DOT lighting regs?

[dicer]

In years past I though there where DOT candle power regulations in the US. It seems now there is none. Many manufactures seem to be putting tail lights in newer vehicles that are blinding. I would think they would cause more problems than they are supposed to prevent. I have to use my hand on occasions to block the brightness, even sunglasses at night don't do the job.
So I am curious are there DOT regs on the maximum brightness of lights on vehicals? If so I'm curious why they are not followed?

 

[IRstuff]

supposedly, it's on the order of 300 candelas:

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2004-title49-vol5/pdf/CFR-2004-title49-vol5-sec571-108.pdf

but I couldn't find the exact reference.

TTFN
faq731-376

 

[potteryshard]

Who can even see the taillights?

As a driver of a small car, I'm constantly blinded by the headlights of the pickups (habitually five feet) behind me. Because trucks are allowed to place headlights higher than the side-mirror locations of cars, the mirrors are on-axis to the low beams of the trucks.

Brighter taillights might give us the luxury of at least having a cue to follow...

 

[IRstuff]

page 10 of this:

http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/trans/main/wp29/wp29regs/r119e.pdf

lists some numbers; not sure what the nomenclature means though. But, given the DOT doc and this one, we can see that it's a bit wild and woolly out there.

One unfortunate thing is that most of the regs were probably written for incandescent lights, and some of the implied measurement approaches might not reveal just how bright some of these lights are.

BTW, the same can be said of traffic signals; some of the earlier LED green lights were so bright that your eyes would almost hurt, looking at them at night. But, they were great during the day, even when backlit by the setting sun.

TTFN
faq731-376

 

[dicer]

I would like to see a nice crack down on these ridiculously bright tail and head lights.