Driving is always a very stressful experience for me and lately it has gotten so much worse

  • invo_rt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Yeah that shit sucks. I drive a 90s Japanese economy car and it’s pretty much guaranteed that this time of the year, I’m going to have some 6,000+ pound bro-dozer behind me flooding my entire cabin with light on the way home from work. They aren’t even modified. That’s just how annoyingly big cars have gotten.

    sleepless

  • nabana [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    PSA: For anyone experience this all the time at night, but especially when it’s rainy/wet. it is most likely their dipshit headlights… buuuuut you should also get an eye exam if you’ve got the opportunity to do so. I know that’s extremely out of reach for a lot of folks but if you can, you should.

    It’s extremely common for halos, streaky/blurry lights, etc. at night to be early or uncaught indicators of eyesight conditions like:

    • Astigmatism
    • Glaucoma
    • Cataracts
    • Keratoconus
    • Etc.
       

    The good thing is pretty much all of those are extremely treatable and not a big deal especially when caught early. There’s also the possibility that it’s literally none of that shit, but if it’s been more than a year, get your eyes checked anyway. You need to be able to see to aim at fascists.

    Again, there’s almost a 100% chance it’s the headlights and just rain and lights being shit at night, but, as has happened to two of my friends, you can also maybe find out it’s your eyes being weird shapes and they fix it real easy and it’s literally the difference between not being able to drive at night and being fine but occasionally struggling.

    Plus on the off chance it’s Glaucoma, you really wanna catch it early.

  • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Bicyclists have started getting LED lights and I fucking hate them. We’re on a bike path in a big city, you’re not more safe for spitting out 1000 lumens, actually the opposite, I am now blind and am going to crash into you, my fellow bicyclist, but at least the path that was illuminated by streetlights is also slightly brighter for having tye power of a cold sun aimed at it

    • Dalek [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      LED lights revolutionised cycling here in the UK. Back when I started you’d go through 4 D cells a week. And the incandescent bulb was shit. Utter, utter shit.

      Then about 20 years ago LEDs came on the scene and suddenly drivers could see you. And I know they saw me because they’d lose their marbles over the light (I always checked my angle/brightness with my brother sat over the bike - if Icouldnt see his body/arms I knew I’d be in trouble). Hilarious that drivers here moan about unlit riders (still many) yet they crawl over the line into the bike box to shout at the lit riders…

      USB recharging as made bike lights even better. The LEDs made the light last 10-20 hours. The lithium gave you 2-3 weeks of riding in some cases with no loss of light.

      If you’re on an unlit bike path (most around heredont have street lights) then yeah, you do need those lumens. But the issue isnt the lumens, its those with helmet lights shining them into others eyes. Or badly positioned lights. Or buying Magic Shine off-road lights from ebay/amazon etc and expecting those to be suitable.

  • pixelghost [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    It’s not just that they’re horribly, unnecessarily bright–but the drivers never adjust their angle because it’s not common knowledge that you’re supposed to do that when you get a car. It’s right there in the manual. LED headlights even have an attempted safety measure where they have a hard line stop instead of a gradual drop-off, to avoid blinding people–so when they’re correctly angled they’re… Okay, I guess. Not great, but better. So when it feels like they’re beaming directly into your eyeballs, that’s because they are.

    That, and idiots putting LED headlights into their old cars without switching the housing, which essentially eliminates the safety measures and turns them into million lumen lasers.

    • LED headlights even have an attempted safety measure where they have a hard line stop instead of a gradual drop-off, to avoid blinding people

      Whoever thought this was a sufficient safety feature had only ever driven on a Minecraft superflat map. Even looking past people having them badly aligned, this breaks down if the road has the slightest change in elevation. Oops, that truck ahead of you is actually climbing a 4 degree incline so now instead of being above that hard cutoff the lights are right in your eyes.

      They need to be less bright, and more importantly they need to be less blue. There needs to be a very small range of acceptable headlight hues.

  • Ho_Chi_Chungus [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    please for the love of god can this country please get any kind of public safety measures passed. literally just stick a railing on somewhere that someone might fall off of. pass some toothless legislation. literally anything please yes-honey-left

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Afaik there are regs that make those lights illegal and require specific alignment of headlights so they don’t blind people, but there’s no enforcement, and people constantly misalign the lights with shoddy installs. idk, I hate it, driving is dangerous enough as it is.

    • lnxtx (xe/xem/xyr)@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      We have the regulation in the Europe.

      But high intensity LEDs suck here too. Especially on the freaking SUVs.

      Too much blue light, too much light from a small area.

      A classic halogen headlights, of course, have disadvantages. But they are more pleasant for the eyes. If only aligned correctly…

  • My RETVRN take is we need to go back to the days where there were like 2 types of headlight and it was the whole housing and car manufacturers just had to figure out where to put in one of the two types of standard headlight

    Reject modernity, return to tradition

    Also ban cars for most people

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I was borrowing a short car and a truck pulled up behind me with it’s ultra-bright while lights directly at eye level. Unbidden my mind conjured the image of a man very like me stepping out of the car with a sledge and smashing the truck’s headlights.

    • SnowySkyes [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I drive a tiny vehicle and this shit happens to me all the fucking time. I just want to kneecap every single person that has the suburban assault vehicles for this singular reason alone.

      • GinAndJuche [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        If you have time, slowing to legal minimum usually results them in doing a dangerous overtake.

        I can’t die happy until I have caused one of these fuckers to roll their SUV.

      • LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I just want to kneecap every single person that has the suburban assault vehicles for this singular reason alone.

        And them wasting gasoline for vanity and ego makes me want to ecoterrorism

    • D61 [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Electric side mirror adjusters can sometimes be used to angle to light back into their eyes.

      I also think to myself, “Self, if ever I did some crazy cosmetic thing to my car, it would be to have some highly polished chrome panel with a series of electric motors that could adjust the angle to be used when somebody behind me has headlights that are too bright.”

  • PaulSmackage [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Used to drive a car with a stun gun: grill and roof lightbars. Would do a quick half-second flip to tell transports and big pickups that their lights were too bright. Definitely made people running with high beams think twice.

    • SpiderFarmer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Eh, I’d draw the line at blinding surrounding drivers. I was a bicyclist and busser till I was 25 and I got enough empathy to not want to kill anyone with my car.

                • SkingradGuard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  Idk about that. In my country if you can’t drive your:

                  • job prospects suck if you’re anywhere that isn’t a city centre, most jobs require a full driver’s license
                  • getting food is difficult if you don’t have a small grocery shop within walking distance
                  • public transport is awful even in big cities, that your commute is longer, with not many bus or train times (if they even exist where you live)
                  • getting around even with a bike sucks because the infrastructure consists of maybe a bikelane, and drivers have homicidal road rage if they see cyclists because they think cyclists are bougie and don’t know the road rules, and because they “don’t pay taxes for using the road because they don’t pay fuel taxes”
                  • because there’s no infrastructure for other forms of transportation, you’re very socially isolated as you can’t go to events etc. unless you have someone drive you
                  • and there is a weird one I’ve found: many people are unwilling to have romantic relationships with people without a license.

                  There’s probably a lot more but yeah these are the key ones I’ve found

            • SpiderFarmer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              I’m not a cager. I walk and bus when I can. I also help people in my life who can’t drive, either due to disabilities like epilepsy, or just life circumstances. Of course, helping people out in shittier circumstances seems to be a bit beyond you, as is the concept of understanding issues with infrastructure. You don’t just push the unshittify button in a place as shitty as the US.

              P.S. Biking is a bit of an issue in the winter here and people have been known to use the few bike lanes here to pass other drivers at red lights.

        • KhanCipher [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          I guess all us living in rural US can just go fuck ourselves, oh wait that’s just been the default stance of every single motherfucker in governance for a long time now.

          Quit being an edgelord, and maybe try actually try touching grass for once.

  • FloridaBoi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I have this friend who definitely defines himself by his consumption. One of the things he has wasted money in the last few years was getting expensive and expensive to repair cars. His latest was a truck that broke the first week he got it. It has an incredibly loud exhaust, probably gets 15mpg hwy and he has a 45 mile commute.

    I actually just think he’s a bit of a dumb guy.

    Then he tells me he wants to swap the headlight bulbs for LEDs and I said to absolutely not do that because of how the housings would scatter the light into the eyes of other drivers. I don’t know if he ever did it but he was really adamant about installing once they arrived in the mail.

  • Trudge [Comrade]@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    I can see the image clearly though? It’s just a picture of a pickup truck. I don’t know what y’all are going on about.