Driving With Your Parking Lights – Is That a Problem?

Q: When I started driving in the early 1960s, parking lights were to only be used when the vehicle was stopped. Today, with driving lights and LEDs around the headlights, the distinction of parking/driving lights is blurred (in my opinion). How could someone distinguish if a newer car is driving with their parking lights on, or driving lights? Is it an issue? Or legal to drive with the parking lights on?

A: This started as a “when” question, but it’s going to get, at least partly, a “where” answer. You mentioned that when you started driving in the early 1960s, parking lights were only for when your car was stopped. Given that I was conceived in the final month of 1969, I’m of no help by way of personal experience. Instead, I dug into the archives to see how our laws on parking lights have changed.

As it turns out, not much. The chapter on lighting in Revised Code of Washington from 1961 reads remarkably similar to our current law. I searched through both our current law and the archived version from 1961 and, on the topic of using parking lights while driving, came up empty-handed. I’ll acknowledge that it’s a lot easier to prove something is a violation of a law than prove that it’s not. If it’s a violation I can show you the law. If I don’t think it’s a violation there’s always this voice in the back of my head questioning whether it’s just because I haven’t looked in the right place yet. (The revised code of Washington is thick.)

Washington law does address parking lights but, as far as I can tell, only while parked. If you drive in urban or suburban environments where the roads are lit by street lights, parking lights may seem pointless. But in places where visibility is poor at night parking lights are meant to illuminate the corners of your vehicle when it’s parked on the side of the road so it doesn’t get hit by another driver who doesn’t see it. The law requires parking lights when a vehicle is parked along a roadway “outside an incorporated city or town” at night and “there is insufficient light to reveal any person or object within a distance of one thousand feet . . .”

This might be one of the least observed traffic laws on the books. When is the last time you saw a car parked along a county road at night that actually had its parking lights on? But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good practice. If it’s dark and you’re parked somewhere that it might be hard to see your car, your parking lights can protect your car and other drivers.

Given that it’s not illegal in Washington to drive with your parking lights on, there’s not a real need, at least from an enforcement perspective, to be able to differentiate between parking lights and driving lights. There are differences, but that’s a topic for another article.

Even though Washington doesn’t (and didn’t) prohibit turning your parking lights on while driving, that doesn’t mean you’ve misremembered your early driving experience. It likely just means you didn’t learn to drive in Washington. As an example, California’s current driving law plainly states, “No vehicle shall be driven at any time with the parking lamps lighted except when the lamps are being used as turn signal lamps or when the headlights are also lighted.”

I do have one question for the people that drive with only their parking lights on: Why? I’m a fan of doing whatever you legally can to be seen, so if you’re turning that knob to light up your parking lights move it one more click and turn on your headlights too.