7 ms·

I actually quite like the gold/yellow light on "traditional" British street lights. Not only is it arguably more "natural" than whiter hued light, but I think i

by fergie 6y ago

I actually quite like the gold/yellow light on "traditional" British street lights. Not only is it arguably more "natural" than whiter hued light, but I think it actually illuminates better. I live in a city in another country that uses white street lights, and I find the illumination to be a lot worse than that of sodium lighting

mtalantikite 6y ago
Yeah I agree. NYC went full on LED a few years back and I hate it. I have a lamppost right outside my apartment window and previously the light didn’t really bother me, now it’s this horrible cold LED that’s super bright flooding into my living room. I get that they’re cheaper to operate, but they throw shadows differently and have more blue wavelengths in them (in nyc they’re 4000 kelvin last I looked). It personally feels much less magical to me and 3-4 years in I still haven’t really gotten used to it.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  Similar feelings in Chicago. It also makes me feel less safe at night. I get that the orange glow makes everything look muddy, color-wise, but it doesn't kill your night vision to the same extent as the bright white LEDs do. Sure, things directly under the streetlight are lit up like it's daytime, but I can't see for @$#% in between the streetlights or behind the bushes or whatever. I'm curious why it seems that no city has tried installing amber LEDs in an effort to try and realize the efficiency gains without quite so many of the downsides.
  - selectodude 6y ago
    >I'm curious why it seems that no city has tried installing amber LEDs in an effort to try and realize the efficiency gains without quite so many of the downsides. Flagstaff, Arizona did. There are some drawbacks, mostly that they simply don't get as bright. https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/how-flagstaff-arizona-switched-to-leds-without-giving-astronomers-a-headache/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/how-flagstaff-arizon...
    - mumblemumble 6y ago
      Aha. And that article also explains why. In terms of lumens per watt, it appears that the amber LEDs are actually about 40% less efficient than the low pressure sodium lights they would be replacing.
      - proggy 6y ago
        True. That said, LED lighting has a directionality advantage as well. So it turns out you need less of them to get the same basic coverage as the sodium lamps. Here’s an account of how Tucson, with its many observatories, managed to keep within budget using standard, high-efficiency blue LED fixtures: “If you absolutely must use white LEDs, you could do what Tucson has done,” Hall said. “They... switched out their whole high-pressure sodium system to 3,000 degree white but reduced their lumen budget for street lighting from 480 million to, like, 170 million [lumens] or something. And you need to do that. For every white LED lumen, you're increasing your skyglow by a factor of about three, but they cut the lumen budget by about a factor of three. So overall, they managed to wash out the skyglow because they’ve got a lot of observatories down there.”
        throw0101a 6y ago
        > high-efficiency blue LED fixtures The extra blue is probably screwing up the circadian rhythms of humans and animals: * https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-has-a-dark-side https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-ha... * https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/06/21/482936520/bright-bluish-white-led-streetlamps-bad-for-our-health-ama-says https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/06/21/482936520...
      - Gibbon1 6y ago
        Lumens per watt is the curse of bureaucratic/industrial mandated lighting. Problem is people hate lighting with low CRI, people also hate dim blue light. But you can't put a number on hate like you can lumens per watt. Efficiency regulations for residential fluorescent lighting delayed adoption by probably 25 years. Because regulations mandated lamps with terrible CRI.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    My opinion is that the whiter LEDs are a welcome change from their orange predecessors. I'm normally very nostalgic, but I make an exception for orange street lights.
- adonovan 6y ago
  The new NYC lampposts also spread wide light cones, which is good for road safety but means they intrude through house windows. Astronomers have also complained about the lights worsening the "seeing", which is already bad.
  - mtalantikite 6y ago
    Exactly, I wish they at least had some sort of shade on the back towards the sidewalk that stopped it throwing that much light back on the houses. Do we really need that much light on a one way, residential street?
  - Starwatcher2001 6y ago
    "Seeing" is actually about how steady the atmosphere is. The old sodium lights emit in a narrow part of the spectrum which can be mitigated against by using light pollution filters. These allow all light through, except sodium frequencies. Sadly, filters are ineffective against modern LED lighting which emits across a lot of the spectrum.
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    It's actually garbage for road safety because bluer lamps spaced so far apart creates less even lighting, blows out everyone's night vision, causes distracting glare in peripheral vision, and makes it impossible to see into the shadows. The ideal for road safety would be more uniform lighting from a larger number of closer-spaced lamps, placed at lower height, diffused, shielded from the sides, and colored orange (and optionally uniformly dimmer). It would also help road safety to ban the new bluer types of car headlamps, which cause much worse glare than previous yellower ones.
    - rootusrootus 6y ago
      > which cause much worse glare than previous yellower ones The color has almost nothing to do with that. Newer headlights are much brighter, and mostly use projectors now. The increase in glare is mostly due to the projectors, because they emit all their light from small point. You'll notice that newer cars with halogen projectors are almost as bad as one with HIDs. It would be interesting to see how a headlight would look if it were able to emit the same amount of light on the road but from a rectangle spanning the entire front of the car. Minimum glare, still effective.
- skohan 6y ago
  This also seems like a choice. There is no reason LED's cannot create warmer light, and there is probably a solution to scatter the rays and not give that "clinical" kind of light which LEDs are known for. I have an LED desk lamp with a temperature setting, and when it's on the warmer settings it really does produce a pleasant light.
  - quickthrowman 6y ago
    LED lights do in fact have the ability to do different color temps, some fixtures have tunable color temp as well. In my home, I use lamps that output 2200-2700K depending on the dimmer setting. Lower color temps output less lumens per watt, and the goal of exterior lighting is generally to improve visibility, hence the 4K color temp. Here’s a cutsheet for a Lithonia wall pack fixture showing the different options, there’s also a chart showing what the lumens per watt is based on the color temp: https://img.acuitybrands.com/public-assets/catalog/1008038/wdge2-led.pdf?abl_version=03%2f03%2f2021+15:50:38&DOC_Type=SPEC_SHEET https://img.acuitybrands.com/public-assets/catalog/1008038/w...
    - MayeulC 6y ago
      The color a LED emits is given by the choice of materials (specifically, the band-gap, with E=hν, ν being light frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_gap#Light_emitting_diodes_and_laser_diodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_gap#Light_emitting_diodes... ) "Tunable" LEDs are just multiple LEDs, the goal being to change the emission peak. Peak wavelength can be mapped onto a black body temperature trough Wien's law (λpeak =2.8e-3/T) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien%27s_displacement_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien%27s_displacement_law I don't really know how the mapping is done, though, as there are different ways to map it since the LEDs won't have the same emission curve as a black body.
- Zamicol 6y ago
  Isn't 4000k far more "natural"? A full moon is 4000k.
  - chrisin2d 6y ago
    Not at that brightness. Moonlight is extremely dim.
  - canoebuilder 6y ago
    Moonlight for some hours of the month, never exceeding a rather low intensity, a minuscule intensity compared to a single led streetlight. The night time lighting humans(and our non-human co-inhabitants of earth) have evolved with and known for a very longtime comes from fires of various types, flames with a much warmer color temperature.
    - Godel_unicode 6y ago
      Humans have had fire at night on a regular basis for a pretty short time, evolutionarily speaking. And that goes double for what animals might have seen; actual fire is so resource intensive that until a few hundred years ago the vast majority of the night was lit only by the moon and stars. Also, intensity is orthogonal to color temperature.
      - samatman 6y ago
        Use of fire predates anatomically modern humans by some hundreds of thousands of years. Consider the spread of lactose tolerance, a recent (no more than 10,000 years and perhaps less) mutation which has spread to 35% of humanity in that time. We have had plenty of time to co-evolve with fire, and doubtless, we have done so.
        ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        Well, we certainly didnt co-evolve to be fireproof in all this time, so what adaptation to fire do you suggest we did evolve? Its probably to do with cooked food, not vision - which is already co-evolved with the Sun, for when we are active/hunting/etc.
- kaybe 6y ago
  You might be able to get the city to add some metal to shade the light coming into your room. I don't know about the US, but here in Germany it took me one call to the city office and two weeks of waiting.
alistairSH 6y ago
Agreed. THere's a street lamp outside my bedroom window. It used to be a dull yellow, which was still plenty to illuminate the surrounding sidewalk and parking spaces. And didn't impact my sleep. A year or so ago, the bulb was replaced with a bright white bulb. It might produce more light, but it's a distracting color and brightness when outside and it's bright enough that we have to install black-out blinds to sleep.
- jws 6y ago
  It’s worth mentioning that if a street light shines in your window you may be able to contact your town and have them shade that side. My city has a contact on the web, you identify the light and what you would like shaded, and they come around and block the light on that sector. In my case it looks like they painted a section of the diffuser black.
- mnd999 6y ago
  I have one too, and now they’ve stuck a white ANPR camera directly under the bulb reflecting the light back anywhere but down. The local councils in the UK are clueless when it comes to lighting.
sdevonoes 6y ago
I agree. Somehow I feel more "secure" (I don't know why) with gold/yellow lights. White light reminds me of: dentist clinics, hospitals, metro stations... not very friendly places.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  And yet, the opposite is likely true; yellow lights feel warmer, but white lights make people feel exposed. You generally feel safe from other people in well lit places. There's research about e.g. subway incidents and safety when they got better / brighter / whiter lights.
- iamatworknow 6y ago
  When I was growing up my father was pretty frugal, so he was very early on the train of replacing all of our home's lightbulbs with fluorescents. However, I don't think he really understood what color temperatures meant, so he always seemed to buy the bulbs with the higher temperatures. Higher is better, right? So he always went with the super sterile cold 5000K bulbs, and just as you say, home felt like some sort of weird sterile warehouse.
noir_lord 6y ago
When LA went over to LED it caused massive problems because the tonal colours of LA at night changed radically. https://la.curbed.com/2014/2/3/10156584/las-new-led-streetlights-are-changing-the-way-movies-look-1 https://la.curbed.com/2014/2/3/10156584/las-new-led-streetli...
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  I guess Los Angeles must be practically a utopia if "making movies look somewhat different" counts as a massive problem for that city.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Massive problem, eh?
globular-toast 6y ago
Yellow lenses are used in sports to increase contrast in lower light situations. I wonder if yellow lamps have the same effect and provide more perceived visibility with less light.
- Lammy 6y ago
  I did the opposite and got yellow-lenses glasses: https://www.jins.com/us/jins-screen#night-use https://www.jins.com/us/jins-screen#night-use No affiliation, and no idea if there's truth to any of the marketing copy, but I'm personally very happy with them especially when driving at night due to the awful intensity of LED brake/tail lights on other cars.
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    Orange safety glasses will work better than this, if you don't mind looking silly.
    - Lammy 6y ago
      These are prescription though :)
DrBazza 6y ago
My local council, prior to recent events in London, decided to turn off all lights after 1am (or thereabouts) "to save money". There was a backlash, and also at the same time when LEDs became more affordable, so the lights are back on, but they're not the same as the good old fashioned orange/sodium lights. The light is more focused on the ground, and it makes driving a little bit more 'interesting' in the evenings. Compare that to the orange lights, where it was more diffuse and even. Improving the lighting is also at odds with wanting a dark sky for the local wildlife too. It has a noted effect on birds for instance. Apropos of nothing... I also remember a story about a northern country replacing traffic lights with LEDs and then spending even more money adding heaters because the old lights were naturally warm, and melted any ice that stuck to the lights. Can't find a link to it at the moment.
- Faaak 6y ago
  In my towns in France, it's actually the opposite: more cities are turning of the lights between 23 and 5 and I personally love it. It gives a sense of "city-sleeping" peacefulness
- M2Ys4U 6y ago
  >Apropos of nothing... I also remember a story about a northern country replacing traffic lights with LEDs and then spending even more money adding heaters because the old lights were naturally warm, and melted any ice that stuck to the lights. Can't find a link to it at the moment. The Technology Connections channel on YouTube has an excellent video on this, called 'The LED Traffic Light and the Danger of "But Sometimes!"': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8
- flurdy 6y ago
  My council are also started turning off their lights during the night. I understand it but I hate it. I feel sorry for the dude across the street that now comes home from work in the dark. Personally I feel a lot less secure now staring out in the darkness with a lot of houses and people nearby but we can't see them. I think in more suburban and rural setting this might make sense, but this is still in the town with many people so it makes little sense to me. I think partially the problem is people(us) have designed their lighting and safety around the street lights being on, and now they are not it is an issue. I have lived in other countries where the norm is for houses to have subtle outside lights that are permanently on at night. But around here they do not and people are more paranoid so all the terraced houses instead have over-active motion sensors with massive flood lights. That are now very noticeable when a poor late night clubber/shift worker/early morning dog walker/baker etc walks by...
garaetjjte 6y ago
>Not only is it arguably more "natural" than whiter hued light, but I think it actually illuminates better. I think it is neither "natural" or better illuminating. Sodium lamps have CRI of around, what, 30? I'm glad that these sodium lamps are finally getting replaced everywhere, and cities at night won't have that monochromatic depressing-ugly-yellow lighting.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  CRI is not used to measure whether a light helps people with practical vision tasks at night. It’s quite possible that a light with CRI zero, totally monochromatic, could be the best choice by some objective measures.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    If CRI is low, all colours on an object are fucked. Ao people in general are going to be worse at idebtifying what they are looking at or reacting. You won't be able to look at a picture, read text on your credit card, etc. Sure what you outline is possible in some spesific scenario, but it's not gonna work for 99%
- colechristensen 6y ago
  I'm happy sodium lamps are getting replaced, I'm not happy with the replacements which might be worse. With LEDs it should be very possible to light streets with low temperature close-to-blackbody light. (I don't know if the proximity to a blackbody radiation distribution is the same as CRI etc.) Who wouldn't want this?
  - ben_w 6y ago
    LED light can be about as far as it’s possible to get from a blackbody spectrum, if similarly to that is what you care about (I don’t, art galleries do). There are two ways of doing “white” with LEDs: • Separate red, green, and blue, whose spectrum is spiky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#/media/File:RGB_LED_Spectrum.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#/media/Fi... • Phosphor, which may give you a spectrum like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#/media/File:White_LED.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#/media/Fi...
krtkush 6y ago
I find white light depressing. My home city has metro coaches with either yellow or white lights. Me and a few friends of mine would skip the white ones because we found the yellow ones more comforting. On the other hand, my dad prefers white and in a room with types of lighting he will always go for the white ones.
- spijdar 6y ago
  I prefer natural white lights. I don't light rooms with them, but the light that terrarium/vivarium bulbs made to mimic sunlight give off is sublime IMO.
- llampx 6y ago
  I like daylight bulbs as well, living in Germany they are a lifesaver because it is cloudy all day and dark at 3-4PM in the winter. However in the evening, around 8PM, I change over to the yellow hued ones. Best of both worlds.
almaember 6y ago
I live in a country which uses both (it's moving towards white lights but it's not uniform), and I like yellow lights MUCH better. The very bright white lights just hurt my eyes.
rini17 6y ago
Same, but recently more and more streetlights are refurbished with 2700K LEDs instead of 4000K and I like these much better.
clairity 6y ago
not just the light temperature (2700K would be better), but the idea that a street light must be a bulb boxes in the design. led lights can be made in any sort of configuration, since it's an amalgamation of bunch of small point sources, not just one big point source. it would be neat to have light strips alongside the sidewalk and the road, as well as above. that way, the light can be lower intensity in aggregate while still providing the necessary illumination (via surrounding light vs. flooding) to make out details. our eyes are highly adaptive, and we don't need a lot of light, but rather, light from many angles. also, the safety argument is often overstated in relation to the intensity of light. you only need a little light to reduce crime and accidents to its threshold. more isn't better in this regard.
- rini17 6y ago
  Compact light sources aren't recent invention, and various lighting methods were tried. I think pylons with bulb boxes still come out best in illumination quality vs. price/maintenance.
statstutor 6y ago
Living in London (specifically Haringey, which is mentioned in the article), I was amazed - positively - when my residential street switched to directed, white, LED light. It lit the street and not everything else. I could see a few stars in the night sky, for the first time since moving to London. I no longer had to deal so carefully with light leaking into my bedroom.
flurdy 6y ago
Oh god I hate the yellow lights. When I moved to the UK in the 90s it took a while to realise what was "wrong" at night, then I realised it was the street lights. Every colour and definition disappeared, hard to spot the right car etc, and late evening strolls was less enjoyable as everything was blasé. I am glad there are a lot fewer of them around now.
xioxox 6y ago
Also the sodium lights are also much easier to filter out if you do astronomy. So much lighting is bad nowadays - lighting the sky rather than the ground.
Shivetya 6y ago
my little subdivision transitioned across a few years from the orange type lamps to LED, I have commented on it a few times here. The primary effect is that its like having a near full moon effect at all times of the night. Not looking directly at the light reveals a landscape that is not harsh on the eyes but never catch a lamp straight on. Fortunately around me the birds caught on pretty quick at first singing at odd hours until they sorted it out. Overall its a benefit as it has opened up hours people can walk the sidewalks and even in the street without worrying about wildlife blundering into them
elric 6y ago
I'm quite fond of the orangey hue myself. Harsh white light is awful. The contrast between the dark of night and white light is too great and it messes up my vision (migraineur with stupid light sensitivity issues). I've recently encountered a couple of construction sites which are illumunated by a particularly pleasant green hue at night. That might be even better. And while we're on the subject of street lights, can we please stop with all the light pollution?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hinkley 6y ago
Street lights should be a balance between visibility, light pollution, and night vision protection. As a tax payer I'd also like them to think about efficiency, longevity. A daylight colored bulbs are probably not doing our night vision any favors (but then head lights have the same problem, yes?). Going from a lit street onto a side street with few lights is potentially a problem depending on the kind of street lights.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > A daylight colored bulbs are probably not doing our night vision any favors More importantly, colour temperature >3200K screw up the circadian rhythms of humans and animals: * https://www.darksky.org/our-work/lighting/lighting-for-industry/fsa/ https://www.darksky.org/our-work/lighting/lighting-for-indus... * https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/conservation/led-streetlights-are-giving-neighborhoods-the-blues https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/conservation/led-street...
StrictDabbler 6y ago
It's a race to the bottom. Light with more white in it feels brighter. Drivers prefer whiter headlights because it feels like the road is more illuminated. Car manufacturers move to HID or LED projectors for whiter light. Whiter light causes the pupil to contract significantly more. Drivers with contracted pupils from the white headlights find the yellow sodium bulbs in streetlights and parking lots too dim. Governments and businesses replace the sodium bulbs with bright white LEDs. At every step along the way we're seeing less of the night. Shadows become darker. A person or animal coming in from the shadowed roadside is increasingly invisible. A mugger can jump you from an alley with no chance of being seen because the shadows are so deep. Now we have to increase the portion of the Earth that's illuminated at night for "safety". This disrupts animals more and deepens the shadows further. It's incredibly stupid and there's no way to stop it without some overarching power a) doing a scientific study into night lighting and b) using that as a reason to impose intense lighting regulations and enforcement. Too late now.

by fergie 6y ago

mtalantikite 6y ago

Yeah I agree. NYC went full on LED a few years back and I hate it. I have a lamppost right outside my apartment window and previously the light didn’t really bother me, now it’s this horrible cold LED that’s super bright flooding into my living room. I get that they’re cheaper to operate, but they throw shadows differently and have more blue wavelengths in them (in nyc they’re 4000 kelvin last I looked). It personally feels much less magical to me and 3-4 years in I still haven’t really gotten used to it.

mumblemumble 6y ago
Similar feelings in Chicago. It also makes me feel less safe at night. I get that the orange glow makes everything look muddy, color-wise, but it doesn't kill your night vision to the same extent as the bright white LEDs do. Sure, things directly under the streetlight are lit up like it's daytime, but I can't see for @$#% in between the streetlights or behind the bushes or whatever. I'm curious why it seems that no city has tried installing amber LEDs in an effort to try and realize the efficiency gains without quite so many of the downsides.
- selectodude 6y ago
  >I'm curious why it seems that no city has tried installing amber LEDs in an effort to try and realize the efficiency gains without quite so many of the downsides. Flagstaff, Arizona did. There are some drawbacks, mostly that they simply don't get as bright. https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/how-flagstaff-arizona-switched-to-leds-without-giving-astronomers-a-headache/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/how-flagstaff-arizon...
  - mumblemumble 6y ago
    Aha. And that article also explains why. In terms of lumens per watt, it appears that the amber LEDs are actually about 40% less efficient than the low pressure sodium lights they would be replacing.
    - proggy 6y ago
      True. That said, LED lighting has a directionality advantage as well. So it turns out you need less of them to get the same basic coverage as the sodium lamps. Here’s an account of how Tucson, with its many observatories, managed to keep within budget using standard, high-efficiency blue LED fixtures: “If you absolutely must use white LEDs, you could do what Tucson has done,” Hall said. “They... switched out their whole high-pressure sodium system to 3,000 degree white but reduced their lumen budget for street lighting from 480 million to, like, 170 million [lumens] or something. And you need to do that. For every white LED lumen, you're increasing your skyglow by a factor of about three, but they cut the lumen budget by about a factor of three. So overall, they managed to wash out the skyglow because they’ve got a lot of observatories down there.”
      - throw0101a 6y ago
        > high-efficiency blue LED fixtures The extra blue is probably screwing up the circadian rhythms of humans and animals: * https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-has-a-dark-side https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-ha... * https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/06/21/482936520/bright-bluish-white-led-streetlamps-bad-for-our-health-ama-says https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/06/21/482936520...
    - Gibbon1 6y ago
      Lumens per watt is the curse of bureaucratic/industrial mandated lighting. Problem is people hate lighting with low CRI, people also hate dim blue light. But you can't put a number on hate like you can lumens per watt. Efficiency regulations for residential fluorescent lighting delayed adoption by probably 25 years. Because regulations mandated lamps with terrible CRI.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  My opinion is that the whiter LEDs are a welcome change from their orange predecessors. I'm normally very nostalgic, but I make an exception for orange street lights.
adonovan 6y ago
The new NYC lampposts also spread wide light cones, which is good for road safety but means they intrude through house windows. Astronomers have also complained about the lights worsening the "seeing", which is already bad.
- mtalantikite 6y ago
  Exactly, I wish they at least had some sort of shade on the back towards the sidewalk that stopped it throwing that much light back on the houses. Do we really need that much light on a one way, residential street?
- Starwatcher2001 6y ago
  "Seeing" is actually about how steady the atmosphere is. The old sodium lights emit in a narrow part of the spectrum which can be mitigated against by using light pollution filters. These allow all light through, except sodium frequencies. Sadly, filters are ineffective against modern LED lighting which emits across a lot of the spectrum.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  It's actually garbage for road safety because bluer lamps spaced so far apart creates less even lighting, blows out everyone's night vision, causes distracting glare in peripheral vision, and makes it impossible to see into the shadows. The ideal for road safety would be more uniform lighting from a larger number of closer-spaced lamps, placed at lower height, diffused, shielded from the sides, and colored orange (and optionally uniformly dimmer). It would also help road safety to ban the new bluer types of car headlamps, which cause much worse glare than previous yellower ones.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    > which cause much worse glare than previous yellower ones The color has almost nothing to do with that. Newer headlights are much brighter, and mostly use projectors now. The increase in glare is mostly due to the projectors, because they emit all their light from small point. You'll notice that newer cars with halogen projectors are almost as bad as one with HIDs. It would be interesting to see how a headlight would look if it were able to emit the same amount of light on the road but from a rectangle spanning the entire front of the car. Minimum glare, still effective.
skohan 6y ago
This also seems like a choice. There is no reason LED's cannot create warmer light, and there is probably a solution to scatter the rays and not give that "clinical" kind of light which LEDs are known for. I have an LED desk lamp with a temperature setting, and when it's on the warmer settings it really does produce a pleasant light.
- quickthrowman 6y ago
  LED lights do in fact have the ability to do different color temps, some fixtures have tunable color temp as well. In my home, I use lamps that output 2200-2700K depending on the dimmer setting. Lower color temps output less lumens per watt, and the goal of exterior lighting is generally to improve visibility, hence the 4K color temp. Here’s a cutsheet for a Lithonia wall pack fixture showing the different options, there’s also a chart showing what the lumens per watt is based on the color temp: https://img.acuitybrands.com/public-assets/catalog/1008038/wdge2-led.pdf?abl_version=03%2f03%2f2021+15:50:38&DOC_Type=SPEC_SHEET https://img.acuitybrands.com/public-assets/catalog/1008038/w...
  - MayeulC 6y ago
    The color a LED emits is given by the choice of materials (specifically, the band-gap, with E=hν, ν being light frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_gap#Light_emitting_diodes_and_laser_diodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_gap#Light_emitting_diodes... ) "Tunable" LEDs are just multiple LEDs, the goal being to change the emission peak. Peak wavelength can be mapped onto a black body temperature trough Wien's law (λpeak =2.8e-3/T) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien%27s_displacement_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien%27s_displacement_law I don't really know how the mapping is done, though, as there are different ways to map it since the LEDs won't have the same emission curve as a black body.
Zamicol 6y ago
Isn't 4000k far more "natural"? A full moon is 4000k.
- chrisin2d 6y ago
  Not at that brightness. Moonlight is extremely dim.
- canoebuilder 6y ago
  Moonlight for some hours of the month, never exceeding a rather low intensity, a minuscule intensity compared to a single led streetlight. The night time lighting humans(and our non-human co-inhabitants of earth) have evolved with and known for a very longtime comes from fires of various types, flames with a much warmer color temperature.
  - Godel_unicode 6y ago
    Humans have had fire at night on a regular basis for a pretty short time, evolutionarily speaking. And that goes double for what animals might have seen; actual fire is so resource intensive that until a few hundred years ago the vast majority of the night was lit only by the moon and stars. Also, intensity is orthogonal to color temperature.
    - samatman 6y ago
      Use of fire predates anatomically modern humans by some hundreds of thousands of years. Consider the spread of lactose tolerance, a recent (no more than 10,000 years and perhaps less) mutation which has spread to 35% of humanity in that time. We have had plenty of time to co-evolve with fire, and doubtless, we have done so.
      - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        Well, we certainly didnt co-evolve to be fireproof in all this time, so what adaptation to fire do you suggest we did evolve? Its probably to do with cooked food, not vision - which is already co-evolved with the Sun, for when we are active/hunting/etc.
kaybe 6y ago
You might be able to get the city to add some metal to shade the light coming into your room. I don't know about the US, but here in Germany it took me one call to the city office and two weeks of waiting.

alistairSH 6y ago

Agreed. THere's a street lamp outside my bedroom window. It used to be a dull yellow, which was still plenty to illuminate the surrounding sidewalk and parking spaces. And didn't impact my sleep. A year or so ago, the bulb was replaced with a bright white bulb. It might produce more light, but it's a distracting color and brightness when outside and it's bright enough that we have to install black-out blinds to sleep.

jws 6y ago
It’s worth mentioning that if a street light shines in your window you may be able to contact your town and have them shade that side. My city has a contact on the web, you identify the light and what you would like shaded, and they come around and block the light on that sector. In my case it looks like they painted a section of the diffuser black.
mnd999 6y ago
I have one too, and now they’ve stuck a white ANPR camera directly under the bulb reflecting the light back anywhere but down. The local councils in the UK are clueless when it comes to lighting.

sdevonoes 6y ago

I agree. Somehow I feel more "secure" (I don't know why) with gold/yellow lights. White light reminds me of: dentist clinics, hospitals, metro stations... not very friendly places.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
And yet, the opposite is likely true; yellow lights feel warmer, but white lights make people feel exposed. You generally feel safe from other people in well lit places. There's research about e.g. subway incidents and safety when they got better / brighter / whiter lights.
iamatworknow 6y ago
When I was growing up my father was pretty frugal, so he was very early on the train of replacing all of our home's lightbulbs with fluorescents. However, I don't think he really understood what color temperatures meant, so he always seemed to buy the bulbs with the higher temperatures. Higher is better, right? So he always went with the super sterile cold 5000K bulbs, and just as you say, home felt like some sort of weird sterile warehouse.

noir_lord 6y ago

When LA went over to LED it caused massive problems because the tonal colours of LA at night changed radically. https://la.curbed.com/2014/2/3/10156584/las-new-led-streetlights-are-changing-the-way-movies-look-1 https://la.curbed.com/2014/2/3/10156584/las-new-led-streetli...

ForHackernews 6y ago
I guess Los Angeles must be practically a utopia if "making movies look somewhat different" counts as a massive problem for that city.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
Massive problem, eh?

globular-toast 6y ago

Yellow lenses are used in sports to increase contrast in lower light situations. I wonder if yellow lamps have the same effect and provide more perceived visibility with less light.

Lammy 6y ago
I did the opposite and got yellow-lenses glasses: https://www.jins.com/us/jins-screen#night-use https://www.jins.com/us/jins-screen#night-use No affiliation, and no idea if there's truth to any of the marketing copy, but I'm personally very happy with them especially when driving at night due to the awful intensity of LED brake/tail lights on other cars.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  Orange safety glasses will work better than this, if you don't mind looking silly.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    These are prescription though :)

DrBazza 6y ago

My local council, prior to recent events in London, decided to turn off all lights after 1am (or thereabouts) "to save money". There was a backlash, and also at the same time when LEDs became more affordable, so the lights are back on, but they're not the same as the good old fashioned orange/sodium lights. The light is more focused on the ground, and it makes driving a little bit more 'interesting' in the evenings. Compare that to the orange lights, where it was more diffuse and even. Improving the lighting is also at odds with wanting a dark sky for the local wildlife too. It has a noted effect on birds for instance. Apropos of nothing... I also remember a story about a northern country replacing traffic lights with LEDs and then spending even more money adding heaters because the old lights were naturally warm, and melted any ice that stuck to the lights. Can't find a link to it at the moment.

Faaak 6y ago
In my towns in France, it's actually the opposite: more cities are turning of the lights between 23 and 5 and I personally love it. It gives a sense of "city-sleeping" peacefulness
M2Ys4U 6y ago
>Apropos of nothing... I also remember a story about a northern country replacing traffic lights with LEDs and then spending even more money adding heaters because the old lights were naturally warm, and melted any ice that stuck to the lights. Can't find a link to it at the moment. The Technology Connections channel on YouTube has an excellent video on this, called 'The LED Traffic Light and the Danger of "But Sometimes!"': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8
flurdy 6y ago
My council are also started turning off their lights during the night. I understand it but I hate it. I feel sorry for the dude across the street that now comes home from work in the dark. Personally I feel a lot less secure now staring out in the darkness with a lot of houses and people nearby but we can't see them. I think in more suburban and rural setting this might make sense, but this is still in the town with many people so it makes little sense to me. I think partially the problem is people(us) have designed their lighting and safety around the street lights being on, and now they are not it is an issue. I have lived in other countries where the norm is for houses to have subtle outside lights that are permanently on at night. But around here they do not and people are more paranoid so all the terraced houses instead have over-active motion sensors with massive flood lights. That are now very noticeable when a poor late night clubber/shift worker/early morning dog walker/baker etc walks by...

garaetjjte 6y ago

>Not only is it arguably more "natural" than whiter hued light, but I think it actually illuminates better. I think it is neither "natural" or better illuminating. Sodium lamps have CRI of around, what, 30? I'm glad that these sodium lamps are finally getting replaced everywhere, and cities at night won't have that monochromatic depressing-ugly-yellow lighting.

jeffbee 6y ago
CRI is not used to measure whether a light helps people with practical vision tasks at night. It’s quite possible that a light with CRI zero, totally monochromatic, could be the best choice by some objective measures.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  If CRI is low, all colours on an object are fucked. Ao people in general are going to be worse at idebtifying what they are looking at or reacting. You won't be able to look at a picture, read text on your credit card, etc. Sure what you outline is possible in some spesific scenario, but it's not gonna work for 99%
colechristensen 6y ago
I'm happy sodium lamps are getting replaced, I'm not happy with the replacements which might be worse. With LEDs it should be very possible to light streets with low temperature close-to-blackbody light. (I don't know if the proximity to a blackbody radiation distribution is the same as CRI etc.) Who wouldn't want this?
- ben_w 6y ago
  LED light can be about as far as it’s possible to get from a blackbody spectrum, if similarly to that is what you care about (I don’t, art galleries do). There are two ways of doing “white” with LEDs: • Separate red, green, and blue, whose spectrum is spiky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#/media/File:RGB_LED_Spectrum.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#/media/Fi... • Phosphor, which may give you a spectrum like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#/media/File:White_LED.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#/media/Fi...

krtkush 6y ago

I find white light depressing. My home city has metro coaches with either yellow or white lights. Me and a few friends of mine would skip the white ones because we found the yellow ones more comforting. On the other hand, my dad prefers white and in a room with types of lighting he will always go for the white ones.

spijdar 6y ago
I prefer natural white lights. I don't light rooms with them, but the light that terrarium/vivarium bulbs made to mimic sunlight give off is sublime IMO.
llampx 6y ago
I like daylight bulbs as well, living in Germany they are a lifesaver because it is cloudy all day and dark at 3-4PM in the winter. However in the evening, around 8PM, I change over to the yellow hued ones. Best of both worlds.

almaember 6y ago

I live in a country which uses both (it's moving towards white lights but it's not uniform), and I like yellow lights MUCH better. The very bright white lights just hurt my eyes.

rini17 6y ago

Same, but recently more and more streetlights are refurbished with 2700K LEDs instead of 4000K and I like these much better.

clairity 6y ago

not just the light temperature (2700K would be better), but the idea that a street light must be a bulb boxes in the design. led lights can be made in any sort of configuration, since it's an amalgamation of bunch of small point sources, not just one big point source. it would be neat to have light strips alongside the sidewalk and the road, as well as above. that way, the light can be lower intensity in aggregate while still providing the necessary illumination (via surrounding light vs. flooding) to make out details. our eyes are highly adaptive, and we don't need a lot of light, but rather, light from many angles. also, the safety argument is often overstated in relation to the intensity of light. you only need a little light to reduce crime and accidents to its threshold. more isn't better in this regard.

rini17 6y ago
Compact light sources aren't recent invention, and various lighting methods were tried. I think pylons with bulb boxes still come out best in illumination quality vs. price/maintenance.

statstutor 6y ago

Living in London (specifically Haringey, which is mentioned in the article), I was amazed - positively - when my residential street switched to directed, white, LED light. It lit the street and not everything else. I could see a few stars in the night sky, for the first time since moving to London. I no longer had to deal so carefully with light leaking into my bedroom.

flurdy 6y ago

Oh god I hate the yellow lights. When I moved to the UK in the 90s it took a while to realise what was "wrong" at night, then I realised it was the street lights. Every colour and definition disappeared, hard to spot the right car etc, and late evening strolls was less enjoyable as everything was blasé. I am glad there are a lot fewer of them around now.

xioxox 6y ago

Also the sodium lights are also much easier to filter out if you do astronomy. So much lighting is bad nowadays - lighting the sky rather than the ground.

Shivetya 6y ago

my little subdivision transitioned across a few years from the orange type lamps to LED, I have commented on it a few times here. The primary effect is that its like having a near full moon effect at all times of the night. Not looking directly at the light reveals a landscape that is not harsh on the eyes but never catch a lamp straight on. Fortunately around me the birds caught on pretty quick at first singing at odd hours until they sorted it out. Overall its a benefit as it has opened up hours people can walk the sidewalks and even in the street without worrying about wildlife blundering into them

elric 6y ago

I'm quite fond of the orangey hue myself. Harsh white light is awful. The contrast between the dark of night and white light is too great and it messes up my vision (migraineur with stupid light sensitivity issues). I've recently encountered a couple of construction sites which are illumunated by a particularly pleasant green hue at night. That might be even better. And while we're on the subject of street lights, can we please stop with all the light pollution?

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hinkley 6y ago

Street lights should be a balance between visibility, light pollution, and night vision protection. As a tax payer I'd also like them to think about efficiency, longevity. A daylight colored bulbs are probably not doing our night vision any favors (but then head lights have the same problem, yes?). Going from a lit street onto a side street with few lights is potentially a problem depending on the kind of street lights.

throw0101a 6y ago
> A daylight colored bulbs are probably not doing our night vision any favors More importantly, colour temperature >3200K screw up the circadian rhythms of humans and animals: * https://www.darksky.org/our-work/lighting/lighting-for-industry/fsa/ https://www.darksky.org/our-work/lighting/lighting-for-indus... * https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/conservation/led-streetlights-are-giving-neighborhoods-the-blues https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/conservation/led-street...

StrictDabbler 6y ago

It's a race to the bottom. Light with more white in it feels brighter. Drivers prefer whiter headlights because it feels like the road is more illuminated. Car manufacturers move to HID or LED projectors for whiter light. Whiter light causes the pupil to contract significantly more. Drivers with contracted pupils from the white headlights find the yellow sodium bulbs in streetlights and parking lots too dim. Governments and businesses replace the sodium bulbs with bright white LEDs. At every step along the way we're seeing less of the night. Shadows become darker. A person or animal coming in from the shadowed roadside is increasingly invisible. A mugger can jump you from an alley with no chance of being seen because the shadows are so deep. Now we have to increase the portion of the Earth that's illuminated at night for "safety". This disrupts animals more and deepens the shadows further. It's incredibly stupid and there's no way to stop it without some overarching power a) doing a scientific study into night lighting and b) using that as a reason to impose intense lighting regulations and enforcement. Too late now.