Understanding the Safety Effects of Vehicle Lighting Through Naturalistic Driving Data

Assessing the safety impacts of vehicle forward lighting is a challenge because crash data do not always contain details necessary to ascertain the role, if any, of lighting in crashes. The present paper describes several approaches to evaluating the safety impacts of lighting using naturalistic driving data. Driving behavioral data and descriptive narratives of crashes and near-miss incidents might provide new opportunities to understand how forward lighting improves traffic safety.