A Glaring Problem For Montana Drivers

QUICK: Is there a pedestrian waiting to cross the street in this picture?

If you looked twice, that's ok. Hopefully you're not reading this in a moving vehicle. But what if this is what you saw out your windshield at sunset IRL?

With the autumnal equinox behind us in Montana, we're beginning to see the low sunrises and sunsets of autumn. They'll get even lower too, making for some epic sunsets:

Well, maybe more epic than that.

Montana being in the northern hemisphere, the sun is almost always in the southern sky all year long. But the path it travels across the sky during the day gets smaller and smaller with each passing day until we reach the shortest day of the year: winter solstice (it will be on December 21st in 2022)

This means the sun is going to be spending a lot more time right in our faces when driving around town, and making it harder to anticipate accidents.

And this was with the visor down.

Driving Tips

• Keep your windshield and windows clean, that means inside and out. The streaks you can see through my windshield above aren't good for visibility.
• Slow down.
• Don't keep things on your dashboard or backseat that could obstruct your view
• Slow down.
• Keep your phone on silent or at the very least hands-free.
• Slow down.
• The flap in the vehicle's roof not only holds your garage door opener, it doubles as a sun visor.
• Pay attention and slow down.

RELATED: Dear Missoula, Slow Down On Higgins

This was taken in the Rose Park neighborhood, where the angles of the streets are much less north-south / east-west. The tall trees provide drivers lots of cover during sunrises and sunsets in the late months.

The Montana Dept of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report that the most common crash occurrences happen in an intersection and blame either driver inattentiveness, an impaired driver, or low visibility. (if you tap that report link, you can find the sourced info on page 18 of the PDF: Intersection Related Crashes)