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

  • Ho_Chi_Chungus [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    9 months 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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      9 months 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.

      • It’d be easy as shit to have a pubic initiative drive for free light adjustment. Pigs could do something useful for once and pull these things over for referral to an adjustment center. But no, we can’t have reasonable things that improve safety. I learned today that Tennessee apparently doesn’t have driver’s training, kids just have an adult sign off that they can drive.

        • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          9 months ago

          I learned today that Tennessee apparently doesn’t have driver’s training, kids just have an adult sign off that they can drive.

          I sure hope the literacy rate of Tennessee is good enough for them to read the road signs…

          • Holy FUCK HOW IS IT BELOW 99%?!! WE’RE THE RICHES GODDAMN COUNTRY IN THE WORLD AND WE HAVE THIS!!! I have friends who live there that want us to come visit and it might force me to come out to them because I have to explain ‘uhh yeah, I don’t want to get arrested for existing’. … I JUST NOTICED THIS ISN’T EVEN THE LOWEST RANKED STATE OHHH MYYYY FUCK!!!

            • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
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              9 months ago

              It’s worse than that. Those percentages add up to over 100% – almost 180% in total. And that’s without even counting the innumeracy rate, which isn’t counted, apparently. We take numeracy far more seriously in my state.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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          9 months ago

          The Batman, except he’s the Mothman and is attracted to bright lights (which he destroys with a sledge hammer and a shotgun loaded with rock salt)

      • Sinistar@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        California has you do a smog check every other year, I think a safety inspection would be nice too (and make it for the whole country). People who are really dedicated to being assholes will work around it, but most people who just don’t realize that they’re blinding everyone else will get their headlights angled downward and then never touch them again.

    • lnxtx@feddit.nl
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      9 months 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…

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months 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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      9 months 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@hexbear.net
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        9 months 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.

        • Stache_@lemmy.ml
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          9 months ago

          If I have someone tailgating me, I’ll usually act like I’m taking a right turn and go into the turning lane. Then they’ll pass and I’ll swing back over into the regular lane (if there’s no one behind them of course)

      • LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        9 months 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

        • SacredExcrement [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          9 months ago

          Listen, they need that vehicle so they can take their two kids to and from school

          And so they can use it 2 times a year to haul slightly more stuff then you’d be easily able to fit into a sedan

    • GinAndJuche@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      I drive a civic in an area full of lifted trucks and oversized SUVs, it’s miserable at night.

    • D61 [any]@hexbear.net
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      9 months 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.”

  • pixelghost [any]@hexbear.net
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    9 months 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.

    • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      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.

  • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    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

    • Hexbear2 [any]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      Sealed beam headlights are just so much better than what we have now. It’s such a pain in the ass to try to change out headlight bulbs in many modern cars, and then the plastic housings start to look like crap from UV after a while. Give me a sealed beam any day!

      • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        Oh my god replacing the headlights on a Prius is a fucking nightmare. One of them is easy enough, but one of them requires insane bending of the arm, wrist, and hand and then to put a decent amount of force into twisting it

        And also my headlight enclosures are so fucking yellow I really need to do something about that

  • invo_rt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months 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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    9 months 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.

    • SpiderFarmer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months 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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                  9 months 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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              9 months 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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          9 months 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.

          • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            9 months ago

            Yes, rural amerikkkans can in fact go fuck themselves and stop with their persecution complex pity parties. The entire structure of amerikkkan government is designed to give them outsized representation and their opinions are somehow even worse than the amerikkkan average.

  • SpiderFarmer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    I ran into a lot of those today. At a point I just kinda snapped and popped my brights on briefly while waiting for a left turn, just to spite the fucker with a death ray facing me. I wish the public transport here was better. I already should minimize driving at night, but then fuckers with LED lamps come out. In the middle of a rainstorm I’ll find it a miracle I don’t wind up crashing or accidentally hitting some pedestrian while momentarily blinded.

  • FloridaBoi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months 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.

    • TomBombadil [he/him, she/her]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      Happened to me last night. Sitting in my little human sized car and a fuck in a giant truck with these LEDs at directly head height rolls up behind me. Truly a painful experience

  • mar_k [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    I been awake for 34 hours and the red lights make this look like a shadow monster with glowing eyes shining its flashlight at me