I've read a number of comments, on another site, where both young adults and Seniors were complaining about those drivers who will drive after the sun goes down............without their headlights or taillights on. Of course, a fuse could've blown or the headlights/taillights just don't work. The only way to see someone in front is when they apply their brake lights, if they work. They could know they don't work and are just trying to make it home, but just how dangerous are they driving like this? Then, there are drivers that won't turn them on, if they do work, until they absolutely have to. Drivers, with headlights on, coming at them (other side of traffic), but they just keep driving without theirs own.
After driving across alligator alley in Florida, I have driven with lights on all the time. It makes it so much easier for others to see me.
At night when I pull out at a dark intersection, I admit I just assume if I don't see headlights, no one is coming. I sometimes think about how dangerous this is, but don't know what else to do about it.
Driving on rural roads in Michigan while I was in high school, we would turn the lights out before approaching an intersection. In that way, we could tell if there was any traffic on the intersecting road, which might affect whether we stopped or slowed for the intersection, unless, of course, they were doing the same thing. Most rural intersections in the area did not have stop or yield signs, then. Instead, there was simply a sign indicating an intersection, and the driver on the right had the right-of-way. So, if there was someone coming on the intersecting road from the right of me, they would have the right-of-way, while if someone on the same road were coming from the left of me, I would have the right-of-way. It worked as long as everyone obeyed the rules. Otherwise, well, two friends of mine died in an intersection accident while I was in the backseat.
I think that some of it is due to street lighting. People can see so they forget about lights or don't think they are necessary since THEY think they can see fine.
We bought a 2010 Nissan Rogue recently, and I have done that a few times. I'm used to the last few cars we've had, including my Chevrolet Tracker and the Ford Edge, which automatically turn the lights on, dimming them, and turning them off when needed, so I sometimes forget that I have to do that manually with the Rogue. Until I get to a dark place or the police pull me over, I don't notice. Okay, so far, the police haven't pulled me over for it.
Speaking of driving in rural Michigan.... When we lived in the Detroit area in the 1970's while my late husband was working on his doctorate, our small town announced that they had run out of money for probation officers and had put out a call for volunteer probation officers to handle non-violent cases. As my husband's background and studies were in youthful offenders and counseling, and as how he could get university credit for this kind of activity, he answered the call. They were delighted to get him and immediately assigned him a young man of 19 who had recently moved down from the Upper Peninsula to work at an auto plant. Said young man had been arrested for both DUI and for driving on the Grand Trunk Western railroad tracks in a very high activity area. He had gotten his tires jammed in the rails and almost got hit by a freight train, causing quite a bit of an incident. He had been charged with numerous offenses, but all the charges had been combined into a unique charge called "Tumultuous Behavior". Yep. His defense was that they "did it all the time in the U.P." Apparently sometimes you had the choice of driving 30 miles round about or you could drive a few miles on the railroad track and get there faster.....so a lot of people used the short cut. There wasn't a lot of rail traffic in those days, so it was ...uh, relatively...safe. He thought he could get by with doing it on the Detroit area tracks, too. He ended up over the course of the next couple of years steering a total of four young men who had come to Detroit from rural areas who had ran afoul of the Detroit area police for doin' what comes naturally in the U.P. or rural Kentucky or......
I was just having that conversation today. My barber was complaining because someone was driving through town at night without their lights on, and I made the very point that you did, Don. I've done it myself in citified areas. Around 40 years ago I was reading an issue of The University Of California Berkley Wellness Letter, and there was an article stating that Canada's law requiring headlights to be on all the time had reduced the rate of accidents by 5%. It made sense to me (some color cars blend into certain backgrounds), so I've been doing it ever since. I always have the headlights on in my truck. My Mazda has daytime running lights that cannot be disabled, and I have the headlights (and high beams) set on Auto. It's interesting to be driving at dusk in this rural area, because going through densely wooded sections cuts the light off just enough to kick the headlights on...then you come into a clearing and they go off again. I can't really see the difference on the road, but it wreaks havoc with the dash lighting. Perhaps a side topic on this might be the opposite of what Cody observes, and that is how blinding the low beams on newer cars are. I've had a lot of folks flash their high beams at me, thinking mine are on when they are not. I've just taken the hit, because if I flash my real high beams back so as to prove my lows are on, it's gonna really blind them.
waking up from a bout of white line fever on bc99 at squamish during a whiteout was refreshing... lights are over rated.