Slightly related; I'm finding the bicycle headlights (and to a lesser extent, rear lights) are becoming a blinding hazard for other cyclists on darker bike paths. Bike lights have certainly gotten brighter and cheaper over the past couple of years, and more people have them. Certainly, this is a good thing for visibility on the roads, where you're competing to be seen against all manner of light sources, and there is high ambient light. But on a darker off-road bike path, there is little ambient light, and it completely blinds a passer by. For a pedestrian, this is an annoyance; for a passing cyclist, this means you cannot see the path in front of you for a few seconds. I regularly have to shield my eyes from passing bikes in the evening. I don't think there's any real solution to this problem; no-one's going to regulate and police this, and people don't seem give enough cares about (or just don't think about) anyone other than themselves.
this so much. i guess we have LEDs to tjank for that.
then people just slap them onto their bikes without giving it any thought or even being like 'yeah I'm gonna make it shine really high so i can see even further'.
also bonus points to people who set them to blink because it saves 2$ a year in batteries but is even more irritating in the dark as it's much harder to extrapolate the path of movement.
Yep, the problem with LEDs is it's such a tiny point source. Lights like Busch & Müller's are better - the LED isn't directly visible out the front, it shines off a reflector. Problems solved by German regulation (StVZO)!
This problem actually stopped me bike commuting; one of the paths I need to ride on after dark is along a river wall, and the temporary blindness just felt too dangerous. It should be a matter of courtesy to use quality lights, aimed appropriately. I'm sure a lot of people who personally use these lights are also annoyed by other users of them.
> I'm sure a lot of people who personally use these lights are also annoyed by other users of them.
I'm sure a few are, but there's probably also a lot of selective perception going on. They're hyper-aware of others causing problems, maybe they even stop to look at their own lights but don't even realize that this alignment could cause that problem they saw. Also, a lot of the worst offenders are bike commuters, who are all going the same way at the same times, so they're not even likely to notice very many goofballs shining light in their faces.
It's tough, because on a remote, dark path (or road in my case) you need a good deal of light because potholes could be fatal. I used to cycle commute on a windy, hilly road with a cliff on the shoulder (and a nice brutal climb at the end) and at night I had to slow down a lot just to avoid outrunning my light.
I cannot understand why a lot of cyclists aim their headlights slightly up instead of down. Are they trying to illumunate the sky? The eyes of their passers-by? I aim mine down, so the road in front of me is illuminated for a couple of meters.
I don't think it's deliberate. They just don't care enough to expend effort on aiming the light correctly. Maybe they don't care because they don't realize the effect it has on others. They get lights that are actually twice as bright as they need to be, adjust them so that half the light goes forward and down like it should, and they're happy. Never mind that the rest of the light is blinding others.
Your comment fits with my experience. When I was newer to night cycling I did not think about the angle of my light. I do not remember precisely if someone complained to me or if I was blinded by other cyclists' lights, but I did eventually start pointing my light entirely towards the ground.
That used to be the case, now high powered LED bike lights are so bright that the overexposed spot right in front of the bike is almost blinding the rider himself.
The solution are properly beam-shaped lights like the Axendo series from Spanninga, but they are a tough sell even in countries where beam shaping is mandatory.
That's what night-vision-friendly red lights are for. If you're using bright whites so others can see you, you're using the wrong tool for the job and endangering others in the process.
Sure you do, in the inverse form of a braking slower car in front of you; its relatively the same thing either way, direction doesn't really matter. and when its a sudden change, it really feels like the ahead car is coming to you
And ofc bike-red lights dont look anything like car red lights, so the association doesnt really matter outside of teaching, and presumably quickly picked up even on first-time encounter on the road
The efficient, very bright LED bicycle headlights are not just for signalization anymore... they do illuminate surroundings, and blind anyone looking at them.
For the running subclass of pedestrians, it's a bit more than an annoyance. During my Silicon Valley trips (typically one week a month) I often run on the Stevens Creek trail, early enough that it's pitch black in places. I wear my own headlamp, which I'm careful to keep turned low in both senses. Some of the early Google commuters have their super-bright lights aimed so high that they're right in my face even though my head is even higher than theirs. The resulting blindness might not endanger my life, but it certainly increases the risk of a wrong step leading to a twisted ankle or knee.
The best solution safety-wise would be for the path itself to be lit, but of course there are cost and environment issues with that. So we're left with better lamp design. As others have pointed out, multiple LEDs would be better than just one. Reflectors and lenses to keep the light more focused forward and down would be even better.
Unfortunately, better lights are likely to cost more, so nobody would buy them. As with the SUV drivers and their super-bright blue/purple lights shining straight into car drivers' faces, danger to others is an externality the purchasers don't care about. People will buy the lights that give them the most lumens on the path/road per dollar, even if half the output is not helping them but is increasing danger for others.
It doesn't help that bike lights can get comically expensive. I actually remember someone trying to sell me a $200 bike light in some shop on University Ave in Palo Alto a number of years ago (and then looking me like I was some kind of pond scum when I was horrified by the price).
Can't really blame people for not being willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a glorified flashlight. (In my case, I was in grad school at the time. The bike itself had only cost $400!)
Even a reflective white stripe in the middle of a path is usually enough to see it quite well, and lessen the need to lights. The only time I need a light when riding on a path is when I can't see the path itself, which is when it's bitumen and there's no line markings on it
I find that rapidly flashing bike lights screw with my visual system. I can't concentrate properly if they're in my field of view. They must be a safety hazard unless I'm alone in this respect.
I’m in the same boat, the flashing cyclist lights hurt my eyes and give me headaches. Sometimes I need to hold up my hand like the sun visor, to cover the flashing light. Other times I’m tempted to turn on my brights to ensure I’m not too close when passing.
The cyclists choose these flashing lights for safety but above some critical brightness it makes things less safe
I’m surprised there’s no regulation of brightness or “flashiness” for bicycle lights.
> I’m surprised there’s no regulation of brightness or “flashiness” for bicycle lights.
There is, at least in the UK, though perhaps not the regulation you may want:
> The lamps may be steady or flashing [...] but the flash rate must be between 60 and 240 equal flashes per minute (14 per second) and the luminous intensity must be at least 4 candela.
Something infuriating - bright, flashing, LED bicycle headlights directed straight horizontally. In cities where bicycles are widely used these are really irritating, safety hazard probably even.
Actually there is a solution. When someone has blinding lights on you should stop them for a few minutes to explain why it’s hard to see with their lights. Somebody did that for me and it now I point my lights down when I pass people head on.
You could do this to every passer by and still hardly make a dint; that's assuming you actually have the time and energy every time this happens (which I certainly don't). My compromise is to put my hand out in front of my eyes to both shield my own vision, and also hopefully to send a message to the oncoming cyclist.
A more aggressive approach, when I'm on a bike myself, is to briefly turn on my own bright headlight, pointed onto the oncoming cyclist's face; I don't do this particularly often nowadays, but would be curious to see which is more effective at behaviour change.
Maladjusted headlights are worse, my own car has a dial for adjusting headlight pitch for when towing, and my wife constantly adjusts them "up" because she can "see better", I think this is also endemic.
Shouldn't towing increase the light angle upwards? So adjustment should only allow you to drop the headlights from their safe level? Seems a manufacturer error or lack of regulation that people can choose to angle them past a standard safe level.
There are a number of factors that can affect the beam angle. If you're not towing and you've only got passengers in the front and nothing in the boot or in the back, the headlights will point lower than normal and you'll need to adjust them up.
Does it help her see better? If so, then how is that the incorrect setting? Perhaps the real problem is the failure of roads to be properly lit. Obviously in rural areas, that’s a challenge and not always necessary, but most people here seem to not be talking about rural areas. In France, it seems that they obsess so much over global warming that the streetlights are pretty much worthless. Which makes the need to “see better” so much more acute.
Brighter or better positioned street lights would solve a lot of these issues.
A real problem I've found in Australia is the overuse of fog lights. People will drive around the suburbs with four lights blasting from the fronts of their SUVs. It's widespread, it's dangerous, and it's illegal, but it's apparently not enforced.
I found that it the worst when the other car is a fairly new SUV. Headlights are higher than in a regular car. Even if calibrated, straight out of factory, part of the light is going the wrong direction(ie up)
Part of the light is supposed to be going up and to the right (for right hand drive countries) to illuminate road signs that are higher than the light centerline.
Every decade, the cost per lumen (unit of useful light emitted) falls by a factor of 10, and the amount of light generated per LED package increases by a factor of 20, for a given wavelength (color) of light.
the last ~200m of my commute is at the "wrong" side of the road, so the cars are driving into my direction. I generally drive especially slow there. The sidewalk is pretty broad and its incredibly rare that even a single person walks there, but it just want to be careful.
when it rains, i need to dismount from my bike, as i'm unable to see anything on the sidewalk/cycle lane. seriously dangerous.
They will use that technology as an excuse with regulators to further increase brightness on the high setting and then everybody who doesn't get detected will get their eyes completely toasted. Still beats getting run over by an Uber, but it will make life hell for everybody who isn't sitting in a car.
On a dark night road, you can already get dangerously blinded even from an overtaking car with the high beam on (please don't do that, always use the low beam when approaching humans, from any side), without ever having a direct sight line to the lights. The technology you are referring to could be awesome if used with caution, but it will inevitably be used for dazzling regulators into allowing even brighter headlights, and as an excuse to recklessly running the high beam all the time.
In the US, at least, there’s also an issue of wider tolerances in headlight design. When lumens were expensive you’d need tightly focused light cones to reach regulation-mandated light intensities at given distances. The new LEDs are cheaper than manufacturing to those tolerances, so...
As a result we not only have brighter lights, but also bigger light cones.
Engineers and businessmen are just doing their jobs. This will only be corrected by regulatory action.
Even if the beam shapes are perfect: old anti-glare regulations limit the intensity of light that goes above the horizon and with the technology of the time that implied a certain limit to below-horizon intensity. Which was still tolerable when the car hit the occasional bump, peeked over a hilltop and so on. But with LED and improved mirror designs, we can make the contrast at the cutoff line much bigger and now technically regulation-adhering cars can be devastatingly blinding whenever the road surface is not perfectly horizontal.
Super-Bright headlights are a massive problem - especially as nearly everyone has their lights adjusted wrong (too high).
Seeing as we're talking about lights on vehicles though, why in the world isn't the use of PWM dimming on a vehicle illegal?
The first thing you teach kids when programming arduinos is to dim an LED using PWM and then move the LED through space; oh look, it's not a dim light, it's a strobing light!
Why in the world it's acceptable to put a strobe light onto a vehicle which by definition moves though space, is entirely beyond me. If you're stuck either behind, or worse, watching one go laterally in your peripheral then it's massively distracting :(
Yep, usually if you are above 3 kHz or so you are good! Unfortunately, a lot of today's LEDs PWM just outside the frequency we could detect flicker without moving, around 100-200 Hz. IEEE 1789 has something to say about this.
I don't think 3khz is enough. Say you can scan your eyes 180deg in 0.1s, and at 3m distance you can discern 1mm features.
If it's 8bit PWM at lowest output (1/256 on-rate) you need about 3(m) x 3.14(pi) / 0.1(s) / 0.001(m) x 256 so you don't see gaps between dots, 24mhz PWM. That does seem high...
You're right that it's probably still detectable. But IEEE considers ~3+ kHz as "no risk." My interpretation is that it could be annoying but unlikely to cause an accident, etc.
Some of the really good LED dimming solutions I've seen that employ PWM are in the 30+ kHz range.
Of course, constant current dimming is the best, but it tends to be expensive.
Dimming by reducing current in LEDs instead of PWM can be very non-linear with respect to light output, brightness can vary significantly between LEDs being given the same current (as is typical in a headlamp, with at least 4-8 individual LEDs being driven by a single driver), and temperature dependent, plus it can cause significant color shift. Long story short, reducing current for dimming groups of LEDs is largely non-practical.
Constant current dimming is used widely for mid-power LEDs in architectural applications. Usually there is a significant number of LEDs, in the 10s or 100s, such that individual variations would average out over the series. You have some color shift, usually toward greenish hues, but this is generally not a consideration.
It might be more of a problem in automotive applications, where for a headlight you use only a few high-power LEDs.
Lights get brighter, irises narrow letting less light in, so your own headlights are less effective and you miss details in the shadows. So get brighter lights. Repeat.
Living rural it's amazing how many urban drivers leave their high beams on the moment they get on a rural road, not understanding the right protocol for turning them on and off depending on oncoming traffic, etc. I don't know how you get through a driver's test like that, but it happens.
That, and it's getting hard to differentiate between high beams and regular lights on trucks and SUVs. On a dark rural road it can be downright dangerous.
There's a bit of a feedback loop in play here too (i.e. Brightness wars).
If you have dim headlights and are the only driver on the road, your eyes will adjust and you'll see pretty well. If you pass a driver traveling in the opposite direction with dim headlights you'll lose a bit of vision for a little while.
Blindingly bright headlights won't necessarily let you see a lot more than dimmer headlights and fully adjusted eyes would. However, if you run into another driver with dim headlights, your eyes won't have to adjust nearly as much and your vision will recover more quickly. The guy with dim lights is going to be blind for a while though.
If you want to minimize the time you spend readjusting to your own headlights after passing oncoming traffic, you want brighter lights than anyone else on the road. Not just bright, but brighter. Thus, there's an incentive for headlights to just keep getting brighter and brighter as technology enables this.
Solution is correct, but you'll never outshine others' headlights shining into your eyes. It's more important that others' bright headlights adjust quickly enough that they do not shine into your eyes. Since the advent on Xenon lights headlights need to automatically adjust so they don't blind drivers. They are just not fast enough or smart enough (shining over a hill crest).
In the US maximum headlight brightness is regulated, but the rules and tests are written extremly poorly. The test is in a specific place at a specific angle, so there are a ton of headlights that can pass the test, but are far brighter everywhere else. Obeying the letter of the law while flaunting the spirit.
To make matters worse, due to the way the rules are written advanced systems that dim LED headlights specifically in the path of oncoming cars are not legal in the US. It's becoming common on high end European cars to not just auto dim but isolate oncoming vehicles from illumination while maintaining brightness elsewhere.
The key to good regulation here is to write rules about how much light can be experienced by oncoming vehicles of various height and driver positions and let engineers figure out how to meet it.
Agreed...it took me awhile to figure out that drivers didn't have their brights on...they're just that bright. This is dangerous and needs to be regulated (coming from someone who isn't very pro regulation)
No. It could potentially kill someone so it might ought to be regulated.
Some of the stuff the pro-regulation types want regulated is nonsensically stupid: in the EU, the shape of cucumbers, the brand names of cheese, the power output of a tea kettle, the strength of hair dryers — none of those things have any life or death consequences. People want to regulate internet content, the height of fences, the width of doorways, the capacity of private toilets — even if those toilets connect to a septic system and don’t connect to the sewer mains. Even fucking lightbulbs are subject to the agenda of unelected officials in Brussels.
People, especially left wing people, just LOVE regulation. They like forcing by people to abide their opinions on how things ought to be. Considering most regulation is by executive agencies and not actually written by accountable elected officials, excessive regulation could be argued as being contrary to the ideas of a representative republic.
We need less overall regulation, but that doesn’t mean NO regulation.
Sounds like you've been reading the usual trash from the Daily Express or Breitbart or whatever.
If the price of a product included all externalities, then yes regulation isn't needed, however it doesn't and can't, and this is where the usual anarcho-libertarian views fall down.
I can clearly think of very good reasons for most of the things you cited and a large majority of them have to do with neighbors who don't respect your privacy rights. For example it's entirely legal in a town near me to burn your garbage within feet of my house, creating a fire hazard and ash fall on to my freshly washed car. No legal repercussion because there's no "damage" to my property aside from the fact that my car is no longer clean, and my house may burn to the ground, but hey it's their property and regulations wouldn't help this right? When their habits cause my house to catch fire and they don't have the money to cover it, you know what would have been nice? Regulations to prevent this risk to my property.
Hair dryers become a fire hazard above certain temps, same with the tea kettle. Septic toilets can overflow if not properly sized and done on the cheap in neighborhoods. Fences fall over, trash in your yard impacts house values of your neighbors that you can't recoup, width of doorways affects handicapped access as well as impedes egress during fires. I used to service homes affected by disasters so I've seen a lot of these first hand because we're in an area with a lot of houses built before the regulations. Regulations clearly provide value, especially when protecting property and safety rights that either are unlikely to be recouped or aren't able to be effectively proven otherwise.
I absolutely HATE neighborhood associations though. What you're growing in your front yard, who you have over for guests, what outrageous color you paint your house, none of that impacts other people nor contributes to overall safety of others.
To echo you're trash burning comment....I have a neighbor in a piece of property adjoining my neighborhood that burns trash and leaves and pine straw every couple of months. Our entire neighborhood and houses fill up with this smoke. It causes wheezing fits and I can't walk my dog. Also perfectly legal in my area.
Lol, good guess,but not quite. I'm fine with regulation on things that make sense (like obnoxiously bright headlights as it seems dangerous that drivers can't see when you're driving a car and someone with a jacked up truck (all drivers in the south)has super bright lights at your eye level.
You gotta admit there is a lot of dumb regulation as well that is frequently brought up by lobbying. Why can't the government just send me a tax form instead of me needing to file my taxes manually or use TurboTax? There's a lot of stuff like that too.
The government has tried to do away with filing taxes more than once. The tax lobby in the US, specifically Intuit the makers of Turbotax, has paid a lot of good money to prevent that. Add to that the anti-taxation people want taxes to be painful so that you associate that pain with taxes and now you understand why you can't file electronically directly with the IRS who already knows how much you owe, or just get your return back if owed one.
My wife and I moved back to Canada last summer and for a while we were living in small towns several hours from where our families/the airport/etc are. So I would, fairly regularly, be making late-night trips through the backroads of Gray County and it definitely made me a little nervous anytime I passed someone with bright/incorrectly configured headlights. It is DARK out there and there are deer and other things that wander onto the road.
Lasy year I had occasion to drive across western Colorado at night in a 22-foot diesel truck. No lights whatsoever except my headlights and those of the rare passerby. Pitch black.
When it's that dark, you lose your spatial sense. A single light approached me, and I realized a motorcycle was driving at me head on. I swerved to avoid it, and the motorcycle changed direction to continue heading for me. When I swerved again, it was too much, and the truck began fishtailing and rocking back and forth laterally. I was sure I was going to tip it. It would have been an utter disaster, especially since I had no cell service out in the middle of nowhere.
As I brought it to a stop, it teetered one last time and almost tipped—then finally, dramatically, landed safely on all wheels.
There was no motorcycle. The lights from the occasional car way off in the distance had merged together into a single light that appeared brighter, and therefore closer. The cars weren't even on the same road; as they rode around a bend the headlights had, in the utter void that I found myself in on these Colorado backroads, created an optical illusion.
After that night I resolved never to drive in darkness like that again.
Personally I’ve found that the new police lights that use LEDs are the worst. They’re blindingly bright. So you get to the scene of an accident, or where there’s some construction work or other hazard and the police are trying to direct you... except you can’t see a damn thing because of their lights.
I bitched at my town PD about this once. Their new cars have bright white "takedown lights" that are intended to keep a target from looking at them directly. I don't think much of the idea in general, but these ones were aimed so high that they overshot the vehicle being stopped and blinded oncoming drivers instead. So I emailed the chief. I probably wasn't the only one. In any case, they both adjusted them more downwards and stopped using them so much, so it hasn't been a problem since. If you encounter the same problem, I suggest at least trying to find the right contact to let them know. You might be surprised by the result.
Unlikely. Your per trip cost at peak commuting periods will 10x, so people will probably adopt more bike and other forms of commuting as long as they can use the roads.
I find this is mostly a problem with SUVs as their lights are naturally higher.
I nearly always get blinded through my rear mirror when an SUV drives behind me at night. I can't imagine I'm the only one with this problem and it's hard to believe that there are no regulations to fix the problem.
You know that little nub sticking out the bottom of the mirror? Flick that and your mirror will flip to another angle so the lights are no longer pointing at your face.
Rear view mirrors actually contain 2 mirrors, so when you flick it you get the same image at the same angle, but only with 10% or so of the light actually being reflected towards your eyes.
Is that why I'm getting all these downvotes on the comment above? Dudes and dudettes, that doesn't work on the side mirrors, which also have that effect.
Doesn't work when the high beams are on and tailgating you for going "only" 10 MPH over the speed limit. Also many newer cars are coming out with "auto dimming" mirrors without the switch but that don't quite seem to cut out as much light. The problem isn't just with lights either, it's with a lot of different features including mirrors that can't adequately capture blind spots and bumpers that cause more harm due to mismatched heights. The differences in vehicles sizes overall probably lead to quite a few avoidable traffic fatalities and accidents.
Definitely not the only one. And around here, you also have to deal with the occasional jacked up truck that's even higher. I've thought that there should be a maximum headlight height, pretty design of large vehicles be damned. 18-wheeler designers figured out how to do it without being ugly. If they were designed like trucks and SUVs are, their headlights would probably be above the normal cars' roof line.
Not mentioned is the height issue. My car is pretty low to the ground. A pickup or large SUV with even 75th percentile brightness, "dipped" is still directly into my eyes.
So there's the brightness wars, and also an arms race in the height of the beams.
Little pinpoints of light will interact badly with optical flaws in the eye, particularly for those who have had eye surgery. They also obviously need to be brighter per area to reach a given level of total brightness.
Large flat panels are best. Note that this does not mean unfocused. A panel can be an array of tightly packed LEDs that are individually focused, and from a distance you couldn't tell that there were individual elements. Panels 24x18 inches would greatly reduce the problem of pinpoint brightness.
Polarized lenses were initially conceived as being for car headlights to reduce glare, but ended up being used in glasses. Perhaps this should be looked into again.
Depending on the situation, I wear polarized sun glasses or yellow tinted glasses at night while driving. The yellow tinted ones work really well to cut down on the ultra intense and blinding LED lights of police (blue) or work vehicles (yellow).
If this became commoditized, we could even standardize on invisible markers on cars to make the problem of identifying where the driver is even easier.
The technology behind this is very cool, but has been out since 2015. For example, one of their features is that it can illuminate pedestrians crossing the road. Some searching shows Mercedes is adding this technology to some of their upcoming cars [1].
I am so excited about tech that can make driving safer.
This has been a problem for me driving for years. Driving thru non-interstate highways in the middle of the desert, you're usually restricted to two lane roads, which have lots of dips and turns which block oncoming visibility. There are also people passing using the oncoming lane.
At night this can be pretty dangerous, and you can easily be blinded, as many people run with the brights on and don't notice an oncoming car is there until too late.
My personal technique for not getting blinded is to watch the yellow line on the right, lowering my vision and turning it away from the bright headlights of the oncoming vehicle, while still giving myself enough visual reference to hold my lane. Once the car passes in a couple of seconds, I can go back to looking at the road normally. Not looking directly at the headlights helps return my night vision much more quickly.
93 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadA constant light appears to be something people compensate for easily. The spackle of dots left in vision during night traffic, not so much.
Car rear lights.
You can see my confusion
(low duty) (cycle rear light LEDS)
(low duty cycle) (rear light LEDS)
:D
then people just slap them onto their bikes without giving it any thought or even being like 'yeah I'm gonna make it shine really high so i can see even further'.
also bonus points to people who set them to blink because it saves 2$ a year in batteries but is even more irritating in the dark as it's much harder to extrapolate the path of movement.
I'm sure a few are, but there's probably also a lot of selective perception going on. They're hyper-aware of others causing problems, maybe they even stop to look at their own lights but don't even realize that this alignment could cause that problem they saw. Also, a lot of the worst offenders are bike commuters, who are all going the same way at the same times, so they're not even likely to notice very many goofballs shining light in their faces.
The solution are properly beam-shaped lights like the Axendo series from Spanninga, but they are a tough sell even in countries where beam shaping is mandatory.
And ofc bike-red lights dont look anything like car red lights, so the association doesnt really matter outside of teaching, and presumably quickly picked up even on first-time encounter on the road
The best solution safety-wise would be for the path itself to be lit, but of course there are cost and environment issues with that. So we're left with better lamp design. As others have pointed out, multiple LEDs would be better than just one. Reflectors and lenses to keep the light more focused forward and down would be even better.
Unfortunately, better lights are likely to cost more, so nobody would buy them. As with the SUV drivers and their super-bright blue/purple lights shining straight into car drivers' faces, danger to others is an externality the purchasers don't care about. People will buy the lights that give them the most lumens on the path/road per dollar, even if half the output is not helping them but is increasing danger for others.
Can't really blame people for not being willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a glorified flashlight. (In my case, I was in grad school at the time. The bike itself had only cost $400!)
I’m in the same boat, the flashing cyclist lights hurt my eyes and give me headaches. Sometimes I need to hold up my hand like the sun visor, to cover the flashing light. Other times I’m tempted to turn on my brights to ensure I’m not too close when passing.
The cyclists choose these flashing lights for safety but above some critical brightness it makes things less safe
I’m surprised there’s no regulation of brightness or “flashiness” for bicycle lights.
There is, at least in the UK, though perhaps not the regulation you may want:
> The lamps may be steady or flashing [...] but the flash rate must be between 60 and 240 equal flashes per minute (14 per second) and the luminous intensity must be at least 4 candela.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
A more aggressive approach, when I'm on a bike myself, is to briefly turn on my own bright headlight, pointed onto the oncoming cyclist's face; I don't do this particularly often nowadays, but would be curious to see which is more effective at behaviour change.
Brighter or better positioned street lights would solve a lot of these issues.
Every decade, the cost per lumen (unit of useful light emitted) falls by a factor of 10, and the amount of light generated per LED package increases by a factor of 20, for a given wavelength (color) of light.
the last ~200m of my commute is at the "wrong" side of the road, so the cars are driving into my direction. I generally drive especially slow there. The sidewalk is pretty broad and its incredibly rare that even a single person walks there, but it just want to be careful.
when it rains, i need to dismount from my bike, as i'm unable to see anything on the sidewalk/cycle lane. seriously dangerous.
On a dark night road, you can already get dangerously blinded even from an overtaking car with the high beam on (please don't do that, always use the low beam when approaching humans, from any side), without ever having a direct sight line to the lights. The technology you are referring to could be awesome if used with caution, but it will inevitably be used for dazzling regulators into allowing even brighter headlights, and as an excuse to recklessly running the high beam all the time.
As a result we not only have brighter lights, but also bigger light cones.
Engineers and businessmen are just doing their jobs. This will only be corrected by regulatory action.
Seeing as we're talking about lights on vehicles though, why in the world isn't the use of PWM dimming on a vehicle illegal?
The first thing you teach kids when programming arduinos is to dim an LED using PWM and then move the LED through space; oh look, it's not a dim light, it's a strobing light!
Why in the world it's acceptable to put a strobe light onto a vehicle which by definition moves though space, is entirely beyond me. If you're stuck either behind, or worse, watching one go laterally in your peripheral then it's massively distracting :(
If it's 8bit PWM at lowest output (1/256 on-rate) you need about 3(m) x 3.14(pi) / 0.1(s) / 0.001(m) x 256 so you don't see gaps between dots, 24mhz PWM. That does seem high...
Some of the really good LED dimming solutions I've seen that employ PWM are in the 30+ kHz range.
Of course, constant current dimming is the best, but it tends to be expensive.
It might be more of a problem in automotive applications, where for a headlight you use only a few high-power LEDs.
That, and it's getting hard to differentiate between high beams and regular lights on trucks and SUVs. On a dark rural road it can be downright dangerous.
If you have dim headlights and are the only driver on the road, your eyes will adjust and you'll see pretty well. If you pass a driver traveling in the opposite direction with dim headlights you'll lose a bit of vision for a little while.
Blindingly bright headlights won't necessarily let you see a lot more than dimmer headlights and fully adjusted eyes would. However, if you run into another driver with dim headlights, your eyes won't have to adjust nearly as much and your vision will recover more quickly. The guy with dim lights is going to be blind for a while though.
If you want to minimize the time you spend readjusting to your own headlights after passing oncoming traffic, you want brighter lights than anyone else on the road. Not just bright, but brighter. Thus, there's an incentive for headlights to just keep getting brighter and brighter as technology enables this.
Solution? Regulate maximum headlight brightness.
To make matters worse, due to the way the rules are written advanced systems that dim LED headlights specifically in the path of oncoming cars are not legal in the US. It's becoming common on high end European cars to not just auto dim but isolate oncoming vehicles from illumination while maintaining brightness elsewhere.
The key to good regulation here is to write rules about how much light can be experienced by oncoming vehicles of various height and driver positions and let engineers figure out how to meet it.
This affects me so it should be regulated. If it doesn't affect me it shouldn't be regulated.
Some of the stuff the pro-regulation types want regulated is nonsensically stupid: in the EU, the shape of cucumbers, the brand names of cheese, the power output of a tea kettle, the strength of hair dryers — none of those things have any life or death consequences. People want to regulate internet content, the height of fences, the width of doorways, the capacity of private toilets — even if those toilets connect to a septic system and don’t connect to the sewer mains. Even fucking lightbulbs are subject to the agenda of unelected officials in Brussels.
People, especially left wing people, just LOVE regulation. They like forcing by people to abide their opinions on how things ought to be. Considering most regulation is by executive agencies and not actually written by accountable elected officials, excessive regulation could be argued as being contrary to the ideas of a representative republic.
We need less overall regulation, but that doesn’t mean NO regulation.
If the price of a product included all externalities, then yes regulation isn't needed, however it doesn't and can't, and this is where the usual anarcho-libertarian views fall down.
Hair dryers become a fire hazard above certain temps, same with the tea kettle. Septic toilets can overflow if not properly sized and done on the cheap in neighborhoods. Fences fall over, trash in your yard impacts house values of your neighbors that you can't recoup, width of doorways affects handicapped access as well as impedes egress during fires. I used to service homes affected by disasters so I've seen a lot of these first hand because we're in an area with a lot of houses built before the regulations. Regulations clearly provide value, especially when protecting property and safety rights that either are unlikely to be recouped or aren't able to be effectively proven otherwise.
I absolutely HATE neighborhood associations though. What you're growing in your front yard, who you have over for guests, what outrageous color you paint your house, none of that impacts other people nor contributes to overall safety of others.
You gotta admit there is a lot of dumb regulation as well that is frequently brought up by lobbying. Why can't the government just send me a tax form instead of me needing to file my taxes manually or use TurboTax? There's a lot of stuff like that too.
When it's that dark, you lose your spatial sense. A single light approached me, and I realized a motorcycle was driving at me head on. I swerved to avoid it, and the motorcycle changed direction to continue heading for me. When I swerved again, it was too much, and the truck began fishtailing and rocking back and forth laterally. I was sure I was going to tip it. It would have been an utter disaster, especially since I had no cell service out in the middle of nowhere.
As I brought it to a stop, it teetered one last time and almost tipped—then finally, dramatically, landed safely on all wheels.
There was no motorcycle. The lights from the occasional car way off in the distance had merged together into a single light that appeared brighter, and therefore closer. The cars weren't even on the same road; as they rode around a bend the headlights had, in the utter void that I found myself in on these Colorado backroads, created an optical illusion.
After that night I resolved never to drive in darkness like that again.
I nearly always get blinded through my rear mirror when an SUV drives behind me at night. I can't imagine I'm the only one with this problem and it's hard to believe that there are no regulations to fix the problem.
Rear view mirrors actually contain 2 mirrors, so when you flick it you get the same image at the same angle, but only with 10% or so of the light actually being reflected towards your eyes.
So there's the brightness wars, and also an arms race in the height of the beams.
Little pinpoints of light will interact badly with optical flaws in the eye, particularly for those who have had eye surgery. They also obviously need to be brighter per area to reach a given level of total brightness.
Large flat panels are best. Note that this does not mean unfocused. A panel can be an array of tightly packed LEDs that are individually focused, and from a distance you couldn't tell that there were individual elements. Panels 24x18 inches would greatly reduce the problem of pinpoint brightness.
Depending on the situation, I wear polarized sun glasses or yellow tinted glasses at night while driving. The yellow tinted ones work really well to cut down on the ultra intense and blinding LED lights of police (blue) or work vehicles (yellow).
If this became commoditized, we could even standardize on invisible markers on cars to make the problem of identifying where the driver is even easier.
I am so excited about tech that can make driving safer.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/6/17086792/mercedes-smart-di...
At night this can be pretty dangerous, and you can easily be blinded, as many people run with the brights on and don't notice an oncoming car is there until too late.
My personal technique for not getting blinded is to watch the yellow line on the right, lowering my vision and turning it away from the bright headlights of the oncoming vehicle, while still giving myself enough visual reference to hold my lane. Once the car passes in a couple of seconds, I can go back to looking at the road normally. Not looking directly at the headlights helps return my night vision much more quickly.