- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
A new community where people can just vent about or actually do coordinate action against the pest of ultra bright LEDs.
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Thank you! I have a tiny cataract, but even my good eye hates jeeps, and big rigs.
I’mma get some downvotes for this. But is this community also for the headlights of bicycles who like to shine into the face of other road users instead of illuminating the road?
Ugh yeah that’s been an increasing problem too. I had some guy last year just as dusk was starting to set with a bike headlight blinding me on the bike trail.
Totally, I’m commuting by bike almost every work day of the year and it’s infuriating how many cyclists have their headlights misaligned.
Yesterday, some idiot on a bike came right at me with a strobing light pointing at my eyes. Fuck you…
What I currently do is to take out my own headlight from its holder and deliberately point into their eyes. At least the message should be clear.
Oh god yes, especially now that all of them use led lights. Mine still uses an old-fashioned light, which is great when you’re alone on the road because your night vision can deal with the rest. But I turn completely blind when an oncoming bike shines one of those led-lights directly in my face.
I’ve already ran off the path twice so far because I couldn’t see where I was cycling (it was at a bicycle path through the park without street lights)
No downvotes from me. I cycle every day, it’s my only mode of transportation, and the number of poorly adjusted lights on other people’s bikes is staggering.
❤️ StVZO-compliant illumination ❤️
I recently had a high beam tailgating me. I moved my side and rearview mirrors to reflect it back and he passed me on a double yellow line with him in front of me I just turned on my own high beams. He turned off soon after but I hope it made his day a little more frustrating ¯_(ツ)_/¯
perhaps there could be an automatic mirror to handle this for you. that’d be a good project
Hah I’ve thought of this maybe I can look into it, I’m an amateur Arduino enthusiast but it might even be more simple than that.
I’ve thought about turning my entire rear window into a mirror, but I imagine there is a law against it, so I haven’t looked into it.
The same crossed my mind but that would be hell for everyone around you on a sunny day. Sometimes even just a car with a lot of chrome is annoying 😔
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Can we vent about loud motorcycles too?
Argh, hate them!
While we’re at it, let’s also vent about cars and trucks with loud modified exhausts.
No. Loud = safe for motorcyclists. Its the only way they can be noticed inside sound proof cars by people on their phones.
I dont ride anymore because bad drivers killed every motorcyclist i used to ride with.
My man, I watched an accident yesterday in a grocery store parking lot. A raised up truck was backing out and a car was behind it. The car honked. Laid on that horn. It was a loud horn. Truck didn’t even flinch. Backed right into it.
I’ve been passed by “loud” motorcycles many times. I saw them in my mirrors. I have a tiny blind spot, but I tracked them the entire way. What I didn’t do is hear them. Especially at highway speed, they’re undetectable.
Your argument is the equivalent of, “I saw someone get stabbed to death so you shouldnt wear your motorcycle helmet.”
I have no doubt you did see these things but that doesnt mean loud pipes dont add a bit of safety at the expense of noise comfort. Every bit of safety adds up and can save your life. There is no one thing that will do it but if you do enough it can have an effect. Maybe you didnt hear those pipes but a few hours later someone else did and didnt see them and they were saved.
As a fellow motorcyclist I hate this myth. https://www.spauldinginjurylaw.com/blogs/5758/loud-pipes-saves-lives-myth
As someone who didnt have an excessively loud bike. … I’ve almost been killed so many times by people who didnt see or hear me and who switched lanes or pulled out in front of me.
Loud pipes do save lives and no amount of bullshit research about one particular scenario that doesnt factor in everything else will change that.
If you think you cant hear loud pipes if you are in front of or beside a motercycle then your an idiot who probably doesnt even ride.
No amount of anything will prevent headons .
But i dont ride anymore and if you do and you want to cruise quietly then you do you.
This lawyer doesn’t post the actual study referenced anywhere in that blog. After looking for the study, it seems to be referencing a quite limited series of tests in a YouTube video made by the Association for the Development of Motorcycling in Romania.
I only know that for me, driving with windows up, radio quiet, I don’t hear most loud pipes until too late. It’s probably not a good idea to startle drivers just as you’re passing them
I recently rented a car from SIXT, a BMW SUV - it was one of their rideshare cars, it was nearest to me, just so you know it was not my choice.
It auto-aligned lights to just slightly blind everyone in front of me. It also had tinted rear windows, wonder why. As a cherry on top, the navigation software made it impossible to anticipate off-ramps, so it had you switch multiple lanes at the last moment.
I think I understand a bit more about why BMW drivers suck.
Built in GPS always sucks, except for Stellantis who at least licenses software, maps from TomTom og Volvo who has built in Google. VWs are a dumpster fire.
The main issue I see comes from regular headlights being replaced with LEDs and other High-Intensity bulbs. Don’t get me wrong, Bubba with his lift kit is just redneck high-beams, but I get more frequent glare from someone in a Sentra who decided to put LEDs in her stock headlight assembly that wasn’t made for LEDs.
That’s my feeling as well, but it would be great if any data exists. Most of the intentional LEDs may be super tight but also have very sharp cutoffs, no problem
How many of these blinding headlights are
- idiots driving with high beams
- idiots with aftermarket LEDs that should be illegal
- idiots who raised their truck enough that headlights can’t be aligned correctly
I still get mad about this aftermarket center high beam. way more blinding in person than the photo, also makes it impossible to see the plates
That is definitely “please ticket / pull me over officer”
Aircraft approach lights level.
It’s a probably a cop driving it.
I wouldn’t be surprised. After seeing that video interviewing a guy that goes around his town and fixes plate obfuscations, many being on cop cars, I noticed that in my city too. Stuff like muck on just the plates or the colour of the lettering buffed off.
The hell of it is, its even stock vehicles now. So many new models have these crazy bright headlights. I know it can be done right, so how about we start having the safety bodies dealing with this bullshit at the manufacturer level?
I personally think headlight brightness peaked just before LED became mainstream. Through the mid teens companies were installing projector headlights. I had a 2014 Corolla with projector headlights so bright that I got non-stop flashes from opposing drivers.
Newer LED headlights are often matrix headlights. See the entire road like you’ve got high beams on, except the oncoming car’s area is dark. Best of both worlds if implemented well enough. You can still turn off the high beams so that if the system stops malfunctioning, you have something equivalent to normal LED low beams.
My car has standard bulbs but with lenses that pivot to achieve the same effect, but I’m dreading the day that one of the servos breaks and my car starts looking like Forest Whitaker
Found the euro …. Is that even approved in the US yet?
As a Tesla driver (yeah yeah) I’ve noticed in my heavily-Tesla area that 80% of the time when I think someone might have their highbeams on but it’s borderline that it’s a Tesla. It makes me uncomfortable about how bright my own lights are to others. My only consolation is that my car is 6+ years old, so there’s a (slim) chance that the new cars that are being rolled off the line are more poorly aligned than my own. Anyway I don’t know what I could do about it regardless.
Trade it for something a little lies swastikar-y.
Honestly I kinda wish I could, but financially it’s not in the cards.
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Yeah, I’m so morally bankrupt that I am worried about how my headlights might blind other people. At least I’m not so morally bankrupt that I make other people feel bad on the internet.
Look through the manual to see if there’s a way to adjust the angle of your lights, or take it into a service center to see if they can adjust it. I’ve never owned a Tesla so I can’t speak on that with any certainty, but all the other cars I’ve driven have had relatively easy ways to adjust the headlight angle.
It’s something I have noticed too. 9/10 times an oncoming car is blinding me, it seems to be a Tesla. And not because their high beams are on. It might be confirmation bias, but it just seems like Tesla headlights have dogshit beam control optics on top of having fairly bright light sources.
Nope, not just you. I live in the greater Seattle area (nearly the tesla capital of the world) and 8/10 times I’m blinded is a tesla in oncoming traffic.
Rivians are also terrible, and most crossovers in the last 2-3 years have been increasingly bad.
Driving a lowered sports car with no windshield tint has made driving at night a horrible process. I’m debating getting a low % window tint just to take the edge off of the headlights.
If all LED headlamps followed a new polarization standard, things could be very cool. As an example, let’s say the headlights could only shine horizontally polarized light and the windshields could only pass vertically polarized light. That means that one could see every thing very clearly because you wouldn’t be blinded by the cars coming on the opposite side. Your light would illuminate everything in from of you, which would then reflect non polarized light back at you plus all other light reflections from other sources like street lamps. Houses could be fitted with the same filter film as older cars. Similarly, people could wear polarized glasses and get the same benefit.
In North America we can’t even get signal lights to not look different than break lights. I hope Europe has better luck.
Edit: that sounds like an awesome idea
I agree with you. Our king Elon tried to make our cars automatic. Our felon president trumpfus will be banning electric cars and orange lights because he doesn’t like to be called orange face.
But yeah otherwise not too crazy of a solution.
Yeah but see that would require the government to do something, and right now they can’t even tell their asses from their elbows. Oh and they’re cutting at least half the jobs. Because eFiShAnSeE.
Maybe guns are the solution. Just gotta aim for the LED’s! Lol.
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I didn’t pay attention in physics class, why is the light reflected back not polarized? what happened to the once polarized photons that they come back non polarized?
Also what is polarization? I know that Electro Magnetic Radiation or EMR is made up from pulsating magnetic and electrical fields that propagate through space at a fixed rate or frequency… but what does polarization mean? does it mean the fields are slanted to one side or into one direction or something? or is it like some sort of spin or other sort of modulation?
There’s Horizontal and vertical polarization as well as circular polarization. In a simple explanation , think of horizontal as a fence with horizontal bars so that only the horizontal part of the photons pass thru. Now once those horizontal photons pass, they will meet surfaces, which will reflect back their light so your eyes can see it. However, in this experiment only the vertical photons will pass your windshield. Because polarization depends on the angle of incidence, you will get some of the horizontally polarized light back as vertically polarized light which will pass thru. The effect is psychedelic. I totally recommend you to try it. You need polarized glasses, a flashlight and a piece of polarized film to place on your flashlight. The colors and shapes come back to you without defined form or glimmers so stuff looks normal, but weird as heck.
I don’t want anything about driving at night to look psychedelic or weird as heck
Its just weird. Once you see it, its just like any other thing in life.
I think ‘uncanny’ would fit better, as certain surfaces would fluoresce despite having no apparent source of light, artifacts, or glaring that you could see.
Yup pretty simple.
It would add to the price, which would suck, but I’d love to see some sort of HUD assist system. Even if it was a wire frame or something that appears as a HUD on the windshield. Not bright enough to blind you or be in the way, but enough to see. User could adjust the color (within limits to maybe not negate the system). To me, we don’t take enough advantage of HUD tech and different types of vision that a computer could do that a human can’t. Make it come on with the headlights or something. That way it’s not on during the day.
Oh, it’s bullshit. It’s a bunch of cockfucking bullshit.
You’re sitting, waiting for the bus, trying to look down the street to see if you notice the bus coming. What do you see instead? White. Just an all encompassing blinding white light which just consumes all reality and everything you’re experiencing right now.
NOW how am I supposed to know if I should be getting my bus pass out? Also, 50% chance my retinas were just singed to a crisp.
Like the sun, if the lights are bright, don’t look at them. Problem solved.
I mean, sort of, but I live in a place with narrow winding roads that all too often don’t have a line painted on the edge of the road.
There’s definitely a strategy to look down at the edge of the road until the perpetrator has passed, but that assumes you have something to look at that will help
When there’s someone behind me with their brights on, i roll down the window and hold my palm over my left mirror so they can see me blocking the light (it has never worked)
Install a rear mounted light bar to blind them back.
I disagree with this.
A mirror of the other hand…
Since you can’t use your mirror anyway, just adjust it so that it reflects back at them.
This is the way
I always try but I don’t think the side ones move that far, and the center mirror has that auto darken thing and rear window is tinted so it’s not that bright
I think in china they have these scary images on backwindows that shine when lights reflect in there for highbeam users
Ooh, tell me more.
Thanks!
Just flash twice!! https://lyricsintosong.ai/music/02a3d10d-b96b-42e4-b839-8d73adeffb97
One time on a dark road a pickup truck had super bright lights. I flashed my brights at them to communicate that maybe they had left their brights on. They then proceeded to flash their actual brighter brights at me. Unbelievable lol
Not just cars, goofy cyclists too. Broad daylight, high noon on a cloudless summer day, somehow, cyclists need piercingly blinding bright little lamps on their handlebars. Or their helmets. Or their armbands. Or all at the same time. Cheap electronics from China make this possible. Backpacks. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing the other day, a guy dressed like a manga-ninja, all black with a face mask, and a backpack covered in LEDs.
Honestly, riding a bike in the middle of traffic is so dangerous that I understand the desire for being visible
Yeah but a single blinding light doesn’t make for good visibility. They’re supposed be much more visible with multiple lights
They don’t have to look like point sources that feel like they are burning your retina.
