Lighting requirements

Your headlights must be on between 17:30 and 06:30. Use them outside those hours too whenever visibility is limited, in rain, mist, smoke or dust. Lights are as much about being seen as about seeing.

Headlights have two positions, main beam and dipped. Main beam belongs on an empty road. Dip your lights in four situations:

• when you meet oncoming traffic,
• when you are following another vehicle,
• where the street lighting is adequate, and
• when you approach a traffic officer directing traffic.

Dip before the beam reaches the other driver's eyes rather than after. Where several vehicles meet, each driver dips for the others.

Reduce speed at night so that you can stop well within the distance your lamps light up. On dipped beam you cannot see far ahead, and driving faster than your own light means arriving at things you have not seen yet.

If oncoming headlights dazzle you, cast your eyes slightly to the left of the road, slow down, and stop if you must. Do not retaliate by raising your own beam. You may remind the other driver to dip by flicking your lights up and down once.

A single light ahead may be a cycle or a motorcycle, and it may equally be a motor vehicle with a lamp out. Keep well clear until you know. The vehicle may also be drawing a trailer, so wait until the whole train has passed.

If you have to stop on the open road after dark, get right off the road. Where that is impossible, pull as far to the left as you can and leave the parking lights on so that others can see you. Something dark and unlit at the edge of a road is what other drivers hit.

Where fog lamps are fitted, use them while visibility is poor and switch them off once it improves. Keep every lamp, glass and reflector clean, see that the stop lights work, and make sure the dipping mechanism functions: headlamps must be correctly adjusted, and a light that will not dip is a fault rather than a preference.