Driving at night: glare, fatigue and your first drive in the dark

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At night a slightly different driver sits behind the wheel — even if it is you. Your eyes receive a fraction of the usual information, distances and speeds deceive, and your body pulls towards sleep. I have covered the autumn season as a whole — pedestrians, reflectors, wet leaves — separately. This one is about the skill of driving in the dark itself: lights, glare, fatigue and your first solo night drives.

Why night driving is a separate skill

In daylight you see the whole picture: the road to the horizon, the verges, pedestrians' faces, the camber of a bend. At night you get the corridor of your headlights and the occasional street lamp — your brain sketches in the rest. That produces two deceptive effects.

First: distances are harder to judge. A pair of lights far ahead tells you almost nothing about how fast it is closing — especially on a straight rural road with nothing for the eye to anchor to. Second: your own speed feels lower than it is. The verge no longer flickers past, and 90 km/h feels like a daytime 70. At night you need to check the speedometer more often than intuition suggests.

The conclusion is simple: at night your margins must be bigger in everything — speed, following distance, time to decide.

Main beam: etiquette that is written into the law

In the dark hours the Latvian road traffic rules (CSN, paragraph 161) require driving with dipped or main beam plus position lights. Main beam is not a luxury — on an unlit road it is your primary working tool. But it has hard limits (paragraph 163). You must switch to dipped beam:

in a populated area where the road is sufficiently and evenly lit;
at least 150 metres before an oncoming vehicle — or earlier, if the oncoming driver asks by flashing their lights;
whenever you could dazzle other drivers — including those travelling your way: your main beam hits their mirrors as painfully as it hits oncoming eyes.

Drivers ahead of you are the ones people forget most often. If you have caught up with a car, switch to dipped beam before your light reaches its mirrors.

If you are the one dazzled, the rules are explicit: switch on your hazard lights and, without changing lane, slow down or stop. Without changing lane is the key part — a dazzled driver who yanks the wheel is more dangerous than a dazzled driver braking smoothly in their own lane. The practical technique when meeting traffic: do not look into the oncoming headlights; drop your gaze down and to the right, to the edge of your lane or the road marking — that becomes your reference for those few seconds. Eyes need time to see darkness again after a bright flash, so it is wise to ease off the accelerator before you pass.

Glare and your eyes: half the problem is inside the car

The night-time halos around street lamps and headlights are often created not by the other driver but by your own glass. A film on the inside of the windscreen — from the heater, dust, fingerprints — scatters every light source. The care rules are simple:

Wash the windscreen on both sides, the inside regularly, not once a season.
Dim the dashboard. A bright panel makes your pupils contract, and the road beyond the glass turns darker than it needs to be.
Flip the mirror to night mode if it is not automatic: the lights of the car behind stop hitting your eyes.
Do not stare at light sources. At night your gaze should sweep the road, not lock onto the brightest spot.

If halos and glare are strong even through clean glass, that is a reason to get your eyesight checked. Night reveals what daytime lets your eyes compensate for.

Fatigue: the honest conversation

There will be no tricks here, because no honest tricks exist. The Road Traffic Safety Directorate (CSDD) dedicated a whole campaign to fatigue at the wheel — "Apstājies, pirms atslēdzies!" ("Stop before you switch off") — and its central finding is uncomfortable: loud music, an open window, coffee, chewing gum, talking to a passenger buy you minutes of alertness, not hours. Then comes microsleep — the brain switches off for a few seconds, and the driver usually does not even notice. At 90 km/h, a few seconds is hundreds of metres driven blind.

The signs that you are no longer fit to drive: heavy eyelids and frequent blinking, a missed turn or exit, the car drifting towards the lane edge on its own, no memory of the last kilometre. Any one of these does not mean "perk yourself up" — it means "stop".

There are two solutions that work. Either do not set off tired at all — stay the night, move the trip. Or, if sleepiness catches you on the road: a safe place, an alarm set for twenty minutes, a short nap. Coffee before such a nap works as a pair with it — the caffeine kicks in right as you wake. On its own, without stopping, it does not solve the problem.

Unlit rural roads: speed matched to your headlight range

The core rule of the night-time highway sounds dull but saves lives: drive so that you can stop within the stretch your headlights illuminate. Dipped beam picks out a dark obstacle — a pedestrian without reflectors, an animal, an object on the road — from roughly 25–40 metres. The 90 km/h allowed outside populated areas is a maximum for ideal conditions, not a target: on dipped beam the genuinely safe speed is noticeably lower. Main beam multiplies your horizon — which is why on an empty dark road it should be working, not held in reserve.

The daytime specifics of rural roads — overtaking, gravel, animals — have their own guide. Night adds one more thing: rain. Wet asphalt at night reflects almost none of your headlight back to you — the road swallows the light, while every oncoming car drags a wall of glare behind it. Add standing water, and aquaplaning is worth recalling before you set off, not at the moment the steering goes light.

Planning your first solo night drives

If your licence is recent, do not let your first night drive be the trip home from a party at two in the morning on an unfamiliar road in the rain. Night experience is built like any other — one variable at a time:

First drive on a familiar route. A road you know by heart in daylight becomes half new at night — that is challenge enough.
Dry weather, light traffic. A late weekday evening is calmer than a Friday night.
Lit city streets first, dark highway later. These are different difficulty levels — do not mix them the first time.
Fresh, not after a full day. A first night drive on a tired head is a bad combination.

If you would rather pass this stage with a safety net, you can book an evening lesson online: in autumn, the slots after sunset naturally turn into a night-driving lesson, with main beam, oncoming traffic and glare worked through live on real roads.

The wording of the rules can be amended — check the current text on likumi.lv and csdd.lv (facts verified in July 2026).

Night does not demand talent. It demands light, honesty about your own fatigue, and a speed matched to what you can actually see. It is a skill — and skills can be trained.