They need equipment that makes objective measurements. Noise tickets and tint tickets are rarely issued anymore due to the social context of those most likely to attract such tickets. Police must use noise meters deployed at a standard distance from the source to issue tickets. That a vehicle's exhaust or radio is annoying isn't enough in the current environment. Same for tint, where a piece of equipment is required to determine a vehicle's light passthrough on its tinted windows. All of this equipment exists and most police have access to it but few want to bother with the hassle and the current social context even with objective measures. Headlights are just another one of these issues where being proactive creates too many troubles. They let the insurance companies fight it out in court over if an accident was caused by improper equipment.
The last part of your argument makes no sense. Even from a cynical view, it makes no sense for the police to condone something that inhibits their own operations by blinding them with light.
You can’t measure brightness objectively? You are right, though, about “social context”. If glaring headlights becomes a black-coded thing, the problem will get solved.
I was being flippant. Of course, I know that if superbright headlamps were identified as belonging to another "social context", that wouldn't solve the problem. It'd just lead to selective enforcement, the "right" people being let off with a warning, etc.
Again, is that what you see is happening with tinted windows and loud cars? We must live on different planets because the only thing I see happening with that is a whole lot of nothing. People just drive with tinted windows and loud cars, nothing happens, and the annoying/harmful circumstances of this just continue indefinitely.
True, because it's a characteristic of the privileged now. We both seem to agree that these laws are poorly enforced, but I'm saying that a bunch of these laws, whether headlights or tints, are not for safety but a pretext to stop people who weren't in a privileged class.
The whole point of the annual inspection the state makes me get is shit like window tints, and that's where it should be checked. I don't have a ready solution for aftermarket headlights (especially as I support right to repair), but a start would be regulating what the manufacturers do so it's not a safety issue by default.
In what way is it a characteristic of the privileged to use incorrectly aimed white/blue headlights, or to drive a loud car? There would be some small amount of argument for having tinted windows but in general fixing those things (removing them) costs money, not the other way around.
The problem is too far gone at this point to stop it via random stops. That would have been a good thing to do about 6 years ago. At this point the only solution is recalls and manufacturer regulation.
