10 Important Halloween Trick or Treat Safety Tips from AskPatty
For 364 days each year, we teach our children not to take
candy from strangers. But on Halloween, collecting candy from strangers is the
number one goal. While most parents are careful to inspect the sweet hoard for signs
of malevolent tampering, many public servants and safety organizations agree
that it’s more important to make safe lighting the primary concern on
Halloween night.
According to Safe Kids Worldwide, children are more than twice as
likely to be killed by a car while trick-or-treating on Halloween night than at
any other time of the year. To raise awareness of pedestrian safety year-round,
Safe Kids coalitions across the country have been teaming up since 2000 with Walk This Way program sponsor FedEx to bring national and local
attention to pedestrian safety issues. As Halloween approaches, the
organizations also ramp up their efforts at exciting and educational events held
at schools, community locations and zoos across the country to provide kids with reflective materials to
promote visibility, including reflective trick-or-treat bags and zipper tags
that can be attached to costumes.
Just as many homes turn on porch lights to signal they are
passing out Halloween candy, drivers can do their part to provide light on a
dark night. One of Safe Kids’ top Halloween safety tips is
to make sure children can see and be seen. There are several ways to
do this and SYLVANIA Automotive Lighting wants
to educate pedestrians and drivers that visibility is imperative to a safe
Halloween night. For drivers, this means considering the status of their
headlights. Premium headlights can provide more downroad and sideroad
visibility – allowing for more time to react to pedestrians and road hazards.
Halloween Trick or
Treat Lighting and Safety Tips:
• Decorate costumes
and bags with reflective tape or stickers and, if possible, choose
light-colored clothing. Have kids use glow sticks or flashlights to help
them see and be seen by drivers.
• If you’re driving,
be especially alert for kids from 5:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., the popular
trick-or-treating hours. Pay careful attention in residential neighborhoods,
drive more slowly, and anticipate heavy pedestrian traffic on and near the road
• Upgrade to whiter,
brighter premium headlights. Whiter, brighter bulbs -- like Sylvania
SilverStar® ULTRA headlights -- can help drivers identify and react sooner to
road hazards like debris, animals, disabled vehicles or even pedestrians, which
are of especially high volume on Halloween night. Ensuring you have bright
white headlights will help you spot children from greater distances, but be
sure you take extra time to actively look for kids at intersections, on medians
and on curbs.
• Change headlight
bulbs before burnout. Bulbs dim quicker than you think, drastically
reducing visibility so you see less of what’s in front of you, so it’s
important to upgrade before burnout. Always change headlight bulbs in pairs. Changing
one at a time can cause an uneven field of vision that can be distracting to
both the driver as well as oncoming traffic.
• Are your headlights
showing their age? Over time, harsh UV rays, chemicals, and environmental
pollutants take a toll on vehicles equipped with plastic headlight lenses,
resulting in hazy, cloudy, and unattractive headlamps, as well as unsafe
lighting during nighttime driving. You can easily restore your headlights to
“like-new” condition using a pre-packaged headlight restoration kit for about $25, whereas replacing the entire assembly can
cost upwards of $300.
• Be sure to cross streets at corners, using
traffic signals and crosswalks look left, right and left again when crossing;
always walk, don't run, when crossing streets.
• Make eye contact with drivers and watch for
cars that are turning or backing up.
• Walk on sidewalks or paths; if there are no
sidewalks, walk facing traffic as far to the left as possible.
• Never dart out into the street or cross in
between parked cars.
• And we wish it could go without saying: make
sure they NEVER accept rides from strangers.
Happy
Halloween from the Ghouls at AskPatty.com!
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