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> And yet some streetlights have suddenly turned a jarring shade of purple. It is hard to determine the exact cause without dissecting one of the defective ligh

> And yet some streetlights have suddenly turned a jarring shade of purple. It is hard to determine the exact cause without dissecting one of the defective lights, but scientists have a hypothesis: bright purple light suggests the phosphor layer around the lights has been “delaminated”—peeled off—exposing the blue LED light underneath, Brgoch says. What an annoying/bad article. "Here are our guesses of this when we could have actually figured it out". It's not like these are in space and hard to get to, they are on the freaking street. Get a crew out there and figure it out. Then they go on to do a _bunch_ of handwavy "science" about blue light while not really making any point (IMHO). > One thing that Bullough suggests pedestrians and drivers do to stay safe under purple streetlights—or any lights, for that matter—is to remove sunglasses and blue-light-filtering glasses when walking or driving at night. Ahh yes, for all the people that wear their sunglasses at night, I'll make sure to let Corey Hart know. This just seems like an incredibly low-effort article with zero definite facts and enough hand waving to sprain your wrist.

neutronicus 1y ago
FWIW I do wear sunglasses for long highway drives at night. Without them halogen headlights in my side mirrors give me a migraine after a while.
- jessriedel 1y ago
  FYI you can get auto-dimming side mirrors (same mechanism as for rear-view mirrors). I presume it’s a pain to install them after-market, but it can be done and maybe worth it for you if brights bother you enough to wear sunglasses.
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    When I had some window tinting done on a car, they tinted the side mirrors at no extra charge with excess film. At first, I didn’t like it, but quickly grew to quite like it. (It’s pretty much only annoying for seeing the curb while parallel parking at night.)
    - jessriedel 1y ago
      I don't think tinting is the same thing as electronic dimming.
      - sokoloff 1y ago
        It’s not the same mechanism, but they both reduce glare and one is wildly easier than the other to get installed for someone bothered enough to wear sunglasses on night drives.
- ssl-3 1y ago
  Are you sure you mean "halogen"? * Halogen headlights have been the most common (and relatively cheap!) kind on the road for many decades. They're just like the tungsten filament incandescent space heaters we used to use at home, except they burn at a somewhat higher color temperature. (And the way they work is really really neat, but I digress.) Halogens, while higher-temperature than regular tungsten headlights (which haven't really been used at all in many decades) are generally "yellow"-ish compared to modern HID (aka "xenon" or "metal halide") or LED headlights. Anyway, I'm also bothered by lights when driving at night, and I find the yellower corner of the spectrum to be the least-bothersome of common lighting colors. The glaring ~6000k white of modern HID and LED is much worse, for me, apparently because of the extra blue spectrum. But if it really is yellow-ish halogen lights in your side mirrors that bother you most*, then I can't tell you that you're wrong. And if that is then case, I can potentially offer some constructive advice: I've owned a couple of cars (specifically, a 4th gen Firebird and an E36 BMW -- both products of the middle 1990s) that came from the factory with side mirror glass that was tinted a pale blue. The slightly-blue tint attenuated yellow halogen lights, by design. It's a clever bit of optical filtering. During the day, in the sun where there's tons of light, they worked mostly-normally: Reflected images had little bit of blue tinge, but whatever. And at night, the halogen headlights that were nearly-ubiquitous in the 1990s had their reflected intensity turned down automatically. Compared to cars with mirrors that used clear glass, I could still see the lights of the cars behind me just fine. They were simply less-blinding. It worked great around the times those cars were produced. If that's really the problem you're experiencing*, then a very pale blue window tint on the mirrors may be exactly what you want for that issue. * (I asked for specificity because it's important. That Firebird and E36 both became increasingly-annoying for me to drive at night as HID and LED lights became increasingly-common, and towards the end of my time driving them I was seriously considering having clear glass mirrors cut and swapping over to that. Not because the blue tint wasn't effective at filtering out halogen light (it was great at that!), but because it seemed to magnify the problems I experience with HID and LED headlights. The world was changing, and the unchanged spectral filtering became a burden instead of a boon.)
  - neutronicus 1y ago
    No, I have no clue, I'm just thoughtlessly repeating what I've heard. The things that give me a migraine look almost purple, so I'm guessing it's HID / LED and not halogen.
kayodelycaon 1y ago
I’m not sure if someone has dissected them to see what’s wrong and published the results. Deductive reasoning points to a failure of the phosphor layer in a specific type of led.
- 1970-01-01 1y ago
  Someone did, it's accurate to state this is published work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Mll-YDDAF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Mll-YDDAF4
floatrock 1y ago
> Get a crew out there and figure it out. I mean, to be fair, the city maintenance crews don't generally run tear-down youtube channels with appropriate equipment to take a close look at a failing semiconductor-based light assembly. But the general point is correct. What could be done is connect with some of those crews' offices, understand what warranties are provided with the municipal purchase of those bulbs, and how much comes out of the infrastructure budget to do an early replacement of these bulbs. Hopefully these bulbs weren't purchased from a RANDOMSYLLABLE amazon china dropshipper who disappeared after 3 months. But yes, that requires talking to municipal governments, and there's not enough click revenue to support that level of journalism anymore. Maybe a youtuber who runs a tear-down channel can do that.
- bob1029 1y ago
  > Hopefully these bulbs weren't purchased from a RANDOMSYLLABLE amazon china dropshipper who disappeared after 3 months. This is how most LED bulbs in use today are purchased. In theory, LED is absolutely superior when engineered correctly, but it rarely is on a statistical basis when looking at the available products. It's hard to make an incandescent bulb that is shitty, other than making it not last for a very long time. I'd rather a dead bulb than one that turns my street into a nightclub.

neutronicus 1y ago

FWIW I do wear sunglasses for long highway drives at night. Without them halogen headlights in my side mirrors give me a migraine after a while.

jessriedel 1y ago
FYI you can get auto-dimming side mirrors (same mechanism as for rear-view mirrors). I presume it’s a pain to install them after-market, but it can be done and maybe worth it for you if brights bother you enough to wear sunglasses.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  When I had some window tinting done on a car, they tinted the side mirrors at no extra charge with excess film. At first, I didn’t like it, but quickly grew to quite like it. (It’s pretty much only annoying for seeing the curb while parallel parking at night.)
  - jessriedel 1y ago
    I don't think tinting is the same thing as electronic dimming.
    - sokoloff 1y ago
      It’s not the same mechanism, but they both reduce glare and one is wildly easier than the other to get installed for someone bothered enough to wear sunglasses on night drives.
ssl-3 1y ago
Are you sure you mean "halogen"? * Halogen headlights have been the most common (and relatively cheap!) kind on the road for many decades. They're just like the tungsten filament incandescent space heaters we used to use at home, except they burn at a somewhat higher color temperature. (And the way they work is really really neat, but I digress.) Halogens, while higher-temperature than regular tungsten headlights (which haven't really been used at all in many decades) are generally "yellow"-ish compared to modern HID (aka "xenon" or "metal halide") or LED headlights. Anyway, I'm also bothered by lights when driving at night, and I find the yellower corner of the spectrum to be the least-bothersome of common lighting colors. The glaring ~6000k white of modern HID and LED is much worse, for me, apparently because of the extra blue spectrum. But if it really is yellow-ish halogen lights in your side mirrors that bother you most*, then I can't tell you that you're wrong. And if that is then case, I can potentially offer some constructive advice: I've owned a couple of cars (specifically, a 4th gen Firebird and an E36 BMW -- both products of the middle 1990s) that came from the factory with side mirror glass that was tinted a pale blue. The slightly-blue tint attenuated yellow halogen lights, by design. It's a clever bit of optical filtering. During the day, in the sun where there's tons of light, they worked mostly-normally: Reflected images had little bit of blue tinge, but whatever. And at night, the halogen headlights that were nearly-ubiquitous in the 1990s had their reflected intensity turned down automatically. Compared to cars with mirrors that used clear glass, I could still see the lights of the cars behind me just fine. They were simply less-blinding. It worked great around the times those cars were produced. If that's really the problem you're experiencing*, then a very pale blue window tint on the mirrors may be exactly what you want for that issue. * (I asked for specificity because it's important. That Firebird and E36 both became increasingly-annoying for me to drive at night as HID and LED lights became increasingly-common, and towards the end of my time driving them I was seriously considering having clear glass mirrors cut and swapping over to that. Not because the blue tint wasn't effective at filtering out halogen light (it was great at that!), but because it seemed to magnify the problems I experience with HID and LED headlights. The world was changing, and the unchanged spectral filtering became a burden instead of a boon.)
- neutronicus 1y ago
  No, I have no clue, I'm just thoughtlessly repeating what I've heard. The things that give me a migraine look almost purple, so I'm guessing it's HID / LED and not halogen.

kayodelycaon 1y ago

I’m not sure if someone has dissected them to see what’s wrong and published the results. Deductive reasoning points to a failure of the phosphor layer in a specific type of led.

1970-01-01 1y ago
Someone did, it's accurate to state this is published work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Mll-YDDAF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Mll-YDDAF4

floatrock 1y ago

> Get a crew out there and figure it out. I mean, to be fair, the city maintenance crews don't generally run tear-down youtube channels with appropriate equipment to take a close look at a failing semiconductor-based light assembly. But the general point is correct. What could be done is connect with some of those crews' offices, understand what warranties are provided with the municipal purchase of those bulbs, and how much comes out of the infrastructure budget to do an early replacement of these bulbs. Hopefully these bulbs weren't purchased from a RANDOMSYLLABLE amazon china dropshipper who disappeared after 3 months. But yes, that requires talking to municipal governments, and there's not enough click revenue to support that level of journalism anymore. Maybe a youtuber who runs a tear-down channel can do that.

bob1029 1y ago
> Hopefully these bulbs weren't purchased from a RANDOMSYLLABLE amazon china dropshipper who disappeared after 3 months. This is how most LED bulbs in use today are purchased. In theory, LED is absolutely superior when engineered correctly, but it rarely is on a statistical basis when looking at the available products. It's hard to make an incandescent bulb that is shitty, other than making it not last for a very long time. I'd rather a dead bulb than one that turns my street into a nightclub.