12 ms·

Its ironic, because this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research to understand why any of these problems he highlights are the wa

• aheidne 2y ago
  It’s* ironic, because you don’t even seem to understand his argument and lazily disputed the LED part which isn’t even remotely what he’s complaining about. But, good job bruh, you defeated a strawman. Super proud of you.
  • tqi 2y ago
    Thanks grant!
• ulbu 2y ago
  [flagged]
• easygenes 2y ago
  It’s possible to install warm colored LEDs with very little blue light output though. You get all those benefits without giving up the more-suitable-for-night sodium light spectral benefits.
  • tqi 2y ago
    Agree, but it's more expensive and less energy efficient[1]. Personally, that seems worth it to me [EDIT: "it" being using slightly less efficient lights that are more comfortable for people], but thats a difference in values not in how much I "care" about the problem... [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-mysteriously-turning-purple-heres-why/#:~:text=The%20other%20is,phosphor%2Dcoating%20combination https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-....
    • nyokodo 2y ago
      > that seems worth it to me How much more energy efficient is it? If it's a tiny efficiency gain vs the negative effects of blue heavy white light then I would suggest it's a bad tradeoff. Some studies have suggested that blue light doesn't affect sleep [1] but the psychological effects of cold vs warm light has been used by lighting designers for decades. Cold light is less comfortable and discourages hanging around, the positive spin is "energizing", it's often used in supermarkets and budget stores that value faster browsing, and impulsive decisions under a greater feeling of urgency. Warm light has a relaxing effect and is used, for example, in luxury stores and restaurants where people are intended to take their time. [2] For outdoor areas where people are intended to enjoy relaxing after dark activities warmer light would be far superior an experience than colder light. 1. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/blue-light-may-not-affect-sleep-wake-cycle https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/blue-light-may-not... 2. https://www.tcpi.com/how-lights-impacts-psychology-mood-in-retail/ https://www.tcpi.com/how-lights-impacts-psychology-mood-in-r...
    • bryanrasmussen 2y ago
      sure - for your house. For lights all over the city that will be lasting years?
  • _lyxd 2y ago
    OK but blinding blue LEDs are most common substitutes, because it's the lazy default, and because people do not care. That's the point of the article.
    • teslabox 2y ago
      Blue-white LEDs have become the replacement for High Pressure Sodium [HPS] traffic lights because that's what the LED light companies have to sell. In the early years of the transition to LED streetlights they had to sell blue-white LED streetlights because warmer LEDs were not competitive with HPS on the basis of lumens-per-watt. Most of the people who understood the advantages of blue-free amber HPS light over white metal halide lights retired, and this little tidbit of information didn't get passed to the next generation of city employees. > and because people do not care. People care, but they don't know why they hate the blue-white LED replacement lights. I've complained to the city about their new lights, but have not gotten any responses about why they haven't deployed LED lights with a safe spectrum of color. This comment about unsafe blue-white headlights got a few upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42444111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42444111
      • Qwertious 2y ago
        Blue light is safer for cars - it gives slightly faster reaction times, and lower the chance of drivers falling asleep. The problem is that for pedestrians, the reaction-time is irrelevant, they're butt-ugly, and plenty of people go on night walks because they can't sleep but want to. Half of this article is basically about cities being overly car-centric.
        • teslabox 2y ago
          I’m not well-read on the old lighting research, but I’ve come across some explanations for why humans actually do much better with amber outdoor lighting than white. One of these points relates to how our pupils expand and contract with the amount of light available.
        • reddalo 2y ago
  • matthewdgreen 2y ago
    Here in Baltimore the city seems to have purchased a huge batch of defective LEDs that are actually purple. It’s disturbing when you encounter one.
    • josephcsible 2y ago
      Nitpick: "are actually purple" makes it sound like they came out of the factory purple, but they're actually changing from white to purple over time as the phosphor coating fails.
      • NikkiA 2y ago
        They'll be near-UV LEDs with a phosphor to produce white, high efficiency, low cost, but garbage long term.
      • matthewdgreen 2y ago
        Just to be clear, these are about 1-3 years old. So yes they probably weren't purple on the day they were installed, but this is a defect and not normal aging. https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/136nz3b/til_since_2020_white_led_streetlights_have_been/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/136nz3b/til_...
    • 1659447091 2y ago
      The city employee who bought them is probably a massive Ravens fan...
      • gunian 2y ago
        i mean who wouldn't be the way they're playing
    • Peanuts99 2y ago
      Might be so that they don't interfere with a certain species of wildlife. We have deep blue ones near me that aren't visible by a protected bat species.
    • 2y ago
  • a_e_k 2y ago
    The funny thing is, in my neck of Seattle (the city this post is complaining about), I've seen some of the harsh white LEDs that went in switched over to a warmer color. I remember being quite shocked when I pulled into a city-owned parking lot one night and realized that all of the lights around were all now a warmer color instead of the harsh white. The lights in my neighborhood also seem to have been switched over at some point. I suppose they're the tunable LEDs, but clearly someone here does care.
    • lloeki 2y ago
      In my city they started turning off all streetlights at midnight outside of major driving lanes and active center areas. It's weird and somewhat unnerving at first but brilliant. I'd argue road-wise it is possibly even safer because headlights work so much better when it's pitch black by virtue of the human eye having so much dynamic range. Pedestrians can't miss cars as they're blasting light through the dark; cars can't miss bikes because even passive reflectors are blaring in the surrounding darkness; even pedestrians end up being more visible because of the higher contrast, cast shadows, and movement that conspire to make them plainly pop out like cardboard props or Doom 3 flashlight jumpscares. And when you go out of the dark zone into a major axis that's bathed in light that feels warm and safe it's like everything is suddenly muted and flattened as if reality went through a low contrast sepia-tinted desaturation filter. You feel like you see better but everything is muddled together in the sameness of uniform lighting. The experience is highly cognitively dissonant and counterintuitive.
      • jaimebuelta 2y ago
        WTF? What about pedestrians? Are they walking in full darkness? This seems to be totally oriented to cars. I find American cities incredibly dark by night. Walking around feels too dark and unpleasant.
        • quietbritishjim 2y ago
          I'm don't see why this is downvoted, I think it's an honest and legitimate question. What are pedestrians supposed to do when there's no car passing them right this moment? Carry their own torch? Rely on ambient light from the moon and reflected from nearby lit streets? Are we assuming there's such a high volume of cars that there's never a gap? I'm genuinely confused.
  • Tomte 2y ago
    In the netherlands I have seen green street lights with motion sensors. Only on smaller streets and pedestrian paths, though.
    • alexandrehtrb 2y ago
      That sounds cool.
  • maayank 2y ago
    Any way to test my light's spectrum? e.g. a cheap home spectrometer
    • tmnvdb 2y ago
      Take a photo
      • maayank 2y ago
        Implies no white balance shenanigans
        • NikkiA 2y ago
          A sheet of paper will generally manage ok for white balance calibration. A 3 tone grey card would be better, but a single, simple white will suffice
    • neop1x 2y ago
      Use a CD disk - really - it disperses light similarly to a dispersive prism. You can then see and estimate the amount of red, blue and green in a light. It works very well if you just want to check blue light sources at night. And you can even make a DIY spectrometer with it! https://youtu.be/p3MzQ1OF3lk https://youtu.be/p3MzQ1OF3lk
  • flyinghamster 2y ago
    In my town, when they replaced the old mercury arc and high pressure sodium lights, they picked a pleasing neutral white for the side streets that's far better than the bluish-white mercury arcs they replaced, while using 40 watts each instead of 175. Win-win in my book. The main streets have a different LED with a slight yellow cast, but not the ugly orange of high pressure sodium. Yes, we can have nice LED street lighting.
• CalRobert 2y ago
  The ones in the article clearly go against the best principles at https://www.savingourstars.org/ https://www.savingourstars.org/ though.
• veltas 2y ago
  I don't understand how they're safer, because locally they've installed a few and they're already dying, and dying by strobing on and off at about 1Hz, which makes it quite hard to drive through. They're so bright that this failure mode is like a disco strobe light. This failure is so severe that regardless of how it might be elsewhere, to me it seems like the people who decided to use these LED lights and continue to advocate for them really don't care about people.
  • jjtheblunt 2y ago
    anedcote but i've been using leds for 8 years+ now and there's big variance in such behavior between manufacturers.
    • throwaway290 2y ago
      Three led lights in my flat went within 3 months after I moved in. But some time ago I had an incandescent bulb that lived for years. With bulb it depends on how/how often you power cycle. A good way to extend its life is to not power cycle it and to underpower it. Dimming a bulb also saves electricity and easier on the eyes. With LED it is up to manufacturer. People say LEDs are cheaper but those leds are exactly the ones you have to keep buying. And good LED prices can go pretty high compared to bulbs.
      • chgs 2y ago
        On the one hand you have your Anne site, on the other hand there’s decades of data.
        • throwaway290 2y ago
          And only one of them is directly pertinent. None of the "decades of data" takes into account correct exploitation. But all talks about leds are about perfect spherical cow in vacuum that doesn't exist for average consumer I am sure leds technically do live longer than bulbs. But the difference is not significant enough in real life.
• deleted 2y ago
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• bobthepanda 2y ago
  it is not exactly a huge secret that SDOT often would rather do weird compromises on a bike lane than inconvenience cars slightly. The NACTO guides don't really have anything on grades into turns, and the AASHTO and FHWA are notoriously not bike friendly. This particular lane was done in 2018. https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs/programs/maintenance-and-paving/current-paving-projects/sw-avalon-way https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs... You can actually see the diagram here: https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/MaintenanceProgram/Avalon/2019_123_Presentation%20-%20Paving-compressed.pdf https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/Maintenan... The entire reason it goes up onto the multi-use-trail to connect to Alki Trail, is because that leaves room for a right turn lane; whereas, if Seattle narrowed the two lanes to nine feet, which is a perfectly fine width on an urban street according to AASHTO, then you could have an actual protected bike lane all the way through the intersection without any sort of shallow curve.
• pointedAt 2y ago
  you guys are smarter than that. in our civilization people observe and tell. all that research is wonderful and helpful but how many percent of people can do that, can follow that, know where to find it, have an environment that enables them to get observations to the responsible people and how many of those have the trust to do that? it doesn't matter how smart you are, any colony dies without enough people that fall into above "description". and those people don't have to fall into that description, but smarter people rather figure out ......
• renox 2y ago
  While you're right on the LED part, this bike lanes is obviously misdesigned.. I have a similar one next to my house and fell from my bicycle due to its poor design, some French civil engineer also don't care :-(
  • 0xEF 2y ago
    We are starting to see some in my city in the US and while that is exciting and appreciated, many of them are terrible to ride on. There is one near my house that is so full of lane changes and curves, you really can do much more than 7mpg (walking speed). For some reason, they saw fit to make the bike lane weave in and out of the parallel parking? It's so bizarre and awkward that I'd rather just ride with the traffic in the street like we used to since that invokes less anxiety.
• phito 2y ago
  Except he is talking about the color of the LEDs. Blue LEDs are terrible, just put orange ones. Has nothing to do with the fact that it's LEDs or hallogen.
• logifail 2y ago
  > There are enormous design standards [..] I would suggest that "design standards" do not always make things uniformly better, certainly not for end users.
  • drunner 2y ago
    Go look into the design standards used in The Netherlands. https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl18004/chap03.cfm https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl18004/chap03.cfm gives a decent overview of some of those things. They are much better for end users because someone over there cared. Whomever designed the ones in the article clearly does not.
    • logifail 2y ago
      > They are much better for end users because someone over there cared. Whomever designed the ones in the article clearly does not This is kind of my point, at a very general level the statement "$thing follows design standards" may or may not mean that $thing is actually better for users.
• crabbone 2y ago
  I live in the Netherlands, in the burbs, and have to cycle a lot. That picture of a bike ramp... I can feel it. Whatever that document you googled says, it's wrong, if it justifies building ramps like that. That ramp is bad. There's no two ways about it. But, responding to this particular example is missing the point of the article. Let me, for a moment, agree with you, and say that the ramp is within acceptable parameters: still, the author complains about a more general phenomenon, a lot of aspects of this phenomenon are very relatable. And it doesn't have to manifest itself uniformly and similarly everywhere in every detail. For example, suburban houses in the Netherlands really show people care about the neighborhood. The want things to be nice. Windowsills are always decorated, have some art displayed in the windows, just for the passerby to enjoy. People mostly care to pick up after their dogs and to generally not litter. People even invest into community playgrounds, community garden patches etc. Life is good, at least in this respect. But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light. It's a convention of sorts, that people understand without saying anything out loud. Do the absolute minimum, waste a lot of time doing nothing of value, don't rock the boat. And it is, as the author says, demoralizing. It makes my blood boil when defects discovered in our product, and instead of being fixed they get documented in a bottomless pit of our multi-thousands pages PDF manual, and the product is shipped regardless. A lot of these defects resulted not from honest mistakes, but from a desire to do as little work as possible, and to do only the "pleasant" part of the work: programmers prefer writing new code to fixing existing code. Testing is for wimps. Adding more stuff without fixing existing problems results in simply having more problems. * * * Now, how to make people care?--I don't know. I know of some things that worked, but they have bad side-effects (religion works, but sometimes it detracts into killing a lot of people, communism works, as in kibbutzim, but then it loses momentum, and is very prone to be exploited by external forces also, doesn't work on a large scale.)
  • maeil 2y ago
    >But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light. In your country this starts way back in middle school, where this phenomenon is worse than I've seen in any other place. It would be incredibly surprising if this suddenly changed in the workplace when it's all people have ever known. As long as the culture doesn't change at that age, there's no hope for changing it later in life.
• addicted 2y ago
  Also, the Wikipedia link he points to has 2 references from the same research team the latest of which is over a decade old. If white LED lights were so awful you’d imagine at least somebody would have done a decent, fairly cheap paper to show the negative impacts in the last decade where the uptake of LED street lights has been so widespread.
  • pdimitar 2y ago
    No, I can't imagine that because again, nobody cares. You are demonstrating the problem very clearly btw: you assume people would have cared and that's why nothing was done. Which is a puzzling thing to say. Because clearly, the people who care have no power.
• gizmo 2y ago
  Of course there are "reasonable justifications" for the shitty status quo, but that's kind of the point. Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons. The author points to Japan to illustrate that you do get measurably better results when people habitually try to do good work. We're not actually doomed to have crappy furniture, flimsy and buggy appliances, byzantine legal codes, ugly architecture, and hostile infrastructure forever. This society is the product of the choices we've made collectively and if we made different choices we could have a much better (or much worse) society.
  • TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    Cheaper lighting costs across an entire city are a very good reason. "Ugly architecture" is subjective. A lot of architects care very much, but they follow the academic line and lack the imagination and empathy to understand why elements of that aesthetic are unpopular and impractical - a completely different problem, even if it causes related outcomes. Bugs are easy to write and hard to fix. MBA culture as a whole is fixated on quick extractive shareholder returns, not on celebrating supreme engineering quality. MBAs care very much too, but not about the things the author (and probably most of us) care about. Some people do care but are simply not good at their jobs. Even if you do care, people will assume you don't. Anyone who's done direct customer facing work or even just sold stuff online will know that people love to nitpick. And so on. The problem is narcissism vs empathy. Caring means trying to have some insight the experience of others. Narcissism is on a scale from blank unawareness of others to outright hostility, whether overt or covert. There's a lot more of the latter than the former around at the moment, and corporate and economic values provide some conveniently expedient justifications for it.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • gizmo 2y ago
      The problem, essentially, is that you can't rage against the dying of the light all by yourself. If you're an architect and badly want to build great housing your goals are frustrated every step of the way. By people who don't care enough to do all the little things that are necessary to make a building 5% better in 20 subtle ways. You can only fight indifference for so long before you're empty. What is the point of lighting being cheap if it produces a city where people don't want to live? Good lighting isn't unaffordable either. Cities with good lighting actually exist! And yet people will insist shitty lighting is somehow necessary. It isn't.
• cassepipe 2y ago
  Ok for LEDs and your general point but for the bike lane situation you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot : It's either non-standard compliant bike lane, which is a problem, or it is standard compliant and then it means that the standard is a broad, inflexible set of rules dictated from the top which is either too complicated for people in charge of the implementation or leaves them no room to adapt to a special case... or probably do not incentivize the implementers to think about what they are doing, all of which is a also a problem.
  • pclmulqdq 2y ago
    Maybe they would rather not have bikers bombing onto the sidewalk at 20 mph when they are going to be sharing that space with pedestrians. A sharp turn is a good way to prevent that. I assume there are several "bike lane ends" signs here, though, which should be an indication to slow down.
    • drunner 2y ago
      Imagine if you were talking about a road doing this for no reason. The engineers care about how fast you can go in a car around town, not bikes. You can't argue bike lanes get the same amount of care/effort as roads.
      • pclmulqdq 2y ago
        Roads do this all the time "for no reason." Plenty of neighborhoods have very sharp curves to get drivers to slow down. This is one of many "traffic calming" techniques. Also, I'm not sure where you got the idea that engineers don't care about the speeds of bikes (especially around pedestrians).
        • drunner 2y ago
          The example by the author is an unsafe one. You think putting unsafe sharp curves at the bottom of hills for cars is acceptable? Your example is good, and the matching example of a bike lane is the opposite of what was shown in the article.
• nicce 2y ago
  I would even argue that the current design of the bike line is better than the one suggested by the author. It forces the biker to slow down and reduces the collision risks with others in the line. It is selfish to think only about the biker coming from the hill. The biker that thinks it is okay to drive 20mph in that situation.
  • mensetmanusman 2y ago
    You can accomplish both with the right design.
    • llm_nerd 2y ago
      By not merging the cycling and walkway, sure. That would be a better design. But presumably real world limitations forced them to merge the two at this point, and forcing cyclists to slow before the merge is of obvious benefit to the safety of pedestrians and cyclists. Not to mention that road construction crews can't fabricate an infinite array of curbs and affordances as a simple practical limitation. As others have cited, the author seems to have an "everything is an easy fix" perspective to the world, at least when viewed as their own requirements and needs being the only consideration. In reality, loads of people care immensely about all the things that they think are easy fixes, but the fixes aren't nearly as easy as they think. Like, anyone who has ever listened to a user tell them how their app could be made much better knows this, when all of their suggestions would diminish usability for almost every other user.
  • drunner 2y ago
    Yeah, that's why we put sharp turns at the bottom of roads too. It is selfish to only think about the driver coming from the hill. The driver that thinks it is okay to drive 45mph in that situation. Do you see the irony of your statement.
    • marcosdumay 2y ago
      We put sharp turns at the end of roads. If you have a high-speed road merging into a slow one without some indication that it's ending and a sharp turn at the end, you have a road that kills people.
• 4ndrewl 2y ago
  He does not care
• mensetmanusman 2y ago
  LEDs last longer, but cities took the savings to add even more blue light, so the lifetime doesn’t matter. The light pollution has absolutely increased because of the amount of LEDs that have been installed. This is well documented. Also, the sodium line spectrum is easy to filter out for astronomy, broad spectrum blue LEDs add light pollution there.
• bill_joy_fanboy 2y ago
  This post is massive copium. If you can't take a look around the U.S. and see that cynicism and apathy are running wild here, then you are either deceiving yourself or you live in an area that hasn't experienced collapse acceleration yet.
• pdimitar 2y ago
  There are also LED lights that are more pleasant to look at and don't blind you. OP's point stands: nobody cares. Nobody even thought about it for a minute. Everything are items in a spreadsheet. Took me less than a minute to ask a lady in the lights store I visited two months ago to sell me softer, more yellow, LED lights. I still save a ton of electricity but my lights are not blinding me. This awful bright-blue-ish white light is bad for our brains btw, but that's a much bigger topic that I will not engage in.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• stronglikedan 2y ago
  Thanks for this. My parent's neighborhood has these purple lights and they are terrible. I never cared enough to do even the slightest bit of to understand why this problem is the way it is, until your comment.
• gspencley 2y ago
  > But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid. He didn't say everyone was stupid. He said that no body cares. There is a very big difference between the two. I tend to agree with him. Yes we can find examples, most commonly when it comes to safety standards, where there are systems in place that prevent the really bad stuff from happening. But why do those systems and checks need to be put into place? Because a lot of people simply do not care and would cut corners if their jobs didn't depend on them following the standards. The problem with broad sweeping generalizations is that they never apply to all individual cases. It doesn't change the fact that the broad generalization is, well, broadly and generally true. Most people don't care about almost anything other than getting home to their families or pets. Most people will even happily admit that. It's not even that they're lazy necessarily (though a few people are). It's that they are working in what is, to them, "just a job / pay cheque." That's not even always a problem. It's just a fact of life that is as true as taxes and death. It's worth acknowledging because it is something that needs to be accounted for after identifying or choosing your fault tolerances. The systems and standards that you cite are the result of acknowledging this fact of reality.
• indoordin0saur 2y ago
  One thing I want to point out is that white light has worse effect on light pollution than warmer light, at least as far as astronomy goes. If you ever go to a stargazing party you'll notice everyone uses red flashlights if they need to see anything in the dark because it doesn't drown out the starlight.
  • xiande04 2y ago
    That's because the warmer the light, the less it is affected by Rayleigh scattering. In other words, shorter wavelength (i.e., bluer) light scatters more. This is the same reason that the sky is blue. Animals are also more sensitive/more attracted to bluer light. These harsh white LED street lamps are a death sentence for moth species.
• scosman 2y ago
  I'm a big bike lane design nerd: that bike lane design absolutely sucks, and in more ways than the author mentions. The person designing it didn't care.
• bccdee 2y ago
  The bike ramp example was insane to me. OF COURSE it's not built so cyclists can zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour without slowing down. That's how you turn a pedestrian into paste. Really, you should be dismounting and walking your bike onto the sidewalk, but if you're going to ride your bike up that ramp, absolutely do not do it so quickly that you risk crashing.
• BeFlatXIII 2y ago
  Everyone defends stupid decisions because they comply with existing standards and no curb is above the law. That doesn't change the fact that it's a bad design, and ain't nobody got the time to file an exemption appeal.
• kylebenzle 2y ago
  I think spending a week in Japan you would see what the author is talking about, they care, we (USA) dont.
• hackernoops 2y ago
  LEDs produce trash light and I'm certain it'll eventually be linked to serious damage to human eyesight. Strobing alone is a nightmare, not to mention color temp like prison yard blue in street lights and car headlights.
• Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
  > this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research It was a rant not a thesis. I get frustrated by a lot of what he talks about too and many of them could be made better and without much cost. It might even be a call to action, shine a light on the nonsense so people do better next time (hopeful thought).
• DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  > Don’t take anything here too seriously. I’m not trying to sound snarky at all but I really do think you should reread the first paragraph of the article.
• ksec 2y ago
  >But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid. Well thanks to all the replies below to prove may be he is not assuming it's because everyone is stupid. I think this reply also amplifies what the author was saying. Just because the standard is like this and everyone is following the standard doesn't mean the standard is good.
• more_corn 2y ago
  LEDs come in multiple color temperatures. It’s possible to install led streetlights that don’t suck. Yes that bike lane follows some sort of standard. Still sucks. DMV sucks. Know what doesn’t suck? AAA DMV services. I think you’re right though. It’s not that people don’t care. It’s that we’ve painted ourselves into a corner of suck and we don’t know how to get out.
• mikeen 2y ago
  Hawaii Big Island does care about light pollution - for the sake of astronomical observatories. They use yellow low pressure sodium light. Yellow is dispersed less by air. The energy efficiency of low pressure sodium bulbs is also high, comparable or higher than most LEDs.