A very bright bike light makes it much more comfortable to ride a bike at night, you need to compete with car headlights so that you can see the surface of the road in front of you. Cars don't need to worry about the road conditions as much as cyclists since if they hit a pothole or a stick, it's no big deal.
I'm hoping cars (and bikes) evolve over the next few years into less blinding headlights. The infatuation we have with projectors makes even halogen lights blinding. I see some newer Acuras coming with multiple LED projectors on each side lately, which ought to help (so long as overall output is constant, and each projector is dimmer)
