This applies only to inner city streets and suburbs.
I'm aware of precious few stretches of road in the DFW metro area where this is reasonably applicable.
Only one major street in my region where I'd be close to comfortable with this idea - a short stretch of Belt Line Road in Addison with median light standards every 30 meters or so
(this photo while obviously touched up gives an idea of the density/arrangement). Some random sections of highway, highway interchanges. A few tunnels and underpasses. Some retail parking lots. Otherwise, street lighting is intermittent and variable enough that you're going to want regular headlights because the range is between 'seemingly more intense than your headlights' and 'shut down color vision but not activate night vision'.
Just in my neighborhood:
- My street is all of ~100 meters long: HPS light at the north T junction, MHI light at the south T junction, both largely obstructed by trees with the junctions relatively well lit and the street itself falling into highly-contrasting darkness
- One of the through streets in the neighborhood has a streetlight at the arterial junction then goes through a slow sweeping 45º curve some 350 meters until reaching a cross street with a street light
- Two parallel tree-lined ~300m streets with lamp posts at either end ... that only illuminate the junctions: because trees
- Arterials bounding the neighborhood will have occasional light standards in the media and a streetlight on each signal post but otherwise rely on neighborhood entrance lighting
... which is pretty representative of the DFW area in my 30+ years of living here.
it makes driving more comfortable
There are countless things that make driving individually more
comfortable. Quite a few of them make driving less safe.
there's less light bouncing into your eyes from in front of you
Read:
you're seeing less. You're also experiencing markedly more variation in visual input since intensities are varying significantly. And in many areas you also have appreciable light source diversity with a mix of HPS, MHI, LED.
Secondly, in low power mode, since you are looking up ahead and relying on the street lights, you are seeing more of the road, which is a huge safety factor.
You're describing a driver training problem. A good driver should be devoting a fraction of their attention beyond the reach of their headlights - be they low or high beams - given that there are compromises in their performance (thus low vs high beams). In total darkness you'll be looking for gross hazards given the small amount of light available; in our hypothetical urban/suburban environment it will be more profitable.
Complimentary to this, headlights should be well-adjusted. See next paragraph.
Headlights light up about 100ft
No, they don't. If I adjusted my daily driver's ~27" high headlights to
conservatively drop 3" at 25' they'll go 225 feet. Another vehicle with ~33" high headlights with 3" of drop will realize 275 feet.
Now I don't doubt that there are no small numbers of poorly-adjusted headlamps out there. Geometry prevents the
brodozer demo - with headlights some 48" high or higher - from adjusting their headlights in such a fashion as to be both useful and acceptable to other non-brodozers. And there are no shortage of vehicles with more conventionally-situated headlights angled far too low, poorly emulating foglights.
Lastly, lower powered headlights option switch means less glare for incoming traffic.
A correctly-adjusted low beam presents negligible glare by design.
