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.
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.