White LEDs (including at least anything with correlated color temperature > 2500K) should never be used outdoors at night for any purpose other than momentary a

White LEDs (including at least anything with correlated color temperature > 2500K) should never be used outdoors at night for any purpose other than momentary artistic displays. (And indoors should be mostly reserved for daytime use.) They are awful for street lamps, porch lamps, car headlamps, flashlights, bike lights, camp lanterns, ... People don’t seem to understand that adding massive glare in your peripheral vision and clobbering your night vision makes it harder to see everything, and makes everything less safe. (Not to mention screws up your sleep, prevents you from seeing the stars, is terribly damaging to nearby animals, ...) Street lighting (including from car headlamps) is safest and most effective when it is dim but even (human eyes are amazing at adapting to low overall light levels, given sufficient time) and not very blue, rather than bright and extremely patchy. If people want to use LEDs, they should be dim, orange, diffuse, as low to the ground as practical, and directed primarily downward. The purported advantage LEDs have in longer lifespan and lower power use can conceivably make them better for street lamps if the lamps are made dimmer, more numerous, spaced closer together, brought lower down, and shielded better from the top and side. But if they are going to be put higher up, made intensely blue and extremely bright, then they end up not having any energy saving and making conditions worse for everyone, including drivers, pedestrians, people whose windows look out on the street, ... The lighting vendors selling these over-blue over-bright lamps to cities and the public are doing the world a gross disservice.