>>2020470>having a beam cut off is a nice ideanice idea if you don't ride bikes, maybe. a "properly set" cutoff is supposedly perfectly horizontal, so that waist-height objects get illuminated. except:
-some obstacles are higher than waist height, a commonly encountered example is loading docks on a delivery truck parked in the special "lane for bikes" (lol)
-since I don't actually live in amsterdam (REEEE EVERYTHING HAS TO REVOLVE AROUND AAAMSTERDAAAAAM), there's rolling terrain which means the strongest part of the beam is actually pointed up some non-trivial % of the time. likewise that part is pointed DOWN to the point of not illuminating oncoming peds/bicycles when I'm approaching the bottom of a slope. so I either get road raged at by having an unnecessarily focused laser beam pointed into someone's retina, or I crash into something that I didn't see
-one of the most important roles of a bike light is to make me visible in the rear view mirror so if I overtake the cager doesn't murder me, but a horizontal cutoff 20 inches above the ground is completely useless for that
in short, john forester did nothing wrong
