Is your windscreen tinted? This feature is for you

Hello Baraza,

I remember reading with interest the advice you gave the reader that asked about the Honda Stream in July 15. You also talked about night driving, which you discouraged.

Well, I couldn’t agree more with you. It’s scary driving at night on Kenyan roads and especially on Saturday and Sunday nights thanks to drunk drivers. I have also noted that very few drivers are courteous enough to dim their lights to on-coming traffic at night. Why it is hard to practice such a simple act?

The worst kinds are the ones that have installed xenon lights. Blinding an on-coming car can lead to an unnecessary accident.

Besides this, I have also observed that many pedestrians are not keen on their safety on the road. They have the ‘Nigonge utanilipa’ kind of mentality. They cross the road without care, others jaywalk, but the most annoying are those who check their phones while crossing the road.

I would also like to get your response concerning situations where one is within the speed limit and encounters livestock on the road and ends up knocking them down, either killing or injuring them and of course also damaging the car.

Under such circumstances, who is to blame? Is it the livestock owner who carelessly left the animal to wander on the road or the driver?

Thank you for the good work you are doing on educating us on matters motoring.

Mikey

Hello Mikey,

We live in a society where logic and common sense left the room at just about the same time our parents went into retirement. It is as if they all agreed to take a break together and left us to navigate this highly populated sea of shortsightedness with a cheery "Ciao!".

I have met people who have tinted windscreens, and every single driver with a tinted windscreen has an excuse, but only one out of the hundreds I have engaged had a solid enough back story for the tinting: he parks in direct sunlight and is trying to minimise damage to the dashboard from the relentless barrage of UV rays stinging it daily when he is at work.

Well, that makes sense.

What doesn't make sense are all those other sniffling excuses I have picked up over the years. Privacy? For what? Who are you hiding from that can identify you through your windscreen?

What are you doing inside the car that you don't want seen through the windscreen? Isn't tinting of the side windows enough?

The side window tint makes the car interior dark anyway, you absolutely do not need to tint your windscreen for further concealment, even if you owe people money or are the subject of a nationwide manhunt.

Worse than that is the vicious cycle: "I drive at night, and oncoming traffic rarely dims its lights so I tinted my windscreen to minimise the glare".

But that doesn’t make sense.

It is dark at night and you can't see, is the solution to blind yourself some more by darkening your windscreen?

I have driven one or two cars with tinted windscreens at night and it was a nightmare because everything is a murky gray or black and you cannot discern details no matter how bright your lights are. And herein lies the problem.

With a tinted windscreen, you will need your full lights to even get your bearings, let alone see well enough to drive from A to B.

It can get so bad that you may even need auxiliary equipment or replacement with illumination so powerful it can bake cookies by its sheer brilliance, but do you understand the implications of this?

It means you are now dazzling oncoming traffic, forcing them to either dazzle you back or resort to your own solution of darkening their own windscreens. Road traffic injuries are the result of human error.

It pays to be vigilant

As far as pedestrians go, I suggest that you be vigilant and develop patience, preferably via meditation. As Kenyans are wont to say, “acha makasiriko”. You will never win.

Picture this: you are at a traffic light, you see a motley crowd of people shambling listlessly along the edges of the blacktop, the light turns green, you gear in, drop the handbrake and they choose that exact moment to stray right in front of your bonnet.

You want to scream at them but you won't hear yourself because the matatu behind you is equipped with a foghorn from a Panama-registered Korean grain carrier and the driver is making you aware of this fact via a practical lesson in auditory damage by shredding your tympanic membrane.

You want to ram them and send them back to the shallow graves from which they escaped, and probably the impatient matatu driver behind you along with them, a man who has now closed the bumper-to-bumper gap between him and you to less than 15 millimeters, so you tap on your horn, just a light tap to urge the pedestrians along.

But instead they freeze in their tracks, turn around slowly and give you the death stare through your untinted windscreen (Reason #53 why we should tint our windscreens, perhaps?), and now you feel slightly embarrassed for your puerile impatience because deep down you are a good man who was raised to fit into polite society.

The listless people shuffle slowly across your field of view and by the time they are done with their slow-motion death march and it's safe to go, you discover the light is red again, and straight across the roundabout is a policeman looking directly at you, and no one else, just you, and the look on his face is unmistakable:

“Jump that light if you think you are special. Make my day and jump that light, Mr Clear Windscreen, I dare you!”

You decide to hold your ground, but you quietly engage Launch Control because at the next green light, you are going to lay down elevenses and show these non-motorised folk what motoring journalists mean when they refer to a “full-bore standing start”.

Right of way

Now, if you run over livestock, you are automatically at fault, just like if you run over pedestrians, the difference is you can escape culpability if you prove without any doubt that the pedestrian you ran over actively put themselves in harm's way and nothing within your power was going to save him.

Not so with livestock. They are incapable of absorbing civic education and lectures on road safety, which is why you can't defend yourself by saying, “That cow was acting stupid”.

This is also why legally and constitutionally, animals have the right of way at all times.

If you run over livestock, the implications are thus: it was right in front of you but you slew it, verily, and will thus face retribution. You either didn't see it (tinted windscreen, anyone?) and there are laws against windscreen obstructions, or you were going too fast to stop in time - and we have laws against speeding, or you were not going that fast but were unable to stop anyway which means your brakes don't work.

No matter your defense, you are at fault. This is why we go to driving school: to be taught not just how to a three-point turn and a hill-start with a manual transmission, but also to develop situational awareness and drive within our limits.

There is absolutely no reason to hit a cow or a goat unless your skills are deficient in some way. If you see livestock, slow down immediately. If you are driving through blind corners and over blind crests, slow down lest you Ian Duncan yourself when you find a donkey smack dab in the middle of a corner, right there on the same racing line you were trying to perfect but since you have loaded up your suspension and are at the limits of tyre grip, adjusting your line will send you into terminal oversteer, degenerate into a tank slapper and you pirouette backwards into an M-Pesa shop, killing the occupants. Slow down and drive within your limits.

You say that the aforementioned scenario happens mostly on rural roads, which are the absolute worst to go practising time trials on. You may run over livestock as you have posited, running the risk of drawing the owner's ire, the owner who may or may not be armed with crude weapons and a box of matches, but there is a far worse scenario: what if you run over a child? You will definitely be lynched by the villagers.

Avoid unnecessary complications in your life and factor in all other road users, including livestock, zombies, children and other drivers who really should remove the tint from their windscreens. It’s called situational awareness.