Those of us who practice in the forensic area are aware that many litigated vehicle crashes occur duringhours of darkness, when visual cues that alert drivers to hazards are either missing or compromised due tothe characteristics of headlights. One particular type of crash of interest to forensic practitioners is apassenger vehicle driving beneath a trailer that is positioned across the roadway during a backing or pulloutmaneuver. In addition to the loss of certain visual cues, such crashes are frequently characterized by thepresence of the tractor pulling the trailer being located in the oncoming travel lane. This may appear to theoncoming motorist to be a benign situation, i.e., a vehicle approaching in the adjacent travel lane. Theheadlights of the tractor not only provide a false cue to the oncoming motorist, they are also a source ofdisability glare. In this paper, we model the effects of disability glare during a typical crash scenario.Despite efforts to bias the analysis to minimize the effects of disability glare, it is clear that such glare mayhide the presence of the trailer until the oncoming vehicle is relatively close to it, thus reducing the chanceof the oncoming driver to avoid an underride collision.
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