Perhaps it's just my eyes getting older, or changes to headlight tech and/or car design is a contributing factor, but modern headlights at night seem more blinding than I ever remember them being in the past.
I'm with you, and the worst part is the color temperature.
Between brightness and this ridiculous fad of high Kelvin blue headlights, driving at night on the highways of major traffic areas is awful. It's the luminous equivalent of people who utterly ignore decibel limits of their vehicles to the detriment of pedestrian ears.
I wonder about the high Kelvin headlights causing retinal damage, there is some research I recall reading about related to blue light filters.
To think we'll all be blinder and deafer for this is quite agitating.
What's frustrating is there's actually a very elegant solution to this problem, but it requires buy-in from all manufacturers. If you use polarized glass at 45 degrees for both headlights and windshields, you effectively cancel out the lights when sitting inside a car (it's not perfect, but they'll be incredibly dim). You could easily adjust it to be brighter (assuming everyone agrees on the standard) if people object to not being able to see oncoming headlights.
But it's meaningless unless everyone does it, and it won't work for cars already on the road.
The problem with polarized glass is that, by its very nature, it's filtering out ~half the light. This is why cameras don't normally come with polarizing lenses: it'll make them perform worse in low-light situations. So you won't be able to see quite as much, with half the light blocked.
Of course, our eyes are logarithmic, so this might not be that big a deal, and it might be worth it, but you'll never get the US government safety agencies to agree to this. They already forbid anything which reduces light transmission through the windshield below the "AS400" line (the optional tint strip near the top).
They already won't allow aspheric side mirrors because those "confuse" drivers (even though cars in Europe have them).
> They already won't allow aspheric side mirrors because those "confuse" drivers (even though cars in Europe have them).
It is so nice to not have a blindspot larger than half a car. That leaves all attention for bikes and bicycles.
I've never had a rental car in the US which did not have a blindspot the size of a small car.
It doesn't hurt them and it still helps drivers. I never said it was a perfect solution for everyone. It's still a net positive.
This is obviously a reach but you could design specially polarized glasses or goggles that would work for everyone if the cyclists really wanted to reduce the blinding glare. And if the cyclists don't want to wear them then they don't have to and they're in the same situation they're in now.
comparatively, they wont be worse of than with original bright headlights when they dont invest in circular polarized glasses for night traffic, while if they do they would benefit. similarily apply the polarization filters to bicycle headlights.
As a cyclist I myself am fed up with bright bicycle lights of others not aimed downward enough, and even when downward there is still a lot of glare... I assume my own bicycle lights are similarily annoying for others.
As a cyclist myself I would prefer a polarization based solution, to be eventually adopted by both cars and cyclists.
I specifically avoid driving at night due to this. The past 2 or 3 years it has gotten especially awful. I even got new glasses because of this. Nope, just new cars having the most annoying headlights imaginable.
My own brights are lower than most of the low beams/automatic adjustment lights that I encounter.
it's the absolute worst. car companies are marketing all this tech like highbeams that stay on and move away from oncoming traffic like it all just works and it doesnt... and very bright leds... and more suvs than ever so if you drive a car most other vehicles headlights are higher relative to yours (hence more in your face)
The best thing to do is to stop driving. The whole idea is bad. We should be living in urban environments where we don't need to drive at all; driving is dangerous (30,000 people killed in the US every year, not to mention maimings), and an ecological disaster due to pollution and sprawl.
I cycle when I can, which is a lot but I feel a lot safer in my car and that's not just an illusion, that's born from the number of near misses with vehicles that are straying outside of their lanes and onto the bike path and/or aggressively overtaking my bike when they have to wait behind it for a few seconds until someone from the other side has passed them. It has worked so far but I always wonder how the long term numbers work in cases like these.
20-25 Km average daily every day of the week, that's only about an hours worth of cycling on a slow bike or maybe 45 minutes on a faster one. That's on the order of a few hundred hours of exposure per year. Near misses several times per month at least.
You are safer in a car, when you're around other cars, than on a bike. I don't I need to explain the physics of why this is obviously true.
The problem here is that there are cars around you when you're biking. If you didn't have to ride alongside cars, then cycling would be far safer, and your main worry would be things like gravel, snow, rain (anything that makes the road surface slippery), and probably pedestrians.
There's a reason that places that put bike lanes next to car traffic, with no barrier, don't get much increase in cycling, and why places with physically divided biking lanes have far lower cyclist deaths and injuries. Cars are just too dangerous to be allowed around bikes.
The fundamental problem here is the existence of cars, and the sheer dominance of cars as a transport method. It makes it almost impossible for anything else to be a viable alternative, for many different reasons including safety and sprawl (cycling isn't all that feasible if you have to ride 30 miles each way because the "city" is so sprawling).
Sure, but scooters don't move very fast (slower than bikes), and e-bikes are usually limited to 28mph. So yeah, getting hit by one of those is still dangerous, but nothing like getting hit by a 6000-pound SUV. Being on any kind of moving vehicle will always have some element of danger to it: our bodies just weren't designed for traveling very fast and colliding with concrete or other hard surfaces. But the momentum carried by any kind of car is far beyond that carried by someone on a scooter or e-bike. Also, those small vehicles don't take up remotely as much space as cars, and their riders have far better visibility, plus their riders are also exposed to a high degree of risk in a collision, unlike a car driver who can easily mow down cyclists without any injury at all.
I agree, it's infuriating. I don't have a car and don't drive too often, but when I do it's mostly reasonably long distances (4-6 hours) and almost always at night because it's the only time I have. I try to drive as late (or early in the morning, if you will) as possible, to avoid as much traffic as possible, not because I'll get stuck in queues but because of the damn headlights of other cars. They're blinding!
I'm actually about to buy a truck because of how bright everyone's lights are and how low my car is (Honda Fit).
My car was in the shop the other day, and they loaned me a truck, it was amazing, I could drive at night with NO ISSUES.
My commute is pretty much a single twisty, turny back road that has no street lamps, so everyone thinks they need their brights on... So I'm constantly blinded by high-beams, then they switch to what has to be illegally bright or misaligned low-beams. In the truck though, I wasn't blinded once but people still had their high beams and way too bright low beams.
I haven't driven a truck in 8 years, but maybe its time.
(As someone who drives a truck in an area much like yours)
This works, until you realize that because you're higher than everyone else, they all think YOU have your high beams on. And then you get flashed and honked at on a regular basis (at least I do). Then I actually turn on my high beams to show people what it could be like and they take theirs off.
But even then, you're still right. The worst case scenario in a truck is still nothing compared to the blinding light of a lifted F250 with upgraded HIDs when I'm in my fiesta.
Instead of just writing it off as the perks of owning a truck, if that many people are that annoyed about your headlights maybe you should investigate the issue. The issue isn't whether you have your high/low beams on, it's whether you're blinding everyone else on the road.
As aimed from the factory, the headlights on my car were casting way too much bright light up way too high, so I just adjusted them to a slightly more downward angle.
Chances are taking your headlights even a few degrees down from the horizon would solve a lot of problems for everyone else trying to share the road with you without significantly impacting your visibility.
I was thinking about some carefully-sculpted "chrome mudflaps" or something on the back of my small car, up near the window. Obviously they wouldn't do much for mud, but if they're purely passive, I think they'd still be legal. If someone's following at an appropriate distance, no issue, but if they get close enough for their lights to point at my window, they'll be eating their own glare.
The other thing I've noticed is emergency vehicles flashing lights are getting much brighter. Sometimes flashing police lights are so intense I feel blinded.
Yeah, they definitely have with the newer LED light bars compared to the old ones with bulbs. Police in my area usually turn half of them off (to where only the very edges of the light bar are flashing, the middle lights are off) once they pull someone over or stop at an accident scene. I feel like otherwise they'd just cause more wrecks due to blindness.
I have the same issue. My suspicion is that this is going to be analyzed as a serious safety concern at some point.
It seems that headlights got much brighter to benefit the driver behind them, without any consideration that they blind everyone else -- and also reduce the ability for peoples' eyes to adjust to dim conditions. That can't be a good trade-off.
The color temperature was much lower in the past with tungsten lamps, and even lower with selective yellow[0]. With xenon and LED lights there's a much bigger blue component.
