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Comment by vuln | Hacker News Reader

I've almost given up on night driving. These super bright headlights really really messes with my astigmatisms (both eyes) with either my corrective contact or normal glasses.

Anyone else in a similar boat that's found relief? I haven't tried night driving glasses.

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I haven't found a solution yet. But I find this especially crippling when our country also forces us to drive to do literally anything, even go for a walk. Particularly during the wintertime, it's crippling my ability to go anywhere or do anything.

The only solution I can think of is for myself to buy a lifted truck or other similar unnecessarily large vehicle. I haven't done this, of course, but if I did I'd then be part of the problem but at least my eye line would be above that of the majority of other drivers. We have a sedan and a small SUV - I don't drive the sedan at night ever because of the headlight problem. My eyes hurt just thinking about this.

There are places in the US where that's not true. You made the personal decision not to live in one of them.

Actually I made a personal decision to live in a walkable place. Repeatedly. But of course people still insist on driving their cars (often dangerously) in my area, regardless of how walkable that place is.

Please share some walkable, bikeable places in the USA here. I really want to live in one but my research reveals very few options where you aren't extremely likely to be run over by a vehicle if you dare to walk or bike exclusively, especially at night.

My criteria requires a grocery store, a coffee shop, and some kind of watering hole with food (brewery or pub) an easy walk from my door. It's amazing how few of those places exist in the USA, and how expensive they can be when you find one.

When arguing about societal/legal/political things that have anything to do with location, people frequently imply that there is no friction to picking where you live or moving. As if people are born into the world as adults and the first thing they do is pick from a list of every available home in the country in their price range, with infinite time and information to make their choice, and then they and their job and family and friends and possessions are all teleported there. And they can do this again as often as they want at any point. It's frankly nuts. "Uncharitable" and "oversimplified" are not really strong enough words for how dramatic the fallacy of "just live somewhere else" is.

It's not an honest consideration of the issue at hand, just a sneering dismissal of a real problem. You see the same sentiment whenever someone wants to seem like they're considering something intellectually when in reality they refuse to entertain the idea seriously at all. They just want you to shut up about it.

Such as?

Mostly I just don't drive at night. I'll take my e-bike or moped instead if I need to grab groceries. Also I'm really good about keeping my windshield clean and polished. About to replace my 10 year old windshield with a new one soon to reduce pitting. I also bought a dash mat to reduce the internal glare.

But sometimes, you just can't do anything about taking 10_000 lumens to the retina except slow down and pull over.

I agree about keeping the windshield clean - that helps a lot.

I don't really have the option of not driving in the dark - for most of winter it's dark well past when I need to drive to the office, and too cold for me to want to take public transit (which would also require me to wake up an hour earlier).

I think it needs to be well regulated and well enforced by police. Nothing else will work.

I agree. Roadside inspections and fix-it tickets would make a lot of sense. Most people won't spend a cent on maintenance unless they absolutely have to.

I avoid driving at night because of other people's headlights. My wife as well, and we're in our 40s. We've just assumed it's because our eyes are getting old and tired, but reading comments in this thread suggest it has less to do with that and more to do with an actual universal problem.

I've often thought of how cool it'd be to have a transparent LCD windshield that could use an eye tracking camera and a forward facing camera to calculate where to best draw an opaque circle in your line of sight so that'd it block the most intense points of light.

Sort of like holding your thumb up to block the light, just automatically and for multiple points of light.

There doesn't exist an addressable transparent LCD yet in mass quantities. But I'm working on a dimmed piece of plastic moving around on a stage. The computer vision is sorta straightforward actually.

If possible, I avoid driving at night. Even if the article is focused on US status, also in Europe it's becoming a nightmare, especially if you see big trucks mounting also super-bright LEDs and everyone has Xenon/LEDs nowadays

I started driving cargo vans that both sit me up straight and put me higher than a lot of the traffic. Also the lack of rear windows is pretty nice for when you're in front of a new F350 riding your ass in the slow lane.

I've heard anecdotally to just get super bright headlights on your own vehicle. That way your eyes are already adjusted to the brightness. I don't know what to if you have a conscience, though.

At least for me, it isn't really a matter of eye adjustment. I still get halos and whatnot against the dark sky and environment.

Retroreflecting band covering upper side of your windshield? This way anyone who shines his lights too high will be blinded with his own reflected light. Doubly so if he tries flashing actual high beams.

Tempting, but then maybe you're escalating blindness into a head-on collision...

That's not a good solution in my experience. I recently purchased a vehicle whose stock headlights (properly height adjusted) are overly bright, and when you're stopped in traffic right behind a vehicle with a white license plate, a significant portion of that light gets reflected right back into your eyes by the white plate. Basically it ends up punishing yourself too. These days I do all my city driving with headlights off (just the daytime running lights) for this reason.

the less sociopathic version of this is to drive with your cabin lights on.

Make sure your glasses and windscreen are very clean and free of stripes from wiping them. It'll not help with the astigmatism, but at least the glasses and the windscreen aren't making it worse.

Another thing to try is the various kinds of night glasses, My mom swears by those. As a last resort you can try untinted polarized sunglasses. While those do make your view less bright they also make it lower contrast which might help.

Have you tried yellow tinted glasses? I found it helped me a lot. I think night driving glasses are supposed to do the same, filter out the blue light but not sure if they do it as effectively as yellow lenses, maybe try both?

I have not. Do you have any solid recommendations?

sadly no, I just had a pair lying around at home which I got for biking I believe, they are unbranded plastic ones. But I don't think it matters as long as they are yellow :-)

In the other thread someone mentioned that normal "blue light" glasses do not work which is too bad, so maybe just grab some cheap plastic yellow glasses and see if they help. If they don't I'd like to hear so I can update my recommendation and try to figure out why mine work so well.

I have keratoconus and scleral contact lenses reduce the flaring enough to make night driving possible.

Expensive solution, but … LASIK fixed it for me. Edit: I had astigmatism in one eye as well.

Yep, no thanks. Not even for free when the military offered it to me as a carrot to reenlist. You only have one set of eyes. There are no guaranteed results. I have blue eyes and astigmatisms which I was told by multiple doctors could affect the results. I've met more than a couple people that have had chronic dry eye and other issues after their LASIK. I'm totally fine with my glasses and rare use of contacts. I'm not gambling my only set of eyes with perhaps half my life left on this planet.

LASIK is known for causing night vision difficulties e.g. bright lights causing starburst patterns or halos. This can happen when the pupil widens to the point where light is entering the eye from both the corrected and uncorrected areas of the cornea. I think the issue decreases over time as the eye heals but in some cases it can remain as a long-term side effect.

https://lasikcomplications.com/starbursting.htm

Right, for a month or so I saw halos around lights at but then they went away. But definitely a risk to be aware of.

I had a friend who was considering LASIK by doing one eye at a time to reduce the possible downside.

I'm in the same boat, no relief found, though. Do your lenses correct astigmatism?

Yes, both my contacts and glasses correct, but it doesn't appear to make a difference.

Window tint? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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