Daniel Stern Lighting said:
Here you are:
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This, I believe, is the location of the bit of Oregon Legislative whimsy
that says "Low beam headlamps shall be deemed to comply with the
requirement not to produce glare, regardless of the loading of the
vehicle".
Heh. It probably was. But that statement is no longer in there. That was
probably in
816.050. What's there now is:
"...Headlights shall be aimed in accordance with rules adopted by the
department. If headlights provide only a single distribution of light and
are not supplemented by auxiliary lights, the single beam headlights shall
be so aimed that when the vehicle is not loaded, none of the high intensity
portion of the light shall, at a distance of 25 feet ahead of the vehicle,
project higher than five inches below the level of the center of the lamp
from which it comes, or higher than 42 inches above the level on which the
vehicle stands at a distance of 75 feet ahead of the vehicle..."
However, that's superceded as stated in ORS 816.040, to whit:
"...Any standard provided for a piece of lighting equipment under ORS
816.040 to 816.290 is subject to being superseded by a rule adopted by the
Department of Transportation..."
...which, in turn, adopted US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108.
Not exactly. The actual law - 816.050 - states:
"...The Department of Transportation shall adopt and enforce rules
establishing minimum standards and specifications for headlights. The rules
shall conform, insofar as practicable, to safety standards and
specifications for vehicle lighting issued by the federal government and, to
the extent there are no such federal standards, to standards and
recommendations promulgated by the Society of Automotive Engineers..."
That "insofar as practicable" lets them off the hook. All ODOT has to say
is that either FMVSS or
SAE has an "unpracticable" rule, and they can make whatever rule they want
to replace it.
No, just the ones that don't emit legally "white" light. The "white" color
standard is huge (excessively so) and there's lots of room for blue bulbs.
Ah, but there are three interesting bits to add to this. The first is that
ORS 816
does not refer to a standard for what they define as white light. Meaning
that since
they are allowing ODOT to supersede 816, legally all ODOT has to do is say
that
any bulb that has a color coating of any kind is not "white" It doesen't
have to
be christmas-tree color blue. In short, ODOT can define what "white" is,
outside
FMVSS 108
I cannot find anything on ODOT's published materials that claims that they
are
restricted to FMVSS 108. They say they adopted it, but what does that mean?
The law seems to allow ODOT to pick and choose from either SAE or FMVSS 108
unless they don't like either, then they can do what they want.
The second interesting bit is in ODOT's "customize vehicle" FAQ. In the
question
titled "are colored (blue, green etc.) headlight BULBS permitted?" they say
the
following:
all headlamps must be "white in color as defined by Society of Automotive
Engineers"
amd FMVS 108. FMVSS 108 disallows any color coating on headlights and/or
headlight bulbs"
Now, if as you say FMVSS 108 permits blue coated bulbs, then ODOT's
statement
in the FAQ regarding FMVS 108 is wrong. What is even more telling is that
among
the rationale cited in the FAQ for this rule is the statement: "colored
bulbs give a distorted
headlamp pattern which may prevent the driver from seeing a person at road
edge"
It sounds like ODOT is being deliberately misleading in the FAQ. They must
know that
the blue-coated bulbs are legally white, but they are taking pains to write
the FAQ to
specifically refer to bulbs, not simply headlamp assemblies, and they are
claiming FMVSS
disallows any color coating. All that it would take is a simple
administrative rule from ODOT
defining all the blue-coated bulbs, "ie: cool-blue, silverstar, etc." as not
being legally "white"
regardless of FMVSS 108 - which ORS permits them to do - and instantly those
bulbs
become illegal in Oregon, despite whatever FMVSS or SAE's "white standard"
is.
And the last bit that is much more interesting is this. ODOT runs a
research think tank,
which has a website here:
http://www.odot.state.or.us/tddresearch/
This unit has apparently been considering this blue-headlight problem. See
the following:
http://www.odot.state.or.us/tddresearch/traffic_prob_stat/headlight_glare .pdf
Knowing how vehicle laws seem to be enforced in Oregon my guess is what is
going on is there's a bureaucrat buried in ODOT that wants to get rid of the
blue
lights, but isn't going to do anything to provoke a showdown with the likes
of
Sylvania, Phillips, espically when NHTSA has investigations going with those
makers over this issue. So they aren't going to outright ban them. Instead
they
are going to build a set of administrative rules that are interpretable
enough so
that any police officer can write tickets.
Right now I can say with conviction that ORS is vague enough so that a cop
could, if he wanted to, start writing tickets on these. The way that the
Oregon
courts have always handled these "vehicle non-compliance" tickets is that
you show up to the judge and produce some kind of documentation saying the
problem is fixed, then they dismiss the ticket. In short, show up with a
copy of
an auto parts store receipt for $20 for 2 new headlight bulbs and they
dismiss
the $200 ticket. In fact the cops will even tell you this when they write
these
kinds of tickets. So, if they just started writing tickets now on these,
nobody would
mount a legal challenge since they can get the ticket dismissed for $20.
Instead,
it's one of those nuisance tickets that for most people, it's easier to just
do what
they want you to do instead of getting hassled.
Mostly good, yes. It gives Oregon teeth to enforce against unsafe ricer
lighting, but it did delete Oregon's previous explicit permission for
European ECE headlamps. Washington kept theirs.
True, but with these administrative rulemaking bodies like ODOT, they would
have to make an explicit rule disallowing European ECE headlamps before
it would become illegal. And even if they had kept the explicit permission
in
ORS, since ORS now defers to ODOT, the explicit permission would have been
pointless unless it had been rewritten to exclude it from ODOT's control.
Ted
