Bike lights in the dark

[jack]

The internet says that they made low beam bike lights sometimes (maybe from germany). Any experience having a bike light which is bright enough to cycle on completely unlit roads/paths without having to slow down a lot, without dazzling oncomers? Is any decent bike light likely to do it or do I need to look for something specific?

I've slowly expanded my comfort zone cycling, but it would open more options if I could reliably cycle on dark ways. I used to have a decent light but it was a bit of a trade-off between "being able to see far enough" and "not dazzling people", and now I have a cheap light that's suffices for urban cycling but doesn't light things up much.

I might have asked this before, I can't remember.

Comments

[jack]

About 10% of car headlights completely blind me these days, so you might as well join them.

Oh! I did get that feeling, but I thought it was just the sort of roads I drove on that made the lights more intense. I retrospect it makes sense but I hadn't thought that it got worse...

But that doesn't seem any better reason to be unsafe myself -- dazzling someone else just makes it more likely they might crash into *me*. (And I don't know if that's clear, but it's not just to cars, I think whizzing past in the other direction at 60 cars might find a too-high beam a problem for little enough time, but the other place it would be really useful is the unlit busway cyclepath, where the oncoming traffic is all similar bikes.)