It's a false sense of security.

They're worse than that. They condition people to expect the lights to be on when the vehicle is moving, which tends to also create the inverse and incorrect assumption that if the lights are off, the vehicle is stationary, regardless of whether they can see it moving. I know someone from sweden whose 16-year old son was hit and nearly killed by a car he walked out in front of, which was doing about 25MPH with the lights out during the day. According to the driver, the boy looked right at him from fifty feet away and simply stepped off the curb.

The kid claimed with some irritation something along the lines of, "It's lights were out, I thought it was stopped." Apparently the fact that it was getting steadily bigger wasn't enough of a clue to override the conditioned response of ((lights on=moving) <> (lights off=stopped)).

Apparently this sort of thing isn't uncommon in countries that have daylight running lights as a standard.

pca