazing, and ever so much more comfortable (highway conditions, with moderate lighting).
I recently had cataract surgery in both eyes where multi-focal lens implants were inserted. I find that I no longer need glasses for either distance or reading. Good that there is a benefit gained from having cataracts! However, at night while driving, there are some instances where I can “see” the concentric rings from the implants. I fully understand that this was a side effect of having these impants, and it’s not a show-stopper by any means, but is there any possible solution via “night driving” eyewear of some sort?
Thank you all for your helpful comments. I have been avoiding night time activities because I cannot see the roadway well in no-light conditions. Our village does not have much road lighting (and none in many parts) because it was once a retirement community and people did not go out after dark. I have had cataracts removed and have implants OS/OD. This has not helped with driving in totally dark areas. I almost missed a curb going onto a major highway the last time I had to drive at night. And being told to freaking stay home is insensitive and rude–wait until you’re over 60 and still engaged in life–meetings are not always during daylight hours. I don’t want to be a danger but I also don’t want to be forced to stay home because it’s pitch black out. I guess I’ll try the yellow glasses just to see if it works for me. We can put a man on the moon but we can’t help night vision… incredible.
There is another approach to this problem: getting a highly individualized eyeglass prescription that takes into account factors such as higher order aberrations, distance to each point on the back of the lens, changes in the eye’s behavior under low light, etc. Such individualized prescribing first became available for wearers of progressive lenses. Hoya, Zeiss, iZon, and Varilux all offer premium progressive lenses with this degree of individualization (see their websites). In the last couple of years Zeiss has started offering such lenses for single vision prescriptions, under the name i.Scription. See http://www.better-vision.zeiss.com/a/u/your-individualized-zeiss-lens/the-new-prescription-for-better-vision-TM/.
I hear what you are saying in your article, but in my case I am tired of being blinded by the new,brighter headlights made by car manufacturers. I drive a Honda Civic and the new Crossovers / SUV’s headlights sit right at the height of my head when I am driving. There are times that I am so blinded on 2 lane roads that I have to slow down and veer as far as I can to the right. I guess sometimes people have to choose the lesser of 2 evils until a better option comes along.
Dave: Yes, it is definitely a choice of lesser evils. Headlights, particularly the new ones, can undoubtedly be visually debilitating. However, so are the use of tinted lenses at night. So, simplifying, the choice then becomes between what is typically a few seconds of intermittent debilitation and debilitation for the entire duration of the night drive. Which is least safe?
Gabe: Individualized lenses may help, however, again, only for those whose problem with glare is created or exacerbated by their existing eyewear.
First of all, thank you for the great article.
After read all the comments, here i come to conclusion to solve the problem.
Buy a big car or MPV or 4W vehicle.
It is significant that you cite “Forensic Aspects of Vision and Highway Safety”.
The first named author of this classic text, much beloved for the last fifteen years by lawyers working for the US automobile industry, was Merrill J Allen. Allen, of course, effectively invented the field of forensic aspects of vision and highway safety in the USA, the home of the automobile.
In the early years, at least, there was almost no one else regarded by the US courts as an expert in this field apart from Allen. If you were a party to a US lawsuit over an incident that involved a vehicle, highway safety and vision, then you needed Allen on your team. Allen appeared as an expert witness in over 600 lawsuits involving such matters. He published 231 research papers and received 21 honours including the Apollo Award from the American Optometric Association.
Allen, however, died on 28 December 2003 at the age of eighty-five. He was born in 1918, the same year the Great War ended. He published much of his groundbreaking studies into optometry in the 1940s when he was still only in his twenties. Moreover, he published most of his seminal papers on visual safety in the US automobile in the 1960s. When the revised and updated edition of “Forensic Aspects of Vision and Highway Safety” came out in 2000, Allen was by then eighty-two.
The fact is that much of the historically important work carried out by Allen is now dated. The luminous output from recent, high-powered vehicle lamps is created by the molecular excitation of xenon gas that produces a blue-white light considerably shifted up the spectrum from the yellow light produced by the white hot, tungsten-filament lamps used to light the headlights of Allen’s youth.
The most relevant and up to date research here is a Dutch study published four and a half year old ago of five adult subjects with normal vision(1).
Here the researchers show, amongst other things, that the only subject (aged 37) with brown eyes was much less visually disabled by luminous glare, leading to retinal straylight, than the four subjects with blue or green eyes (age range 29 to 59).
Most importantly, however, for the purpose of this forum, the researchers compared the amount of retinal stray light from a white CRT display with that from yellow LEDs. The measured differences were significant. For all four subjects with blue or green eyes, the glare effect (retinal straylight) was much less from the yellow light than from the white light of the CRT. (See columns 8 and 12 in TABLE 1. “Model Parameters for the Straylight Measurements at Different Pupil Diameters in the Five Subjects” which compare the Translucency (Equivalent mm2)).
Only the one subject with the brown eyes showed a slight worsening from no measurable glare effect from the CRT light to a very small effect (0.02mm2) with the yellow light. The other four subjects experienced a great reduction in the glare caused by the yellow light compared to that caused by the white light, ranging from a reduction down to one sixth (0.4mm2 down to 0.07mm2), down to one half (0.23mm2 down to 0.11mm2).
(1) “Pupil size and retinal straylight in the normal eye”, Franssen L et al; Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2007 May;48(5):2375-82; [PMID: 17460305].
Bullshit! People don’t need a study group of hired quacks to tell them what they can see for themselves with their own eyes. No educated idiot with a piece of paper from some money pit college should try and tell men and women that have actually worked in the real world what is good for them. That piece of paper really means Somebody paid a school and I sat in a classroom situation for a required amount of time. After all I wasn’t doing anything else anyway. Some egghead thinks he needs to tell us stupid people what to think and do.
Fascinating stuff. I only need a bit of help from glasses for reading but not for driving which in daylight is fine. However, the “starburst” effect of headlights drives me mad and makes night driving unenjoyable. It’s got to be worth trying the yellow tinted specs so that’s what I’m going to do. If they don’t work then so be it but it will surely have been worth a try.
I asked my ophthalmologist about this the other day.
He is a noted pioneer, well-published, etc. He said that they tested “blue-blocker” type dyes in the lenses implanted in eyes and that he was a firm believer in yellow “shooting glasses” tints.
Can anyone suggest me which eyeglasses to wear during the night cycling? the best one which can light up the road and eliminate the reflection coming from the car-lights?
thanks!
I wish people would remember that fog lights are for inclement weather and not for normal night use. They are usually more annoying that regular headlights.
Thanks for all the good info especially from professional drivers. My duofit contacts serd me well for several years, but not so much now and I have appt next week to have eye exam for specs and especially about night driving problems. Since I’m not likely to be able to stop driving at night – I don’t imbibe, so am always the designee – and there are some family functions we can’t or don’t want to avoid. I will defiitely turn down the dash lights to minimum; good tip, but I still feel vulnerable. Just as a question: does anyone remember more current info about the purple cone cells of the retina? I am a retired Registered Nurse Practitioner and have forgot more of what I used to know than I care to think about, but I think as they age, the ability to discriminate colors on the spectrum also declines – l i k e e v e r y t h i n g e l s e!! Yellow makes some sense in cancelling out some of the bluer wavelengths – IF I am remembering correctly. My eye doc always shoots straight or he knows I’ll go elsewhere with my business, so, with my thanks to you, I’ll consult him.
I have to agree with the posters speaking of the light yellow tint glasses.
I commute twice a day in the dark. All the new vehicles with bright blinding blue headlights are more than an irritation; they at times, can render me effectively blind while driving down the highway.
Tried different various strategies including closing/covering one eye while a vehicle with blue headlights approaches so I can quickly see again after it has passed.
On a whim I tried the light yellow tint glasses. They work amazingly. I can still see the road ahead of me while the bright lights approach me.
Seeing in yellow tint is better than not being able to see at all. Plus you can set them up up your forehead when not needed.
I just happened to look online to see if yellow/amber tints would be useful during night-time driving. I ride a Sport Bike & had already bought an amber shield for my helmet for riding at night. Let’s just say that I was amused at all the naysayers at this site regarding the usefulness of such lenses. I wanted every advantage while riding my bike in Riyadh, KSA & the amber shield allowed me to focus on my riding & avoiding errant drivers on the freeways in the city, rather than getting distracted by halogen or HID bright lights. The difference between a clear shield & an amber one is like the difference between night & day. Don’t let some self styled, lawsuit-shy, so called expert scientist let you know what you should do. I was able to ride confidently at well over the posted limits (over 100 MPH). I can also say that an average motorcycle rider, used to riding in the West, would not last more than a ride or two here. And I’ve been riding in the USA for over 12 years on a Liter Bike.
I am an Internal Medicine Physician who has practised for more than 24 yrs. and can safely say that as long as you do not have any visual issues, you can ignore the negative comments about amber/yellow tinted lenses at night & find out for yourselves whether they’ll be useful for you or not. It sure helped me tremendously to focus on riding my motorcycle in a city with traffic that is fast & loose & kept me safe.
The conclusion I draw from the comments is. Get some Yellow lenses and see for yourself that they do in fact work regardless what the article says.
Byker365 Paplo.
That was the best letter, on any subject that I have ever read.
You should run for Government But I fear that you are too intelligent
and honest to get very far.
Regards: Irish Mike.
As someone who drives a vehicle that rides so low I have to look up to see Honda Civic drivers, I’ve been blinded by pretty much every vehicle on the road. That being said, HID lights aren’t so bad provided they’re not on an SUV, and normal SUV lights aren’t so bad provided they owner didn’t install a lift kit and fail to re-aim the headlights. The only trick I found is to take my left hand and literally cover up the oncoming vehicle’s headlight.
Last week I picked up some yellow driving glasses, and while they do help control lights from the aforementioned antisocial jackholes, I could immediately see how much darker they make my environment. Given that I drive on well-lit urban/suburban roads I’ve continued their use and adjusted my driving habits, but if I lived out in the boonies like I used to, where most of my driving was on two lane country roads with vanishingly few lights and extended sojourns through forests, I’d have to suck it up and use my hand again.
It is amazing how much detail you can see once you cover up that blinding light. Oh, and when I felt particularly annoyed I would cover up their lights with a fist and a raised middle finger, since they’re effectively doing the same thing to every oncoming driver.