Originally Posted by jyl
My eyesight is poor. My eyes don’t focus as well as they used to. I like my optometrist. My optometrist is an old-school shop in the heart of downtown Portland where little businesses are struggling to survive. I would like them to stay in business. As a result, I have so many pairs of glasses. I have distance glasses, that turn out to be good outdoors and shooting glasses. I have computer glasses, multiple pairs. I have near glasses, for time spent indoors. I have progressives, which are good at being mediocre at everything. When I have the right glasses with me, I see adequately. I seldom have the right glasses with me. This is only an irritating inconvenience, except for one situation:
Driving at night.
Here is what driving at night during the Portland winter is like. It is raining. It never stops raining. It is very dark, except where headlights are glaring and reflecting off everything wet and shiny and sparkly with splashing rain. Sometimes it rains hard, in curtains or sideways sheets.
Each time you turn onto a street you haven’t driven in a few months, it has been reconfigured. Lanes have disappeared, jumped laterally, have become something-only. You learn of this by peering at the new painted lines on the glaring, flooded, rain-pelted road. We don’t believe in signs.
Everyone is confused. Except pedestrians. They have it all figured out. They don’t pay attention to lines on the road. Those are not for them. They wear black. If drivers can’t see you, they can’t hit you. There are two kinds of pedestrians at night. The first is deaf. He wears white hearing aids, but they only help him hear his iPhone. The second is homeless, or deranged, or high. He hears things, that no-one else does, and it seems distracting.
The ninja cars come out at night. These are cars with no license plates, sometimes older and battered, or so filled with stuff that it almost seems like someone lives there. The ninja cars often have a headlight, or tailight, or both tailights, or for the super ninjas both headlights, out. It seems a good bet that they are strangers to insurance as well as registration and maintenance.
Then there are the DGAF drivers. They, like everyone, have figured out that Portland is out of the traffic enforcement business. Red lights, speed limits, no turns, hey whatever, the Man’s not home anyway. They drive all kinds of cars - often fully illuminated and plated, new black Audi wagons to old pickup trucks. Some of the DGAFs look like your neighbors. Some are your neighbors.
I haven’t even mentioned the Lost Washingtonians, circling confusedly around trying to get back to their side of the river, or the Californian Transplant - there are fewer of these nowadays - who have never seen a 20 mph zone outside of a mall parking lot.
Driving around here at night is a maximum defensive driving exercise. Which taxes my eyesight mightily. So, I am thinking about getting a pair of dedicated night driving eyeglasses, to keep in the car. Which is why I’m here - I know PPOT has some eye care professionals, and we have no shortage of getting-older sorts.
My question is: is there such a thing as night driving eyeglasses? Is there a color, or polarization, or anti-glare treatment, that helps? I’d probably get a version of my distance prescription.
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