SIDE LAMPS

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LVI, Issue 80, 22 October 1935, Page 2

SIDE LAMPS

SUPPRESSION ADVOCATED

What is the precise use of side lamps on a motor car? Are they required in order that one may see to drive by their light, or are they necessary merely to indicate the approximate width of the vehicle? It is time for these questions to receive an authoritative answer, suggests a writer. One view is that the side lamp should not be employed to illuminate the road, he writes, for the reasons that it is not normally fitted with any anti-dazzle device, is very rarely focused correctly, generally has a reflector that makes focusing difficult, if not impossible, and—in a word —is a real source of dazzleannoyance and danger through the "spraying" of its beams in an upward direction.

So long as cyclists are not bound to carry live rear lights it is exceedingly dangerous to rely on a motor vehicle's side lamps as a means of picking them out. Side lamps, also, cannot give timely warning of a presence. Therefore —apart from the dazzle nuisance which they accentuate —the function of side lamps should be only to show the width of the vehicle to which they are fitted. One simple way of preventing their employment as supplementary, uncontrollable headlamps would be to lay it down that no side lamp should have a bulb exceeding six candlepower, and that all side lamp front glasses should be either frosted or coated with some form of translucent material, such as tissue paper, which would prevent the filament being visible.

In New Zealand it is not legal to travel "on the parking lights" except in well-lighted thoroughfares.