9 ms·

> After New York replaced the sodium-vapor lights in the city’s 250,000 streetlamps with shiny new LEDs in 2017, the experience of walking through the city at n

> After New York replaced the sodium-vapor lights in the city’s 250,000 streetlamps with shiny new LEDs in 2017, the experience of walking through the city at night transformed, almost . . . overnight. Forgiving, romantic, shadowy orange gave way to cold, all-seeing bluish white. Before the late 1970s, NYC was illuminated at night by pinkish-white incandescent bulbs. When the yellow monstrosities were rolled out people almost rioted. Their harsh orange glow invaded bedrooms creeping between gaps in curtains and assaulting the eyes, destroyed the soft and warm ambiance that had set the night scene for generations, and muted all colors into a monochromatic hellscape. After just 30 seconds on TimesMachine I found an article from 1982 about the transition and how some residents were hesitant and one jurisdiction rejected the change out of hand. It took a long time for NYC to gain its orange glow and people didn't like it. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1982/09/12/137352.html?pageNumber=326 https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1982/09/12/137... Lol here's another article from the 40s: "Sodium light is not suitable for city streets, Commissioner Goodman said, because it gives a person a sallow appearance not liked by women." https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1940/05/26/issue.html https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1940/05/26/iss... People of my age view them as a nuisance born out of the austerity of the 1970s, a temporary suboptimal fix that persisted due to inertia. A reminder of the rot and desperation of the that era. Now this dude is nostalgic for them?

dghlsakjg 3y ago
People hate new things more than they hate the mediocrity they know.
renewiltord 3y ago
Most of these aesthetic criticism people are just conservative people. They don't like change. The world was best when they arrived somewhere. That's pretty much it. SF is full of a similar kind.
- achileas 3y ago
  This is the only real takeaway of the article. “I don’t like this because it’s new to me, therefore it’s universally bad.” I live in Boston and there was a similar freakout about the gas lamps in Beacon Hill being replaced by LEDs. Not a single person I talked to about it knew that the gas lamps were only added to the neighborhood in the late 70s to make it look more quaint and historic.
  - esafak 3y ago
    So they were added to suit the character of the neighborhood? That is a great selection criterion.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    In SF, the most recent two controversies were over historic seating being removed from a Castro theatre and historic rusted iron protective chains being replaced by the waterfront. Age of said seating? 20 y. Age of chains? 30 y. It's not that I have a problem with this. It's just that I personally don't want to be considered historic in my mid 30s.
    - elevatedastalt 3y ago
      How are things ever supposed to become historic if people aren't allowed to fight to keep them around when they are only 20 or 30 years old?
      - renewiltord 3y ago
        To be honest, I don't think seats and rusted iron railings should be things we strive to just retain so that they can be considered historic. Though I do like the idea of forcing everyone to keep their iPhone 13 for the next 20 years so that it can become old enough to be historic.
  - lttlrck 3y ago
    On the other hand, that they didn't know they were added "just" 40 years ago suggests that the decision to install them was a very good one? Not that I support gas street lighting, but there is a distinct lack of genuinely quaint and historic districts in US cities.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  Are you sure? Many more people admire Taj Mahal or Ancient Greek/Roman buildings than, say, brutalist architecture. Heck, even Art Deco, while distinctly modern, seems to be likeable. I am fairly conservative myself, but I like some new Czech buildings, such as the Masaryčka project by Zaha Hadid. It has a soaring soul that is hard to describe, but nevertheless you can feel the positive vibe of the structure when you walk underneath it. https://www.masarycka.com/cs/o-projektu/ https://www.masarycka.com/cs/o-projektu/ On the other hand, Le Corbusier architecture (mostly older than me, so I should have been used to it) looks like deliberate insult to anything human: look at this concrete prison I made for you and weep and gnash your teeth because there is no escape from its rotting ugliness, you worm.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    I can't speak to the culture in Eastern Europe. I meant in the US where I'm quite sure considering old beloved artifacts of today are all the nightmarish monsters of yesteryear that people protested. Fortunately, the American version of this view will be smashed in the next two decades and we will enter an era of creation once again.
  - lannisterstark 3y ago
    Yellow street lamps are not Taj mahal
  - rayiner 3y ago
    > hand, Le Corbusier architecture (mostly older than me, so I should have been used to it) looks like deliberate insult to anything human: look at this concrete prison I made for you and weep and gnash your teeth because there is no escape from its rotting ugliness, you worm. This is how I feel about the watergate, in which I work.
- bufio 3y ago
  Do you really prefer hospital lighting over yellow lighting?
  - nradov 3y ago
    I really prefer full spectrum lighting over yellow lighting in all circumstances. Bring on the white LEDs.
    - jokethrowaway 3y ago
      You should talk with architects and interior designers. Lights can transform the feel of a place and they have their purpose.
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    Are we calling full spectrum daylight "hospital lighting" now?
- Tanoc 3y ago
  When you're an artist who tries to recreate things from the past you learn very quickly the limitations of what we use nowadays. Tradeoffs in efficiency are often paid for with quality of life. For example many of the older high pressure sodium lamps were better for human eyesight because of their colour spectrum being a segment of daylight allowing better contrast perception and not straining the upper limits of the cones in your eyes for night vision. Their falloff was also much better, preventing harsh shadows inherent to fluorescent and LED lights that hide things all too easily and create unwelcoming chiseled depth on architecture. Sadly adding in those little quality of life benefits costs more fractions of a cent per unit, so the modern LED bulbs capable of recreating them go without. The other thing, about the "McCentury Modern" architecture, has been proven time and again over the last decade. Flat shapes without detail with random splashes of colour cause anxiety because the human mind needs visual definition and coherency. There are ongoing studies about whether or not modern architecture causes depression because so many people have noticed. At least in the past the cheapest stuff used bricks for facades, but developers think even those are too expensive now. That and the proliferation of grey is entirely about money, because it's easier to sell the lowest common denominator without a hint of individuality. This is especially true when it comes to market instability, because when tenant turnover is in the range of months grabbing the cheapest thing and throwing together the least personable environment to rope in anybody at all will keep you from having a vacancy of longer than a few weeks. The films thing is just... Nobody actually looks at physical examples anymore, so they have no idea how things should look. With practical effects you were manipulating and testing what already existed instead of trying to recreate it as an approximation. There's a surrealist level of detail in almost anything created via CG, only worsened by the lighting needing to be flattened to cover up the unfinished work done because of an impossible schedule and masked with digital colour correcting. Real waves don't have that much foam, real diamond weave cloth doesn't have that specular profile, real explosions don't have such low luminosity and so many particles, so on and so forth. A lot of people realize things are very wrong with the world, they just don't have the expertise or the vocabulary to explain it. So they point at things they know other people will innately understand as examples. Don't say they hate change because of that limitation.
codelikeawolf 3y ago
> A reminder of the rot and desperation of the that era. I think there's a tendency to romanticize this kind of thing, a la an early Tom Waits song. I've lived in Portland for a little under 5 years. I feel like it has been moving in the "ugly" direction the author describes for a while, and it started before I moved here. People that have been here much longer describe how it used to be much more "gritty" and dangerous. They say it with sort of a twinkle in their eye, almost as if they miss it. Part of me would have loved to see how it was, but the other part of me knows what's its like to be in the wrong part of town. At least you have the wherewithal to see why a move to LED lights was probably a smart move. Just because it's new and different doesn't make it bad.
- ghaff 3y ago
  When someone mentions the "disneyfication" of Times Square I'm declined to think they have either very selective memories or they were never around that area and 42nd Street in the 80s especially late at night. They can still hang out at the Port Authority if they want to experience echoes of that time.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    I think some people really like to have a lot of (negative) drama in their lives for some reason. You can see it in their relationships too; they seem to be unable to have a relationship with a partner that doesn't have a lot of needless drama in it. Maybe they have some kind of addiction to chaos. Put them in an environment where everything is nice and peaceful and works well and they feel lost.
vondur 3y ago
My main memory from the 70s as a child was the ugly fluorescent light everywhere outside.
Paianni 3y ago
Chances are the pre-1980s lamps were mercury-vapour, not incandescent. Incandescent lamps were obsolete for road lighting by the 1950s. Sodium lamps caught on because they were much more efficient than both.
mp05 3y ago
> People of my age view them as a nuisance born out of the austerity of the 1970s, a temporary suboptimal fix that persisted due to inertia. A reminder of the rot and desperation of the that era. > Now this dude is nostalgic for them? You could just as readily be talking about a cassette tape.
- argiopetech 3y ago
  The cassette tape has a lot of things going for it. They play for longer than CDs, they don't skip, they are simple to duplicate and record onto (with most cassette decks capable of one, if not both, actions), and the occasional tape tangle teaches patience and encourages mechanical understanding of the system. They can't compete with my phone and a bunch of FLAC for fidelity, but I wish they weren't effectively dead technology. Next, let's talk about how I miss CRTs...
  - twiddling 3y ago
    < Next, let's talk about how I miss CRTs Best television I had was a HD Sony CRT. Incredible picture. Also weighed over 230 pounds. My back does not miss CRTs
    - c0pium 3y ago
      I guarantee you that this is not the case. Go watch an old CRT, even the eye-wateringly expensive ones sucked compared to even a mediocre OLED. We just think they were great because of the SD pieces of crap we compared them to. Ditto for all of the technology Millennials have ennui for.
      - shiroiuma 3y ago
        As an Xer who grew up with all these old technologies and saw the transitions to modern stuff, I fully agree. It's odd how Millennials are so interested in obsolete and obviously inferior technologies like LPs and Polaroid photos. There's very, very few cases I can think of where an older technology really was better in a significant way. Mechanical keyboards like the IBM Model M (or better yet, the Model F, though the layouts on those keyboards sucked) were really great, but they were also expensive, and we do have all the Cherry-switch mech keyboards now, though personally I don't like them as much. However, one big negative trend I do see is with streaming services and the entire lack of ownership this carries. This isn't really a technology problem: there's nothing stopping you from buying real CDs and ripping them to FLAC and listening to those on your phone, for instance (that's what I do). I'd call this a mis-application of new technology, similar to how so much software is so ridiculously slow and laggy: it's entirely possible (and easier than ever before with modern tooling) to write software that performs well, but people are just too lazy to do it, and insist on building in too much BS like ads and tracking.
crazygringo 3y ago
> Now this dude is nostalgic for them? No, they really were better for sleep. With the orange-ish sodium lights, I could go to sleep with their light still coming through the bedroom window. The amber glow was reminiscent of the glow of fire. The harsh blue light now tells my brain it's daytime. I had to buy blackout curtains to be able to fall asleep. It's the same principle as using the amber-hued Night Mode on your phone in the evening. I never experienced the pinkish-white, but the transition from orange to blue has been horrible for sleep. Nighttime lighting around homes should be amber, not blue. (Contrast with highways where you do want people to stay awake, so blue makes sense.)
- ricardobeat 3y ago
  > Contrast with highways where you do want people to stay awake, so blue makes sense I remember some kind of study around yellow light being ideal for roads actually. The human eye is more sensitive in the green/yellow part of the spectrum, the lights are more efficient and cut through fog better.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    The difference between white & yellow light in fog is minimal. What really makes fog lights effective is being under 18 inches off the ground so they shine under the fog.
    - shakow 3y ago
      And they also shine much brighter.
    - ricardobeat 3y ago
      White light scatters more since it contains multiple wavelengths, generating more glare and losing brightness faster. And this is about street lighting, a 10% difference in brightness can result in massive energy savings.
- saghm 3y ago
  > With the orange-ish sodium lights, I could go to sleep with their light still coming through the bedroom window. The amber glow was reminiscent of the glow of fire. > The harsh blue light now tells my brain it's daytime. I had to buy blackout curtains to be able to fall asleep. When I moved in with my fiancee (at the time my girlfriend), I noticed after a couple months that I had a bit of trouble sleeping due to her often falling asleep later than me and being on her laptop for a bit. Since blackout curtains don't help with that, I bought a sleep mask for a few dollars from Amazon (basically a piece of nylon fabric and a strap, nothing specialized), and it's not an exaggeration to say that it's been life-changing. As a child, I'd often struggle to fall asleep due to literally any amount of light in my bedroom, and when I was in elementary school it got bad enough that it would take me several hours of lying in bed to finally fall asleep, and I ended up getting prescribed insomnia medication that I continued taking for a couple of decades. It turned out that with the sleep mask, I was able to taper off the prescription sleeping medication within a year or so, and I'm even able to get up earlier without being quite as groggy due to my quality of sleep increasing so much. If anyone else has similar issues with lighting interfering with their sleep, especially if it's from things within their building rather than outside, I'd highly recommend investing a few bucks to try this out. Obviously my sample size is only one, but given how drastic the effect was and how low-cost it is to try out, it would almost feel irresponsible for me not to suggest this to people.
Izkata 3y ago
Your links require a subscription to view. > Now this dude is nostalgic for them? An easily-unrealized benefit until people were forced to use them, they didn't ruin our low-light vision, at least not nearly as much as the new ones. You could easily see into unlit areas, or go from an unlit area to a lit one without your vision having to adjust.
flyinghamster 3y ago
> Now this dude is nostalgic for them? I stopped reading there. I'll take LEDs over ugly orange any day (or mercury-arc, as well). When my town converted, they picked neutral-white lights for the side streets and ones with a very slight yellow tint for the major streets. Either of these is far better as far as I'm concerned. Even the old mercury-arc lights weren't that great - either sickly greenish or a color-corrected version that was blue-white. The 175W mercury-arc streetlight on my corner was replace by a 40W LED, with better lighting to boot. Low-pressure sodium is even worse - an absolute monochromatic yellow. If you forgot where you parked your red car, good luck finding it. Been there, done that.
- mint2 3y ago
  Actually neutral white and blue tinged white (the most common led shade) is terrible for night vision, glare, and light pollution all due to the actual physics of light.
ironmagma 3y ago
You seem to make no room for the possibility that the people rioting were correct in both cases, that the current lights are worse than the yellow, and the yellow lights are worse than the pinkish.
NoPedantsThanks 3y ago
The problem with LEDs is the massive increase in light pollution they cause.
- smileysteve 3y ago
  But do they? LEDs are directional vs Sodium is omnidirectional and reflected; So given a similar housing, LEDs causes less light pollution.
  - xnx 3y ago
    The bigger factor (in my neighborhood at least) is the LEDs being many times brighter than what they replaced.
  - Ferret7446 3y ago
    All light is reflected, unless your neighborhood has opted for an avante garde Vantablack theme. Given a similar housing, the brighter light causes more light pollution.
JohnFen 3y ago
It's amazing how people get used to stuff. I remember well how awful those sodium lamps were when they were first put in, and how nearly everyone hated them in part because they made everything look ugly. Now, people get nostalgic for them. People are weird.

dghlsakjg 3y ago

People hate new things more than they hate the mediocrity they know.

renewiltord 3y ago

Most of these aesthetic criticism people are just conservative people. They don't like change. The world was best when they arrived somewhere. That's pretty much it. SF is full of a similar kind.

achileas 3y ago
This is the only real takeaway of the article. “I don’t like this because it’s new to me, therefore it’s universally bad.” I live in Boston and there was a similar freakout about the gas lamps in Beacon Hill being replaced by LEDs. Not a single person I talked to about it knew that the gas lamps were only added to the neighborhood in the late 70s to make it look more quaint and historic.
- esafak 3y ago
  So they were added to suit the character of the neighborhood? That is a great selection criterion.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  In SF, the most recent two controversies were over historic seating being removed from a Castro theatre and historic rusted iron protective chains being replaced by the waterfront. Age of said seating? 20 y. Age of chains? 30 y. It's not that I have a problem with this. It's just that I personally don't want to be considered historic in my mid 30s.
  - elevatedastalt 3y ago
    How are things ever supposed to become historic if people aren't allowed to fight to keep them around when they are only 20 or 30 years old?
    - renewiltord 3y ago
      To be honest, I don't think seats and rusted iron railings should be things we strive to just retain so that they can be considered historic. Though I do like the idea of forcing everyone to keep their iPhone 13 for the next 20 years so that it can become old enough to be historic.
- lttlrck 3y ago
  On the other hand, that they didn't know they were added "just" 40 years ago suggests that the decision to install them was a very good one? Not that I support gas street lighting, but there is a distinct lack of genuinely quaint and historic districts in US cities.
inglor_cz 3y ago
Are you sure? Many more people admire Taj Mahal or Ancient Greek/Roman buildings than, say, brutalist architecture. Heck, even Art Deco, while distinctly modern, seems to be likeable. I am fairly conservative myself, but I like some new Czech buildings, such as the Masaryčka project by Zaha Hadid. It has a soaring soul that is hard to describe, but nevertheless you can feel the positive vibe of the structure when you walk underneath it. https://www.masarycka.com/cs/o-projektu/ https://www.masarycka.com/cs/o-projektu/ On the other hand, Le Corbusier architecture (mostly older than me, so I should have been used to it) looks like deliberate insult to anything human: look at this concrete prison I made for you and weep and gnash your teeth because there is no escape from its rotting ugliness, you worm.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  I can't speak to the culture in Eastern Europe. I meant in the US where I'm quite sure considering old beloved artifacts of today are all the nightmarish monsters of yesteryear that people protested. Fortunately, the American version of this view will be smashed in the next two decades and we will enter an era of creation once again.
- lannisterstark 3y ago
  Yellow street lamps are not Taj mahal
- rayiner 3y ago
  > hand, Le Corbusier architecture (mostly older than me, so I should have been used to it) looks like deliberate insult to anything human: look at this concrete prison I made for you and weep and gnash your teeth because there is no escape from its rotting ugliness, you worm. This is how I feel about the watergate, in which I work.
bufio 3y ago
Do you really prefer hospital lighting over yellow lighting?
- nradov 3y ago
  I really prefer full spectrum lighting over yellow lighting in all circumstances. Bring on the white LEDs.
  - jokethrowaway 3y ago
    You should talk with architects and interior designers. Lights can transform the feel of a place and they have their purpose.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  Are we calling full spectrum daylight "hospital lighting" now?
Tanoc 3y ago
When you're an artist who tries to recreate things from the past you learn very quickly the limitations of what we use nowadays. Tradeoffs in efficiency are often paid for with quality of life. For example many of the older high pressure sodium lamps were better for human eyesight because of their colour spectrum being a segment of daylight allowing better contrast perception and not straining the upper limits of the cones in your eyes for night vision. Their falloff was also much better, preventing harsh shadows inherent to fluorescent and LED lights that hide things all too easily and create unwelcoming chiseled depth on architecture. Sadly adding in those little quality of life benefits costs more fractions of a cent per unit, so the modern LED bulbs capable of recreating them go without. The other thing, about the "McCentury Modern" architecture, has been proven time and again over the last decade. Flat shapes without detail with random splashes of colour cause anxiety because the human mind needs visual definition and coherency. There are ongoing studies about whether or not modern architecture causes depression because so many people have noticed. At least in the past the cheapest stuff used bricks for facades, but developers think even those are too expensive now. That and the proliferation of grey is entirely about money, because it's easier to sell the lowest common denominator without a hint of individuality. This is especially true when it comes to market instability, because when tenant turnover is in the range of months grabbing the cheapest thing and throwing together the least personable environment to rope in anybody at all will keep you from having a vacancy of longer than a few weeks. The films thing is just... Nobody actually looks at physical examples anymore, so they have no idea how things should look. With practical effects you were manipulating and testing what already existed instead of trying to recreate it as an approximation. There's a surrealist level of detail in almost anything created via CG, only worsened by the lighting needing to be flattened to cover up the unfinished work done because of an impossible schedule and masked with digital colour correcting. Real waves don't have that much foam, real diamond weave cloth doesn't have that specular profile, real explosions don't have such low luminosity and so many particles, so on and so forth. A lot of people realize things are very wrong with the world, they just don't have the expertise or the vocabulary to explain it. So they point at things they know other people will innately understand as examples. Don't say they hate change because of that limitation.

codelikeawolf 3y ago

> A reminder of the rot and desperation of the that era. I think there's a tendency to romanticize this kind of thing, a la an early Tom Waits song. I've lived in Portland for a little under 5 years. I feel like it has been moving in the "ugly" direction the author describes for a while, and it started before I moved here. People that have been here much longer describe how it used to be much more "gritty" and dangerous. They say it with sort of a twinkle in their eye, almost as if they miss it. Part of me would have loved to see how it was, but the other part of me knows what's its like to be in the wrong part of town. At least you have the wherewithal to see why a move to LED lights was probably a smart move. Just because it's new and different doesn't make it bad.

ghaff 3y ago
When someone mentions the "disneyfication" of Times Square I'm declined to think they have either very selective memories or they were never around that area and 42nd Street in the 80s especially late at night. They can still hang out at the Port Authority if they want to experience echoes of that time.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  I think some people really like to have a lot of (negative) drama in their lives for some reason. You can see it in their relationships too; they seem to be unable to have a relationship with a partner that doesn't have a lot of needless drama in it. Maybe they have some kind of addiction to chaos. Put them in an environment where everything is nice and peaceful and works well and they feel lost.

vondur 3y ago

My main memory from the 70s as a child was the ugly fluorescent light everywhere outside.

Paianni 3y ago

Chances are the pre-1980s lamps were mercury-vapour, not incandescent. Incandescent lamps were obsolete for road lighting by the 1950s. Sodium lamps caught on because they were much more efficient than both.

mp05 3y ago

> People of my age view them as a nuisance born out of the austerity of the 1970s, a temporary suboptimal fix that persisted due to inertia. A reminder of the rot and desperation of the that era. > Now this dude is nostalgic for them? You could just as readily be talking about a cassette tape.

argiopetech 3y ago
The cassette tape has a lot of things going for it. They play for longer than CDs, they don't skip, they are simple to duplicate and record onto (with most cassette decks capable of one, if not both, actions), and the occasional tape tangle teaches patience and encourages mechanical understanding of the system. They can't compete with my phone and a bunch of FLAC for fidelity, but I wish they weren't effectively dead technology. Next, let's talk about how I miss CRTs...
- twiddling 3y ago
  < Next, let's talk about how I miss CRTs Best television I had was a HD Sony CRT. Incredible picture. Also weighed over 230 pounds. My back does not miss CRTs
  - c0pium 3y ago
    I guarantee you that this is not the case. Go watch an old CRT, even the eye-wateringly expensive ones sucked compared to even a mediocre OLED. We just think they were great because of the SD pieces of crap we compared them to. Ditto for all of the technology Millennials have ennui for.
    - shiroiuma 3y ago
      As an Xer who grew up with all these old technologies and saw the transitions to modern stuff, I fully agree. It's odd how Millennials are so interested in obsolete and obviously inferior technologies like LPs and Polaroid photos. There's very, very few cases I can think of where an older technology really was better in a significant way. Mechanical keyboards like the IBM Model M (or better yet, the Model F, though the layouts on those keyboards sucked) were really great, but they were also expensive, and we do have all the Cherry-switch mech keyboards now, though personally I don't like them as much. However, one big negative trend I do see is with streaming services and the entire lack of ownership this carries. This isn't really a technology problem: there's nothing stopping you from buying real CDs and ripping them to FLAC and listening to those on your phone, for instance (that's what I do). I'd call this a mis-application of new technology, similar to how so much software is so ridiculously slow and laggy: it's entirely possible (and easier than ever before with modern tooling) to write software that performs well, but people are just too lazy to do it, and insist on building in too much BS like ads and tracking.

crazygringo 3y ago

> Now this dude is nostalgic for them? No, they really were better for sleep. With the orange-ish sodium lights, I could go to sleep with their light still coming through the bedroom window. The amber glow was reminiscent of the glow of fire. The harsh blue light now tells my brain it's daytime. I had to buy blackout curtains to be able to fall asleep. It's the same principle as using the amber-hued Night Mode on your phone in the evening. I never experienced the pinkish-white, but the transition from orange to blue has been horrible for sleep. Nighttime lighting around homes should be amber, not blue. (Contrast with highways where you do want people to stay awake, so blue makes sense.)

ricardobeat 3y ago
> Contrast with highways where you do want people to stay awake, so blue makes sense I remember some kind of study around yellow light being ideal for roads actually. The human eye is more sensitive in the green/yellow part of the spectrum, the lights are more efficient and cut through fog better.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  The difference between white & yellow light in fog is minimal. What really makes fog lights effective is being under 18 inches off the ground so they shine under the fog.
  - shakow 3y ago
    And they also shine much brighter.
  - ricardobeat 3y ago
    White light scatters more since it contains multiple wavelengths, generating more glare and losing brightness faster. And this is about street lighting, a 10% difference in brightness can result in massive energy savings.
saghm 3y ago
> With the orange-ish sodium lights, I could go to sleep with their light still coming through the bedroom window. The amber glow was reminiscent of the glow of fire. > The harsh blue light now tells my brain it's daytime. I had to buy blackout curtains to be able to fall asleep. When I moved in with my fiancee (at the time my girlfriend), I noticed after a couple months that I had a bit of trouble sleeping due to her often falling asleep later than me and being on her laptop for a bit. Since blackout curtains don't help with that, I bought a sleep mask for a few dollars from Amazon (basically a piece of nylon fabric and a strap, nothing specialized), and it's not an exaggeration to say that it's been life-changing. As a child, I'd often struggle to fall asleep due to literally any amount of light in my bedroom, and when I was in elementary school it got bad enough that it would take me several hours of lying in bed to finally fall asleep, and I ended up getting prescribed insomnia medication that I continued taking for a couple of decades. It turned out that with the sleep mask, I was able to taper off the prescription sleeping medication within a year or so, and I'm even able to get up earlier without being quite as groggy due to my quality of sleep increasing so much. If anyone else has similar issues with lighting interfering with their sleep, especially if it's from things within their building rather than outside, I'd highly recommend investing a few bucks to try this out. Obviously my sample size is only one, but given how drastic the effect was and how low-cost it is to try out, it would almost feel irresponsible for me not to suggest this to people.

Izkata 3y ago

Your links require a subscription to view. > Now this dude is nostalgic for them? An easily-unrealized benefit until people were forced to use them, they didn't ruin our low-light vision, at least not nearly as much as the new ones. You could easily see into unlit areas, or go from an unlit area to a lit one without your vision having to adjust.

flyinghamster 3y ago

> Now this dude is nostalgic for them? I stopped reading there. I'll take LEDs over ugly orange any day (or mercury-arc, as well). When my town converted, they picked neutral-white lights for the side streets and ones with a very slight yellow tint for the major streets. Either of these is far better as far as I'm concerned. Even the old mercury-arc lights weren't that great - either sickly greenish or a color-corrected version that was blue-white. The 175W mercury-arc streetlight on my corner was replace by a 40W LED, with better lighting to boot. Low-pressure sodium is even worse - an absolute monochromatic yellow. If you forgot where you parked your red car, good luck finding it. Been there, done that.

mint2 3y ago
Actually neutral white and blue tinged white (the most common led shade) is terrible for night vision, glare, and light pollution all due to the actual physics of light.

ironmagma 3y ago

You seem to make no room for the possibility that the people rioting were correct in both cases, that the current lights are worse than the yellow, and the yellow lights are worse than the pinkish.

NoPedantsThanks 3y ago

The problem with LEDs is the massive increase in light pollution they cause.

smileysteve 3y ago
But do they? LEDs are directional vs Sodium is omnidirectional and reflected; So given a similar housing, LEDs causes less light pollution.
- xnx 3y ago
  The bigger factor (in my neighborhood at least) is the LEDs being many times brighter than what they replaced.
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  All light is reflected, unless your neighborhood has opted for an avante garde Vantablack theme. Given a similar housing, the brighter light causes more light pollution.

JohnFen 3y ago

It's amazing how people get used to stuff. I remember well how awful those sodium lamps were when they were first put in, and how nearly everyone hated them in part because they made everything look ugly. Now, people get nostalgic for them. People are weird.