Street Smarts reader Palmer Edwards, of Snohomish, recently wrote asking why the state doesn’t require drivers to keep their headlights on at all times.
“It’s a no-brainer and does not cost anything,” Edwards said.
Turns out some Snohomish High School teens are pushing for just that.
Students in Tuck Gionet’s “Government and Law” class routinely draft legislation and try to find sponsors in Olympia. This year, they found a match with Sen. Don Benton from Clark County, who sponsored Senate Bill 5901. The teens’ bill would, in part, require cars not equipped with running headlights to turn their headlights on when driving.
Seniors John Todd and Nick Wedler, both 18, did a lot of the research and legwork.
“We have a lot of rain, we have a lot of cloudy weather — put two and two together, and daytime running lights make sense,” Todd said.
The change could save the state money by reducing car crashes, Wedler added.
“It just seems like a common sense thing,” Wedler said. “It’s what they teach you in driver’s ed. So we figured, why not try to get a bill passed on that?”
The original idea came from a Monroe woman, who wrote Gionet some years back suggesting a law to turn on headlights whenever windshield wipers are used.
Currently, motorcycles are required to keep head lamps on. And under a related rule, counties or cities can request that the state create a 24-hour headlight zone, if they share the cost of signage and if the roadway meets certain criteria.
According to a list of headlight laws compiled by AAA, the only places where headlights are required to be on at all times are in the far-north provinces of Canada and in Nova Scotia. Otherwise, most states and territories are like Washington, although ours is at the higher end of the visibility requirement — lights need to also be on when visibility is under 1,000 feet, whereas in some states it’s as low as 400 feet.
Failed bills in recent years would have actually increased the state’s sight distance. Other bills had proposed adding adverse weather to the list of criteria. You have to go back to 2007 to find the last proposal to have drivers keep headlights on at all times, in that case on highways. Then-state Rep. John Lovick was among those to sign on.
This year, too, the Snohomish teens are learning how hard it can be to get a bill pushed through the Legislature.
With pressing issues this session, including passing a transportation package and funding schools like theirs, the teens are seeing hopes fade for their bill.
“We’re not very familiar with the process. This is our first time doing everything. To our understanding, it’s kind of dead in the water,” Todd said. But when they pitched it, “there was nobody who didn’t like the bill. So it would be pretty easy to get traction or tack it onto another bill.”
As long as lawmakers remain in session, there’s always a glimmer of hope.
“You never know what’s going to happen down there. So we’ll just have to wait and see,” Wedler said.
Isn’t that the truth?
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