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If you feel like your vehicle’s headlights have been too bright lately and are blinding you on the road, Transport Canada wants to hear from you.
The federal agency is conducting a survey of headlights that have gotten brighter over the years, and some experts say they are a safety issue.
Bright LED lights on the road are a common trend that semi-truck drivers immediately notice.
Bill Fries has been a truck driver for 30 years and says stronger headlights can be useful, but not pleasing to the eye.
“The LED lights are very bright, they don’t travel very far. They’re very strong, and if the driver doesn’t adjust them, quite often I wear amber glasses, night driving glasses that kill the glare and eliminate a lot of the blue light,” Fries said.
Vehicle lighting expert Daniel Stern says increasingly powerful headlights are not a myth.
“The headlights get brighter in the sense that they emit more light over a wider beam pattern, they also get smaller and bluer,” Stern said.
“Those three things make them even more striking.”
He adds color temperature – warm vs cool lighting – makes a difference.
“For a given intensity, blue and white light like we get from LED headlights, produces more glare. Fifty to 60 percent more glare discomfort than the same amount of light in a warmer white light color with less blue in it.”
This increase in glare is an important part of Transport Canada’s national survey. It asked Canadians how headlight glare affects them and their experiences on the road at night with bright lights, which can sometimes create dangerous situations.
“You put an LED bulb in a halogen headlight, you turn it into a glare monster. It feels like it’s a lot brighter, but you’re not getting the right amount of light in the right place to see safely, so that’s a disadvantage,” Stern said.
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Auto repair shops in Edmonton say a common concern they hear from customers is that their lights aren’t bright enough, but new LEDs aren’t always the solution.
“It’s often very difficult to see ahead. I mean, if you can imagine yourself on a narrow highway and there’s a lot of vehicles around you and there’s traffic almost blinding you, one miscalculation can cause an accident,” said Moe Araji of Fat Dog Automotive.
“There’s a misconception about bright headlights; just because they’re bright doesn’t mean they’ll give you better visibility.”
As Transport Canada looks for potential solutions to headlight glare, local mechanics and Stern hope headlight inspections will be part of the discussion.
“We really need to do vehicle inspections again, at least lighting inspections. Not only are the lights not aimed properly, but also when you walk through parking lots, you see a lot of cars with cloudy, blurry headlight lenses. This happens with age, and it scatters the light so that light that should be pointing at the road is instead pointing at other drivers’ eyes,” Stern said.
“The glare control measures that used to be adequate no longer work. So what we have are headlights that are much brighter than before, that are still legal under the regulations, and that hasn’t changed.”
Surveys are available at Transport Canada website and open until April 20.
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
