I drive a sedan and I’m often blinded by oncoming headlights on the Gardiner Expressway. There are concrete barriers in the middle but they just aren’t high enough. The problem seems to be getting worse, especially with so many more drivers in big SUVs and trucks with LED headlights. Can’t they just raise the height of the barriers so they actually block headlights? It seems like an obvious solution. Surely this is a safety issue. – Nish, Toronto
Driving westbound along the Gardiner Expressway. The barriers are 1.05 metres high in newer sections.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
Those centre barriers may be too low to block headlights, but they have a higher calling.
“Centre barriers are used to prevent head-on crashes,” Eric Hildebrand, honorary research professor of civil engineering at the University of New Brunswick, said in an email. “Simply making them higher is a little more complicated than one might think.”
Concrete road barriers have to be crash-tested to meet provincial safety guidelines. If they were taller, they would need a wider base so they wouldn’t topple over if struck, Hildebrand said.
“Width is at a premium on most motorways so this is not likely feasible from an engineering [or cost] perspective,” he said.
Centre barriers are typically used on divided highways and expressways, not on most city streets.
Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation said the standard height for centre barriers on provincial highways, including Highway 401 and the Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW), is 1.05 metres.
On Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway (DVP), which are managed by the city, newer sections are 1.05 metres high and older sections are 0.83 metres high, the city said.
That’s lower than the headlights on some modern vehicles, especially trucks and SUVs. Canadian and U.S. safety rules allow headlights to be mounted up to 1.37 metres above the road surface, Daniel Stern, a Vancouver-based automotive lighting consultant, said in an email.
The standards vary by province. In British Columbia, the standard height for centre barriers is 0.81 metres, although they can be as high as 1.07 metres.
“Median barriers are not intended for headlight glare,” Ceara Kavanagh, a spokeswoman for B.C.’s Ministry of Transportation, said in an email.
Westbound traffic (L) on the Queen Elizabeth Way, as seen from the Dixie Road overpass.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Glaring problem?
Headlight glare has been in the spotlight recently after Vancouver and Victoria city councils called on Transport Canada to update federal safety rules to keep headlights on new cars out of drivers’ eyes. Complaints from drivers have been “increasing in volume and pitch,” Stern said.
Headlights are getting brighter over all, Stern said. More Canadians are also driving taller SUVs and trucks – and more new vehicles have LED headlights.
Because LED headlights tend to be smaller and bluer than older headlights, they can look harsher to oncoming drivers, Stern said.
While glare from oncoming cars might be annoying, it’s not clear that it’s a safety problem.
“Glare is not reliably tracked as a cause of crashes,” Stern said. “By the time a crash happens, the [sources of] the glare are gone, many kilometres down the road.”
We asked several cities whether glare was a safety concern. We heard back from Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver.
“[We have] not identified headlight glare from oncoming traffic as an issue on Toronto roadways,” Saira Virani, a spokeswoman for the City of Toronto, said in an email.
Edmonton and Vancouver said they hadn’t received many complaints. “The most common headlight concern we receive from residents is vehicles driving without lights at night,” Jessica Lamarre, director of safe mobility with the City of Edmonton, said in an email.
A glare screen between the sides on Route 1 near St. George, N.B.Supplied
Screen time?
While replacing concrete barriers with higher ones is complicated and expensive, some jurisdictions have installed glare screens “with some success,” Hildebrand said.
Also known as glare shields, glare screens are mounted on top of barriers to reduce light from oncoming headlights.
“Some use flexible plastic blades that work much like a louvered window shade,” he said. Typically, they’re installed only in places where glare is a problem, including curves on the road.
Toronto has some glare screens on the Gardiner and DVP, but they’re not there to block glare specifically, Virani said.
“The shields currently in place were installed years ago as a standard practice to reduce driver distraction on divided highways,” she said.
The city has gradually been replacing the older centre barriers which had glare shields with taller barriers without them, Virani said. “Glare shields are no longer required and have not been added to newer sections,” she said.
One drawback of glare shields is that they can block the view of the other side of the road and make drivers feel like they’re “driving in a tunnel,” B.C.’s Kavanagh said.
While glare screens could help on some divided roads with barriers, what about on roads with no barriers?
The bigger solution has to come from car companies and regulators, Stern said.
That could include tougher glare limits on new vehicles, such as lowering maximum headlight height, requiring warmer-toned LEDs and restricting how much light reaches other drivers’ eyes, he said.
“There’s a lot that [they] could do,” Stern said.
Have a driving question? Send it to globedrive@globeandmail.com and put ‘Driving Concerns’ in your subject line. E-mails without the correct subject line may not be answered. Canada’s a big place, so let us know where you are so we can find the answer for your city and province.