- Barracloughs News
Stay safe behind the wheel
Every year we see new cars released with bigger and faster engines so it's no surprise that one in four fatal crashes are due to speed limits being ignored*. We need to remember that rural roads are not race tracks. Road Safety Week (20-26 Nov) aims to raise awareness of the serious risks of driving dangerously.
Road Safety Week is Britain's largest road safety campaign, coordinated annually by the road safety charity, Brake. The aims of the Week are to inspire thousands of schools, organisations and communities to take action on road safety and promote life-saving messages during the Week and beyond. We are happy to take the opportunity to explain the visual benefits to driving, when choosing adequate driving lenses.
A standard lens only lets 92% of the light through, (8% is lost by reflection) whereas a lens with an anti-reflective coating lets through 99.5%If you suffer with glare when driving, particularly at night, you could benefit from an anti-reflective coating. This allows more light to enter the eye rather than it being deflected. Research from the Eyecare Trust tells us that a potential 10% of drivers would fail their driving test if they re-took it today, due to their poor eyesight. Any problems with eyesight are largely exaggerated at night because of the low light conditions providing much less information for your eyes to work with.
Road Safety Week will use this year's campaign to focus on:
- Speed causes deaths and serious injuries on our roads
- Rural roads are not race tracks
- 20mph is the only safe speed in heavily built-up areas used by pedestrians and cyclists
- Going slow = stopping in time
- Speed is scary and noisy. It stops communities being enjoyable places for children and families to walk, talk and play
- Speed cameras work. They save lives.
- Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA) is an important development that is likely to be fitted to all vehicles in the future
Improve your vision behind the wheel
We now offer a tailor made solution to provide you with the very best vision possible, particularly when driving at night. Rodenstock Road lenses are specially developed single vision and varifocal lenses which ensure you are optimally equipped for the visual requirements of driving. They reduce glare and provide better spatial vision so that you are more aware of your surroundings.
Spectacle wearers who have different values in the left and right eye can often struggle to judge distances around them, with Rodenstock Road the optimised lenses ensure symmetrical fields of vision between right and left eye and thus safe 3D vision. Enhanced safety in road traffic is always welcome.
Lenses designed to accommodate for the uneven surface of your eyes
In addition to Road lenses, your sight can be improved further thanks to DNEye scanning. Available at your Bexhill and Seaford stores, a simple scan of your eyes allows us to record in detail how the surface of your eye looks. As light hits the front of your eye, the light becomes distorted due to the uneven surface, resulting in vision which is not as sharp as it could be. With DNEye lenses, we can accommodate for those distortions, allowing the maximum amount of light to reach the back of your eye. The result is sharper vision and a LOT less glare when night driving.
Both DNEye and Road lenses are great for day-to-day use, but particularly useful for those who wear glasses for driving.
You can reduce some of the visual struggle when driving by following a few simple rules of course: Make sure your spectacle lenses are clean and not scratched - any marks will distort the light. For safe driving at night, it is better to have completely clear lenses rather than any tint, and if you wear spectacles, make sure that your prescription is kept up-to-date. One final tip that some overlook is to simply make sure your windscreen is as clean possible inside and out! This can help to reduce glare from oncoming headlights - if the light is becoming distorted before it has even reached your eyes, you will soon notice.
Finally, a few facts on why this year's Road Safety Week theme is so important:
- Breaking the speed limit or travelling too fast for conditions is recorded by police at crash scenes as a contributory factor in one in four (23%) fatal crashes in Great Britain*.
- Drivers with one speeding violation annually are twice as likely to crash as those with none†.
- A recent Brake survey found that four in 10 (40%) UK drivers admitted they sometimes drive at 30mph in 20mph zones‡.
Visit www.roadsafetyweek.org.uk for more information.
* Reported Road Casualties Great Britain 2015, Reported Road Casualties Great Britain: Annual Report 2016, Department for Transport, 2016, table RAS50008
† Crash involvement of motor vehicles in relationship to the number and severity of traffic offenses, SWOV, 2013
‡ Report on safe driving: speed, Brake, 2016