Parking Lights Really Lack a Purpose--by Day or Night

Dear Street Smart:

Why can General Motors introduce daytime driving lights even though California forbids the rest of us from driving with our parking lights on? I don’t see the difference.

Robert D. Edmiston Mission Viejo Barry Felrice, an administrator with the National Highway Safety Administration, said the usual reason that states outlaw driving with parking lights is that the lights illuminate the dashboard and thus might cause drivers to forget to turn on headlights when night falls.

But the bottom line, Felrice said, is that parking lights aren’t bright enough to improve the visibility of a car to oncoming traffic in the daytime.

By contrast, he said, the “daytime running lamps” that General Motors Corp. introduced this year on some of its new cars are bright enough to be seen even in the sunlight. They are low-intensity headlights that turn on automatically when the car is put in driving gear. In Canada, where such lights are required, studies show they have reduced accidents by 10%.

And the daytime running lamps are legal, because using headlights during the day is legal.

So what are you supposed to use parking lights for? Felrice isn’t sure, but he believes they originally were required to make parked cars--apparently with the drivers still in them--more visible at night.

“To be honest, it is an old regulation that we picked up from industry standards,” he said.

Felrice said his agency is in the midst of eliminating requirements that serve no purpose.

“I am going to add (parking lights) to our list,” he said.

Dear Street Smart:

It is very frustrating to see the way people take advantage of handicap signs. It seems that some people must share them. You so often see someone parking in the handicap parking and just before they get out of the car they produce the sign and display it in the window. Then they jump out of the car and almost run into the store.

How about an idea to make it fair for the handicapped, so all their parking spaces are not taken by (members of) the general public who are quite capable of walking a distance. If a handicapped person were required to have his or her photo on the sign, it might just cut out all the lazy ones (who are not handicapped) from taking advantage of the reserved spots.

This idea is working in England, where my father, who is handicapped, visited a month ago. After all, we all have our photo on our driving license, so it should not pose any hardship to do the same to identify the handicapped.

I would appreciate your feedback on this matter, which is a very important issue. After all, nobody wants to be handicapped, so let us help those who are unfortunate and need us to meet their special needs, instead of taking advantage of their disabilities. I hope you can help get something done about this problem.

Joyce Haines Garden Grove Janis Silver, a manager at the state Department of Motor Vehicles, cautioned that not all people who seem too fit to qualify for handicapped parking are impostors.

“A lot of disabilities don’t always have an outward manifestation,” she said, noting, for instance, heart disease, emphysema and arthritis.

But Silver acknowledged a troubling amount of fraud. Statewide, the DMV has issued 1.1 million placards that authorize their owners to park in marked stalls or free of charge in metered spaces. Much of the abuse, DMV officials said, has been tracked to friends or relatives of the handicapped who use the placards.

The idea of placing a photo of the handicapped person on his or her placard has been considered and rejected by the DMV, Silver said. Although such a photo might help people spot abusers, she said, the DMV doesn’t want to make the handicapped uncomfortable by displaying their faces on public streets.

“I think we are all very concerned regarding abuse and misuse of placards, but I think we need to be very careful that we don’t inconvenience those who do not misuse their placards because of the small number who do,” Silver said. Moreover, she said, the process of adding photographs to the placards would be costly.

But the DMV is stepping up enforcement, she said. Two years ago, the agency began reviewing state death records to make certain that placards were not used by relatives of handicapped people who had died. As a result, she said, this year alone more than 22,000 placards were recalled.

Also, the disabled have been warned that abuse of the placards, for instance by lending them to friends, can result in having them taken away.

Dear Street Smart:

There is a potentially dangerous situation at the crossing for children attending Loma Vista Elementary School, 13822 Prospect Ave., Santa Ana. The school is in the Tustin Unified School District, has a Santa Ana address, but is actually an Orange County location, not in either city.

Frequently when students are arriving in the morning, there will be a group at the curb, and the crossing guard comes to the center of Prospect with his “stop” sign raised, and four or more cars and pickups will speed past him.

The same crossing guard has been there for several years, the children love him, and he knows his job. (But) one day a child might step off that curb into the path of a car, thinking it is safe to cross. There is an accident waiting to happen at this intersection.

Recently, all four corners of the intersection were altered for wheelchair accommodation, and there was a time when the county planned to make this a four-way stop, but that hasn’t happened.

(There are stop signs on the intersecting street, called Carlsbad Drive on the east and Anglin Lane on the west, but there are none controlling traffic on Prospect Avenue.)

Grace M. Fritzsche Tustin Phil Dunmeyer, principal at Loma Vista Elementary School, acknowledged that the crossing guard on Prospect Avenue occasionally has complained about cars ignoring his stop sign.

In response to a parent’s letter of concern, Dunmeyer said, last September he asked Orange County officials to consider assigning a second guard at the crosswalk.

“Any time you have a situation of cars and children, it is very important to make sure the child wins and the car loses,” Dunmeyer said.

But Dunmeyer he said the county Sheriff’s Department, which is in charge of crossing guards, determined traffic wasn’t sufficient to merit a second guard.

Ignacio Ochoa, county traffic engineer, said his department instead decided to remove two other crosswalks on Prospect Avenue north of Carlsbad Drive on the theory that drivers might be more watchful and law-abiding if they weren’t frustrated by having to stop repeatedly. Ochoa said the county also recommended that the crossing guard at the school request backup from the California Highway Patrol, which has jurisdiction here, to ticket violators.

While “most school crossing guards are very good and out there because they want to help the children,” Ochoa said, they don’t have legal authority to stop and ticket cars that run their stop signs.

As for the idea of having a four-way stop at the crosswalk, Ochoa said he believes irresponsible drivers would pay even less attention to unmanned signs than to a guard holding one.

Also, because Prospect is a busy arterial highway, it would be unreasonable to make traffic stop when schoolchildren are not crossing, he said. The effect of adding permanent stop signs, he said, would be to force “95% of the traffic (on Prospect) to stop for 5% of the traffic (on Carlsbad).”

He predicted that frustrated drivers would be prone to drive through the signs and thus more likely to accidentally hit children for whom the signs would provide “a false sense of security.”

“Putting a sign and paint on the road is not a guarantee you will get obedience from drivers,” Ochoa said.

The only time obedience is guaranteed, Dunmeyer said, is when a guard calls in sick and has to be replaced by a sheriff’s deputy. Just the sight of the patrol car does the trick.

“It is amazing,” Dunmeyer said. “Everyone bats 1,000.”

Street Smart appears Mondays in The Times Orange County Edition.