I do not have in practice other choice than using a multiuse path along the particular route. The only other nominal option is a road with rapid traffic and lacking a cycling lane. Whatever you do around other people is a compromise.
You “compromise”. Pedestrians without lights suffer the same problem you do except when you leave, they are completely in the dark. If you are going to complain about how other cyclists use their lights, think about the way
you use your lights.
My lights are all with upper cutoff and hitting the ground close enough that they avoid eyes of the pedestrians.
It doesn’t matter where your lights are aimed nor that they have a cut off. The problem isn’t with the light hitting the eyes indirectly, the problem is with the way that eyes deal with light. There are two types of cells in the eye…rod and cone. The cones work well for bright light and recover quickly after being saturated. The chemical used to move the signal clears quickly. In the dark, however, the cone cells aren’t very sensitive but they are sensitive enough when there is a lot of light around.
Rod cells work in very low light and don’t need much light to trigger them. They are highly sensitive…a single photon is enough to trigger them… but they saturate with light very quickly and are slow to recover. During night vision adaptation, the rod cells are doing all the work. However when you ride by that pedestrian even with lights aimed down or with cutoffs, you flood the rod cells and once the light source is gone, the rods in the pedestrian’s eyes are no longer able to able to work. It takes several minutes for those cells to relax and go back to normal. Meanwhile, you are long gone,
Incidentally, around my area those walking dogs will often have reflective elements and runners are likely to have blinkies and, at times, LED strings. There are street lights here and there or illumination in front of houses, so my lights are not particularly standoffish.
Reflective vests spread the light out over a wide area in a rather random direction. They won’t overwhelm the rods. Blinkers and LED strings are usually red which is low energy wavelength that will not overwhelm the rods. Often night operations and stargazing are done with low intensity red lights because the light doesn’t overwhelm the rods.
House lights and street lights play havoc on night vision which usually means that people want
more of them which ruins their night vision, which means they need more lights, etc. However, all of those lights are more dispersed than your headlamp. A 100 watt light bulb puts out similar lumens to a bike light but that light is radiating in all directions. The lumens/square meter is lower than if you use a reflector to project all that light out towards one spot.
Yet a bright helmet light shone into your face disables you. From time to time, of course, you encounter cyclists with bright lights mounted on handlebars that aim too high and blind you too.
Directly and close, a helmet light is dazzling but not disabling. It’s not like you have to stop riding and you absolutely can’t see the road in front of you. For the pedestrian without lights depending on night vision…true night vision, not what people
think is night vision…your downward aimed lights
are disabling. Everything around them is black for a least a few seconds and diminished for several minutes (up to 20).
Try a couple of experiments to see what I’m talking about. Experiment 1: While riding down the road, turn off your lights and keep riding. How well can you see?
Experiment 2: Put yourself in the shoes of the pedestrian and go for a night walk without lights. Have someone ride past you or just turn on a flashlight of a similar brightness to your bike lights. Then turn it off and see how well you can navigate.
Extra credit: Go talk to an astronomer and ask them about “night vision”. Running with lights on a bicycle is not that.