9 ms·

A French town where the lighting is alive

150 points by Kaibeezy 5y ago

bombcar 5y ago
One of the downsides of car-centric cities is that lighting has to be insanely bright because of the speeds of the cars. At human walking speeds, you can get by with substantially less light to illuminate; but that won't work if there are bright lights elsewhere nearby.
- basisword 5y ago
  You can get by sure, but more lighting can help reduce crime. We have a few streets nearby which have non-standard street lighting. It's less bright and the lights alternate on each side of the street. It's great for the people sleeping in the houses on that street but people feel much less safe walking down it at night and if I were to decide to steal a car or burgle a house, I'd pick that street. At least from what I hear politicians discuss when streets are having new/more modern lighting installed the discussion is always around crime and personal safety and never around cars.
  - Kye 5y ago
    I haven't seen a credible study that shows more lighting reduces crime. I wouldn't be surprised if more lighting increased reported crime at night in the same way more policing increases the number of people who enter the justice system until criminals adapt. But most crime is done in broad daylight or beyond the reach of outside lights, so I doubt lighting has much to do with it.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    I wonder how much lighting reduces crime vs just moving it around. If you have bright streets and dark ones, does the crime migrate to the dark ones? If all the streets are lit the same, does the crime spread out generally? Do people feel less safe or are they actually less safe? Suburbs are often lit like a Walmart parking lot yet I suspect the amount of crime is quite low.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    > people feel much less safe walking down it at night and if I were to decide to steal a car or burgle a house, I'd pick that street A lot of it comes down to feelings. We need actual data, how much does crime actually goes up, not how people think it does. Otherwise, these people need to pay for the infrastructure and electric consumption. There is no reason why everyone should pay for their feelings if it does not bring concrete benefits to everybody.
  - Faaak 5y ago
    Actually I've heard the contrary. There is less degradation (broken things, trashing glass bottles, etc), because people don't want to be in places they can't easily see themselves and move to more lit places.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    > more lighting can help reduce crime It works on a hyperlocal level, but on as whole city it's a zero-sum game.
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    "Eyes on the street" is the key to safety. If you have enough people out and about on foot, you see less crime. This is not a function of any one thing.
  - EricE 5y ago
    A good compromise is having a low level of steady light, but when there is motion increasing the brightness. It won't work for every situation - the constant up/down would be more annoying on a busy road, but we had a building with a large parking lot set back from a busy road that attracted lots of loitering in the parking lot. Swapping out the old parking lights to motion activated LED ones pretty much eliminated people congregating the parking lot at night leaving trash all over, tearing up the landscaping, or tearing up the lot doing donuts and other dumb stuff. So heck yeah, effective lighting can be a significant deterrence - and with things like motion sensors and LED fixtures with integrated dimming it doesn't even have to be obnoxious by default.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Car requires a lot of infrastructure that are very costly. Traffic control, safety equipment, road bumps (how ironic) because indeed cars are fast and heavy. Biking made me realize how much it took to get a full fledged car culture.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    What’s even more frustrating is that most people have integrated that with the “infrastructure you have to have” and then whine about the cost of a bike lane. We seem to have accepted that putting billions into motorways was ok, and use that against any other form of transport.
    - gernb 5y ago
      I'm sure this isn't enough money but ... car users pay taxes on gasoline to maintain the roads. Cyclists pay nothing equivalent. Of course cyclists pay normal taxes like everyone else. It does raise the question of should their be a cycle tax. Cars will have a similar problem soon, as they go electric all over the world whatever taxes come from gas will disappear and governments will have to find a new way to pay for the roads.
      - davidrhunt 5y ago
        At least in the US gas taxes and usage fees don't come close to covering the cost of roads [1,2]. In the US all of us pay for roads through other taxes because the use fees and taxes don't cover the cost of the infrastructure. [1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-gas-taxs-tortured-history-shows-how-hard-it-is-to-fund-new-infrastructure https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-gas-taxs-tortured-... [2] https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/ https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/
      - kergonath 5y ago
        > car users pay taxes on gasoline to maintain the roads. True. But then it’s counter-productive, because it really does not cover government spending to build and maintain roads (and motorways, and bridges, and tunnels). To be fair, roads are necessary and useful in a modern economy. But the same money on some reliable tracks for freighter trains could be even better in some instances, and now we have people saying that we cannot have that because trains are expensive. True, they are, but the comparison is flawed because we assume that roads are free. Indeed, gas taxes will have to decrease, and that will be associated with increased maintenance costs (EVs and modern cars keep getting heavier, which results in more wear and tear). So it’s possible that at some point people will realise how much the debate is stacked against any alternative form of transport, but I am not too hopeful. Roads are just expected; people don’t really realise they we had to pay for them.
- noduerme 5y ago
  Also, cars have gotten a lot brighter over the past 20 years or so. Since ultra-bright halogen style headlights became standard, it's become much more difficult for my eyes to adjust back to darkness after passing oncoming traffic. I always considered them hazardous to other drivers. My car's from the 80s and after passing some of these monstrous lit up things it's hard to tell if my own headlights are on. It seems like there's been some kind of race to have the brightest headlights on the road.
  - bennyg 5y ago
    As someone with incredibly bad eyes, going from my 2015 Honda Accord's stock headlights to a Tesla Model 3's brighter LEDs have been a big boon on my driving confidence at night. Just offering a different perspective that I actually like the brightness race since it's improved my ability to drive.
    - Frenchgeek 5y ago
      As someone who see fairly well in the dark: I too often find myself nearly unable to see what's in front of me because of the car behind. It also makes judging the distance and speed of a passing vehicle a literal pain.
      - noduerme 5y ago
        Yeah, cars behind you is another thing. Especially if it's a pickup truck with the beams high up at level with a sedan's mirrors.
    - MisterTea 5y ago
      > I actually like the brightness race since it's improved my ability to drive. Unfortunately you are not taking into account how that brightness impairs other drivers ability to see. I do agree with the parent, I do feel more distracted by bright flashes of blueish-white light from modern head lamps. Roads aren't flat. Cars bounce, dip, and hop over hills, bumps and pot holes. Never mind the jerks who regularly drive with high beams on or forget to turn them off when passing. Those sudden flashes of light cause floaters in your field of vision leaving you temporarily blinded. This is a problem that no one seems to care about and I feel like we are ignoring these issues on purpose.
- scythe 5y ago
  It's not just car dependence, though. New streetlights are brighter than old ones, but we've been car-dependent since the '70s. It's CPTED. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_prevention_through_environmental_design#Natural_surveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_prevention_through_envir...
Kaibeezy 5y ago
Imagine it embedded right into the sidewalks/pavements to make them glow at night. Magical.
- partiallypro 5y ago
  That could make you blind to your surroundings though, and studies show fairly consistently that well lit areas have lower crime rates. So imagine a dimly lit path that has a lighting system that makes it more difficult for your eyes to see your peripherals.
  - Kaibeezy 5y ago
    I was imagining more of a Bright Tree Village sort of thing, but sure, you can go with District 9, and you’d probably be right.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    > studies show fairly consistently that well lit areas have lower crime rates It works on a hyperlocal level, but on as whole city it's a zero-sum game.
    - ars 5y ago
      That's not true. You are assuming there is a base level of crime that just gets pushed to other places. But if you discourage crime then it just doesn't exist anymore.
      - goodpoint 5y ago
        No, countless sociological studies proven that if people are in poverty and have no access to jobs and healthcare many will resort to crime. And it does not disappear into thin air if you increase lightning or set up fences and so on.
  - trgn 5y ago
    Picture the ballroom of Beaty and the Beast. Avatar perhaps. Or anything else, dimly, but gloriously lit. No high-tech beams of light, that's just gross, but a mist of light. Not threatening at all. Already some walkable cities already bathe in this kind of light, they don't even need glow worms. It's unreal how degraded 99% of the public realm is, when there's for a fact places in the world today, hosts of a functional 21st century economy, where you feel like royalty just for being outside. Like, why the low low low bar? Ah yes, because we made cities for cars, not people.
bandibus 5y ago
Fabulous. Not just for the light-pollution & energy side of things, but because softer lighting is the thing sleep experts have been telling us to introduce into our lives in the evenings, all the blue light filters for our phones etc, to help us tell our bodies it's time to sleep... But the comments here about bright light deterring crime are important (and true). Not sure what a solution is that deals with that AND helps us sleep better etc.
- malauxyeux 5y ago
  > But the comments here about bright light deterring crime are important (and true). Not sure what a solution is that deals with that AND helps us sleep better etc. Every French home and apartment I've ever been inside (mostly in the Northwest) has been built or retrofitted with shutters that block out almost all outside light. They're installed on all the main windows including on living room and kitchen windows. It's just part of the nightly routine to walk around and close them. (Or, in the case of newer electric shutters, just to hit the main button to close them all.)
  - BrandoElFollito 5y ago
    Wooden panes that you fold onto the window from outside is a traditional part of houses all over France. They have been upgraded to roller shutters, but not always replaced (both coexist sometimes)
    - malauxyeux 5y ago
      > (both coexist sometimes) Indeed. My in-laws' 300-year-old granite farmhouse has a mix of modern roller shutters, pvc panel shutters, and wooden panel shutters.
naikrovek 5y ago
> A French town where the lighting is alive The title of this submission reads like a Doctor Who story synopsis.
teslabox 5y ago
Looking at the present article, while these bio-lights are diffuse, they are probably the wrong spectrum. Due to the nature of the light-sensitive proteins in our eyes, humans do best with orange light at night. Our peripheral vision is most sensitive to blue light, and there's a reflex where we look at blue light in our periphery. Blue light is exhausting for us. Intense blue light is blinding. Back when the lighting companies had all the money in the world to research their lights, scientists figured out how to use artificial light safely. Now that those scientists have mostly retired, and people alive today have no idea what it was like for artificial light to be precious, we're forgotten everything our predecessors figured out. Just last night I was at my current city's newest hotel, and while the lights are mostly pretty good, they also have a bunch of 5000K LED fixtures mounted at exactly eye level. Light is mostly useful to us humans when is bounces off of things. In the 1970's the outdoor lighting industry standardized on High Pressure Sodium bulbs, because they're incredibly energy efficient AND because they're an almost blue-free light source. Low pressure sodium [LPS] bulbs are even more efficient and a perfect single-wavelength of orange (~590nm), but only a few cities (Flagstaff Arizona) really standardized on LPS. I was whining to someone about how Phoenix, Arizona switched out its safe HPS streetlamps for 5000K LEDs in 2016 (I think they switched these to ~3000K after people complained about 5000K's effects on wildlife). The guy knew exactly what I was talking about, and said "I wrote the 1982 report that resulted in Phoenix's 1984 lighting ordinances." He'd recommended LPS, but the police didn't like how people have no color perception when things are lit with the single wavelength of LPS. HPS has a bit of a spread of spectrum from red -> yellow, with a peak at the pleasant orange color. Arizona DOT is gradually switching out the safe HPS lights for defective LEDs. At first these were 5000K, but I watched them switch out one intersection's functional 5000K light for what I think is 3000K. LED streetlights' light is not nearly diffuse enough. I've come to referring to the bright spot under the lights as a 'cone of destruction', and have taken to lowering my car's street lamp visors to protect my eyes from the glare of passing under these streetlights. Flagstaff Arizona uses pure-orange LED streetlamps, now that LPS bulbs are no longer being manufactured. These are wonderful... Not as nice as LPS, but 1000x better than "white" LED streetlamps. If you're interested in the guy's 1982 report about street lights, give this comment an upvote, and I'll maybe work on that blog post.
- hahamrfunnyguy 5y ago
Barrin92 5y ago
Reminds me of another very cool artistic project that used silkworms to build pavilions and other structures. Would be pretty cool if you could have a sort of symbiotic city. https://youtu.be/MUVv4wtyMPE https://youtu.be/MUVv4wtyMPE
fnordpiglet 5y ago
I for one welcome our bioluminescent overlords.
EricE 5y ago
I have a dark parking lot at a church that needs at least some lighting - it's a serious safety issue as that congregation is heavily weighted with seniors. Traditional lighting is often overkill/way harsher than it needs to be. Love to see alternative tech like this at least starting.
throwawaycities 5y ago
> This phenomenon – where chemical reactions inside an organism's body produce light – can be observed in many places in nature. Organisms as diverse as fireflies, fungi and fish have the ability to glow through bioluminescence. Humans are also bioluminescent, we just glow to dimly for our own eyes to detect.
- addaon 5y ago
  Citation: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0006256 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
teekert 5y ago
I once investigated it for a company. I found that Luciferase uses 1 ATP molecule for one photon. I calculated that I'd need kilo's of ATP per day for a 200 lumen lamp. We stopped the project soon after (we also looked at closed ecosystems etc). But maybe, with large surfaces, in situations where you only need very little light, It might work. A closed glass container though, I wonder, will it remain efficient? I think closed ecosystem haven't been that successful right?
- Mumps 5y ago
  Could you add some detail to your comment - I believe it's missing some biological nuance. Specifically: sure, it you wanted to feed a pile of ATP to some luciferase to output photons. But that's missing the point that ATP gets (near) infinitely restored from ADP. If glucose is your energy source, that cuts your mass needs by ~50x ( C6=180g/mol, ATP=241g/mol, 36ATP per C6).
  - teekert 5y ago
    Good remark but we were thinking of luciferase outside the cellular context. Keeping cells alive is a very big challenge. But arguable keeping “naked” luciferase functional is as well… For cells you need a lot more than just glucose, you needs some medium and fetal bovine serum and you need a way to remove waste and dead cells, etc.
formerkrogemp 5y ago
Does the US even regulate headlight brightness and function?
- epmos 5y ago
  Yes. Nearly everything about vehicles has US federal and state regulation. Headlight regulations being stricter in the US are why US versions of European cars up until about the 1980s had different headlights than their home markets. 49 CFR § 393, FMVSS 108 and a crapload of other regulations and regulatory interpretations. In general, these make IRS instructions seem a marvel of clarity. FMVSS-108 S5.5.11(a) talks about brightness.
  - formerkrogemp 5y ago
    As someone working with taxes, I find your comment a little funny. IRS instructions can be verbose. I'll need to look up these headlight regulations then. Thank you.
istjohn 5y ago
I guess I'm the only one who thinks this is a dumb gimmick. There's no way this is more environmentally friendly than dim LED's on a full lifecycle carbon emissions per lumen-hour. One of the systems bubble oxygen. That alone probably uses more energy than an equivalently bright LED. These are not going to be very bright at all. Then you have to maintain each "bio-bulb" with nutrients which requires energy to produce and distribute. This makes no more sense than replacing street lights with glow sticks.
Avlin67 5y ago
led light consumes less… for all of you not from france, bear in mind cities can spend 2 millions for just 1 roundabout. how much cost to make this light keep working in 20 years ?

150 points by Kaibeezy 5y ago

One of the downsides of car-centric cities is that lighting has to be insanely bright because of the speeds of the cars. At human walking speeds, you can get by with substantially less light to illuminate; but that won't work if there are bright lights elsewhere nearby.

basisword 5y ago
You can get by sure, but more lighting can help reduce crime. We have a few streets nearby which have non-standard street lighting. It's less bright and the lights alternate on each side of the street. It's great for the people sleeping in the houses on that street but people feel much less safe walking down it at night and if I were to decide to steal a car or burgle a house, I'd pick that street. At least from what I hear politicians discuss when streets are having new/more modern lighting installed the discussion is always around crime and personal safety and never around cars.
- Kye 5y ago
  I haven't seen a credible study that shows more lighting reduces crime. I wouldn't be surprised if more lighting increased reported crime at night in the same way more policing increases the number of people who enter the justice system until criminals adapt. But most crime is done in broad daylight or beyond the reach of outside lights, so I doubt lighting has much to do with it.
- bombcar 5y ago
  I wonder how much lighting reduces crime vs just moving it around. If you have bright streets and dark ones, does the crime migrate to the dark ones? If all the streets are lit the same, does the crime spread out generally? Do people feel less safe or are they actually less safe? Suburbs are often lit like a Walmart parking lot yet I suspect the amount of crime is quite low.
- kergonath 5y ago
  > people feel much less safe walking down it at night and if I were to decide to steal a car or burgle a house, I'd pick that street A lot of it comes down to feelings. We need actual data, how much does crime actually goes up, not how people think it does. Otherwise, these people need to pay for the infrastructure and electric consumption. There is no reason why everyone should pay for their feelings if it does not bring concrete benefits to everybody.
- Faaak 5y ago
  Actually I've heard the contrary. There is less degradation (broken things, trashing glass bottles, etc), because people don't want to be in places they can't easily see themselves and move to more lit places.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > more lighting can help reduce crime It works on a hyperlocal level, but on as whole city it's a zero-sum game.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  "Eyes on the street" is the key to safety. If you have enough people out and about on foot, you see less crime. This is not a function of any one thing.
- EricE 5y ago
  A good compromise is having a low level of steady light, but when there is motion increasing the brightness. It won't work for every situation - the constant up/down would be more annoying on a busy road, but we had a building with a large parking lot set back from a busy road that attracted lots of loitering in the parking lot. Swapping out the old parking lights to motion activated LED ones pretty much eliminated people congregating the parking lot at night leaving trash all over, tearing up the landscaping, or tearing up the lot doing donuts and other dumb stuff. So heck yeah, effective lighting can be a significant deterrence - and with things like motion sensors and LED fixtures with integrated dimming it doesn't even have to be obnoxious by default.
agumonkey 5y ago
Car requires a lot of infrastructure that are very costly. Traffic control, safety equipment, road bumps (how ironic) because indeed cars are fast and heavy. Biking made me realize how much it took to get a full fledged car culture.
- kergonath 5y ago
  What’s even more frustrating is that most people have integrated that with the “infrastructure you have to have” and then whine about the cost of a bike lane. We seem to have accepted that putting billions into motorways was ok, and use that against any other form of transport.
  - gernb 5y ago
    I'm sure this isn't enough money but ... car users pay taxes on gasoline to maintain the roads. Cyclists pay nothing equivalent. Of course cyclists pay normal taxes like everyone else. It does raise the question of should their be a cycle tax. Cars will have a similar problem soon, as they go electric all over the world whatever taxes come from gas will disappear and governments will have to find a new way to pay for the roads.
    - davidrhunt 5y ago
      At least in the US gas taxes and usage fees don't come close to covering the cost of roads [1,2]. In the US all of us pay for roads through other taxes because the use fees and taxes don't cover the cost of the infrastructure. [1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-gas-taxs-tortured-history-shows-how-hard-it-is-to-fund-new-infrastructure https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-gas-taxs-tortured-... [2] https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/ https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/
    - kergonath 5y ago
      > car users pay taxes on gasoline to maintain the roads. True. But then it’s counter-productive, because it really does not cover government spending to build and maintain roads (and motorways, and bridges, and tunnels). To be fair, roads are necessary and useful in a modern economy. But the same money on some reliable tracks for freighter trains could be even better in some instances, and now we have people saying that we cannot have that because trains are expensive. True, they are, but the comparison is flawed because we assume that roads are free. Indeed, gas taxes will have to decrease, and that will be associated with increased maintenance costs (EVs and modern cars keep getting heavier, which results in more wear and tear). So it’s possible that at some point people will realise how much the debate is stacked against any alternative form of transport, but I am not too hopeful. Roads are just expected; people don’t really realise they we had to pay for them.
noduerme 5y ago
Also, cars have gotten a lot brighter over the past 20 years or so. Since ultra-bright halogen style headlights became standard, it's become much more difficult for my eyes to adjust back to darkness after passing oncoming traffic. I always considered them hazardous to other drivers. My car's from the 80s and after passing some of these monstrous lit up things it's hard to tell if my own headlights are on. It seems like there's been some kind of race to have the brightest headlights on the road.
- bennyg 5y ago
  As someone with incredibly bad eyes, going from my 2015 Honda Accord's stock headlights to a Tesla Model 3's brighter LEDs have been a big boon on my driving confidence at night. Just offering a different perspective that I actually like the brightness race since it's improved my ability to drive.
  - Frenchgeek 5y ago
    As someone who see fairly well in the dark: I too often find myself nearly unable to see what's in front of me because of the car behind. It also makes judging the distance and speed of a passing vehicle a literal pain.
    - noduerme 5y ago
      Yeah, cars behind you is another thing. Especially if it's a pickup truck with the beams high up at level with a sedan's mirrors.
  - MisterTea 5y ago
    > I actually like the brightness race since it's improved my ability to drive. Unfortunately you are not taking into account how that brightness impairs other drivers ability to see. I do agree with the parent, I do feel more distracted by bright flashes of blueish-white light from modern head lamps. Roads aren't flat. Cars bounce, dip, and hop over hills, bumps and pot holes. Never mind the jerks who regularly drive with high beams on or forget to turn them off when passing. Those sudden flashes of light cause floaters in your field of vision leaving you temporarily blinded. This is a problem that no one seems to care about and I feel like we are ignoring these issues on purpose.
scythe 5y ago
It's not just car dependence, though. New streetlights are brighter than old ones, but we've been car-dependent since the '70s. It's CPTED. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_prevention_through_environmental_design#Natural_surveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_prevention_through_envir...

Kaibeezy 5y ago

Imagine it embedded right into the sidewalks/pavements to make them glow at night. Magical.

partiallypro 5y ago
That could make you blind to your surroundings though, and studies show fairly consistently that well lit areas have lower crime rates. So imagine a dimly lit path that has a lighting system that makes it more difficult for your eyes to see your peripherals.
- Kaibeezy 5y ago
  I was imagining more of a Bright Tree Village sort of thing, but sure, you can go with District 9, and you’d probably be right.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > studies show fairly consistently that well lit areas have lower crime rates It works on a hyperlocal level, but on as whole city it's a zero-sum game.
  - ars 5y ago
    That's not true. You are assuming there is a base level of crime that just gets pushed to other places. But if you discourage crime then it just doesn't exist anymore.
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      No, countless sociological studies proven that if people are in poverty and have no access to jobs and healthcare many will resort to crime. And it does not disappear into thin air if you increase lightning or set up fences and so on.
- trgn 5y ago
  Picture the ballroom of Beaty and the Beast. Avatar perhaps. Or anything else, dimly, but gloriously lit. No high-tech beams of light, that's just gross, but a mist of light. Not threatening at all. Already some walkable cities already bathe in this kind of light, they don't even need glow worms. It's unreal how degraded 99% of the public realm is, when there's for a fact places in the world today, hosts of a functional 21st century economy, where you feel like royalty just for being outside. Like, why the low low low bar? Ah yes, because we made cities for cars, not people.

bandibus 5y ago

Fabulous. Not just for the light-pollution & energy side of things, but because softer lighting is the thing sleep experts have been telling us to introduce into our lives in the evenings, all the blue light filters for our phones etc, to help us tell our bodies it's time to sleep... But the comments here about bright light deterring crime are important (and true). Not sure what a solution is that deals with that AND helps us sleep better etc.

malauxyeux 5y ago
> But the comments here about bright light deterring crime are important (and true). Not sure what a solution is that deals with that AND helps us sleep better etc. Every French home and apartment I've ever been inside (mostly in the Northwest) has been built or retrofitted with shutters that block out almost all outside light. They're installed on all the main windows including on living room and kitchen windows. It's just part of the nightly routine to walk around and close them. (Or, in the case of newer electric shutters, just to hit the main button to close them all.)
- BrandoElFollito 5y ago
  Wooden panes that you fold onto the window from outside is a traditional part of houses all over France. They have been upgraded to roller shutters, but not always replaced (both coexist sometimes)
  - malauxyeux 5y ago
    > (both coexist sometimes) Indeed. My in-laws' 300-year-old granite farmhouse has a mix of modern roller shutters, pvc panel shutters, and wooden panel shutters.

naikrovek 5y ago

> A French town where the lighting is alive The title of this submission reads like a Doctor Who story synopsis.

teslabox 5y ago

Looking at the present article, while these bio-lights are diffuse, they are probably the wrong spectrum. Due to the nature of the light-sensitive proteins in our eyes, humans do best with orange light at night. Our peripheral vision is most sensitive to blue light, and there's a reflex where we look at blue light in our periphery. Blue light is exhausting for us. Intense blue light is blinding. Back when the lighting companies had all the money in the world to research their lights, scientists figured out how to use artificial light safely. Now that those scientists have mostly retired, and people alive today have no idea what it was like for artificial light to be precious, we're forgotten everything our predecessors figured out. Just last night I was at my current city's newest hotel, and while the lights are mostly pretty good, they also have a bunch of 5000K LED fixtures mounted at exactly eye level. Light is mostly useful to us humans when is bounces off of things. In the 1970's the outdoor lighting industry standardized on High Pressure Sodium bulbs, because they're incredibly energy efficient AND because they're an almost blue-free light source. Low pressure sodium [LPS] bulbs are even more efficient and a perfect single-wavelength of orange (~590nm), but only a few cities (Flagstaff Arizona) really standardized on LPS. I was whining to someone about how Phoenix, Arizona switched out its safe HPS streetlamps for 5000K LEDs in 2016 (I think they switched these to ~3000K after people complained about 5000K's effects on wildlife). The guy knew exactly what I was talking about, and said "I wrote the 1982 report that resulted in Phoenix's 1984 lighting ordinances." He'd recommended LPS, but the police didn't like how people have no color perception when things are lit with the single wavelength of LPS. HPS has a bit of a spread of spectrum from red -> yellow, with a peak at the pleasant orange color. Arizona DOT is gradually switching out the safe HPS lights for defective LEDs. At first these were 5000K, but I watched them switch out one intersection's functional 5000K light for what I think is 3000K. LED streetlights' light is not nearly diffuse enough. I've come to referring to the bright spot under the lights as a 'cone of destruction', and have taken to lowering my car's street lamp visors to protect my eyes from the glare of passing under these streetlights. Flagstaff Arizona uses pure-orange LED streetlamps, now that LPS bulbs are no longer being manufactured. These are wonderful... Not as nice as LPS, but 1000x better than "white" LED streetlamps. If you're interested in the guy's 1982 report about street lights, give this comment an upvote, and I'll maybe work on that blog post.

hahamrfunnyguy 5y ago

Barrin92 5y ago

Reminds me of another very cool artistic project that used silkworms to build pavilions and other structures. Would be pretty cool if you could have a sort of symbiotic city. https://youtu.be/MUVv4wtyMPE https://youtu.be/MUVv4wtyMPE

fnordpiglet 5y ago

I for one welcome our bioluminescent overlords.

EricE 5y ago

I have a dark parking lot at a church that needs at least some lighting - it's a serious safety issue as that congregation is heavily weighted with seniors. Traditional lighting is often overkill/way harsher than it needs to be. Love to see alternative tech like this at least starting.

throwawaycities 5y ago

> This phenomenon – where chemical reactions inside an organism's body produce light – can be observed in many places in nature. Organisms as diverse as fireflies, fungi and fish have the ability to glow through bioluminescence. Humans are also bioluminescent, we just glow to dimly for our own eyes to detect.

addaon 5y ago
Citation: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0006256 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

teekert 5y ago

I once investigated it for a company. I found that Luciferase uses 1 ATP molecule for one photon. I calculated that I'd need kilo's of ATP per day for a 200 lumen lamp. We stopped the project soon after (we also looked at closed ecosystems etc). But maybe, with large surfaces, in situations where you only need very little light, It might work. A closed glass container though, I wonder, will it remain efficient? I think closed ecosystem haven't been that successful right?

Mumps 5y ago
Could you add some detail to your comment - I believe it's missing some biological nuance. Specifically: sure, it you wanted to feed a pile of ATP to some luciferase to output photons. But that's missing the point that ATP gets (near) infinitely restored from ADP. If glucose is your energy source, that cuts your mass needs by ~50x ( C6=180g/mol, ATP=241g/mol, 36ATP per C6).
- teekert 5y ago
  Good remark but we were thinking of luciferase outside the cellular context. Keeping cells alive is a very big challenge. But arguable keeping “naked” luciferase functional is as well… For cells you need a lot more than just glucose, you needs some medium and fetal bovine serum and you need a way to remove waste and dead cells, etc.

formerkrogemp 5y ago

Does the US even regulate headlight brightness and function?

epmos 5y ago
Yes. Nearly everything about vehicles has US federal and state regulation. Headlight regulations being stricter in the US are why US versions of European cars up until about the 1980s had different headlights than their home markets. 49 CFR § 393, FMVSS 108 and a crapload of other regulations and regulatory interpretations. In general, these make IRS instructions seem a marvel of clarity. FMVSS-108 S5.5.11(a) talks about brightness.
- formerkrogemp 5y ago
  As someone working with taxes, I find your comment a little funny. IRS instructions can be verbose. I'll need to look up these headlight regulations then. Thank you.

istjohn 5y ago

I guess I'm the only one who thinks this is a dumb gimmick. There's no way this is more environmentally friendly than dim LED's on a full lifecycle carbon emissions per lumen-hour. One of the systems bubble oxygen. That alone probably uses more energy than an equivalently bright LED. These are not going to be very bright at all. Then you have to maintain each "bio-bulb" with nutrients which requires energy to produce and distribute. This makes no more sense than replacing street lights with glow sticks.

Avlin67 5y ago

led light consumes less… for all of you not from france, bear in mind cities can spend 2 millions for just 1 roundabout. how much cost to make this light keep working in 20 years ?