Is headlight glare making it harder for you to drive at night?
Well, the federal government wants to know.
Transport Canada is asking Canadians about vehicle headlights and glare at night through a new survey.
Daniel Stern, a Vancouver-based vehicle lighting and regulation expert, said headlight glare is definitely getting more intense compared to a decade or two ago. Stern is also the chief editor of Driving Vision News, the technical journal of record for driver vision and vehicle lighting around the world.
“They’re putting out more light and they’re providing wider beam patterns that spread in a wider angle across the road, and they’re getting smaller, and they’re getting bluer,” Stern explained.
”And all of those things make them significantly more glaring.”
The technical change at the centre of it, he said, is the adoption of LEDs as the light source, rather than a glowing filament or an electric arc from the past with halogen headlights. Headlights have been growing bluer and bluer over the last 40 years or so.
Marketers and stylists “absolutely love this,” he said.
“It’s a very visible sort of keeping up with the Joneses indicator, right? Is your car new enough to have the bluest headlights? If your headlights are bluer than your neighbours, well, your car must be newer.”
Glare and how can it be attributed to crashes
Stern said glare falls into two categories: discomfort glare and disability glare.
Discomfort glare, he said, is the kind that makes a person throw their hand in front of their eyes, like when you first turn on the lights in the morning. Whereas the latter is the kind that degrades a person’s ability to see.
Stern described disability glare as if a “monster pickup truck with five light bars and high beams” comes around the corner, “you’re completely skewered.”
That, he said, is a “short, straight line between glare and a crash.”
It’s discomfort glare that is spurring most complaints, Stern said. But discomfort glare is “a lot harder to draw a line between the glare and the crash.”
However, he said one word comes up an awful lot when people talk about headlight glare: distraction.
“We know that distracted driving is unsafe,” Stern said.
“In fact, it’s so unsafe that if a traffic police officer sees you faffing with your phone, you’re going to get a ticket even if you don’t cause a crash because that’s distraction and distraction causes crashes.”
Stern said that if changing regulations starts from the “pretty solid basis that distracted driving is known to cause crashes and headlight glare is known to be distracting, maybe those two pieces can be put together in a productive way.”
B.C. councils taking notice
Vancouver city council, in January, unanimously passed a motion to write to the federal transport minister, urging the government to address “excessive headlight brightness and glare.” The motion also called for the federal government to update national vehicle safety standards and enforcement mechanisms.
The Vancouver council motion says headlight glare has been linked to reduced nighttime visibility, delayed reaction times and increased collision risk.
Shortly after that, a Victoria councillor called for change after 17 pedestrians and road users were injured by drivers in the first 19 days of 2026.
The Victoria motion called for the mayor to write to the provincial and federal governments to take a comprehensive review of recent vehicle design trends and impacts on road safety. That review would hopefully include headlight brightness, mounting height, beam pattern and glare impacts on people walking, using bikes and other mobility devices.
Stern said he thought those council motions were interesting since they’re “so far afield” of the normal scope of what a city council does.
“This isn’t parks policy. This isn’t budget allocation. This isn’t wrestling with the problems of urban homelessness. This is headlight glare.”
Survey open now
The survey, which is open until April 20, aims to learn how headlight glare affects road users and what vehicle or lighting features may influence how people experience it at night.
The survey, which Transport Canada says takes about 15 minutes to complete, asks a gamut of questions, ranging from how often you drive at night to what steps you have to take to avoid headlight glare and whether or not it has become easier or more difficult to drive at night in the last decade.
Transport Canada is also looking for feedback on solutions.
Stern, who has taken the survey, said it really comes off as a good-faith effort by Transport Canada.
“The questions cover pretty much all aspects of seeing and glare while you’re using the roads at night. They are written in a very clear and understandable way so that you don’t have to be an expert to make sense of them,” he said.
“And I think that’ll probably help people give honest, useful answers.”
However, Stern said Transport Canada is in a “really tough position” with how the results could be implemented.
The federal government, he said, is charged with optimizing regulations for Canadian needs, but Transport Canada faces enormous pressure to keep the Canadian regulations aligned and lock step with the U.S. regulations.
“Well, the U.S. regulators flat out do not care about low-beam glare.”
Stern said it’s not just the regulators in the U.S., but also the technical standard bodies and the engineering groups.
The survey can be found here and is open until April 20. Feedback is anonymous.
– With files from Christine van Reeuwyk
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