Chicago's About to Get a Lot Less Orange
chicagomag.com
chicagomag.com
The new lamps are definitely much bluer than the current sodium lights, which gives the street a different, unfamiliar feel. The article suggests the city ultimately adopted 3000K lamps, but it definitely feels like the pilot program used 4000K ones, they looked very cool.
Another interesting development with these so-called "smart lights" [1] is that the city can potentially modulate brightness on a street-by-street basis, and asking different neighborhoods to weigh in on where they want the lamps to be brighter (or maybe, if they want them dimmer on side streets etc). This sounds like a very good change - customizing street lights based on neighborhood requirements is a very nice development!
[1] https://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/cdot/supp_info/c...
The light doesn't have greater luminosity, but it is perceived as brighter.
We are all just trying to help someone be more correct. For me at least, it isn't because I wish to nit pick. Perhaps you could have had a more useful comment by not adding your personal anecdote and instead providing a citation?
The other responder to your comment is correct. It is entirely perceived and there is no real change in luminosity and thus brightness is the incorrect term.
I was offering my insight as both a graphic designer and amateur technical 3D artist with solid grasp of color theory and optics. Meanwhile you just butted in to tell me I'm wrong and I shouldn't tell other people they are wrong.
That's a conflicting position, and furthermore the person I was replying to was correcting someone else, and I was clarifying for both of them. So I really don't know why you felt the need to comment in the first place.
> Who is nitpicking here?
You and /u/colechristensen
> We are all just trying to help someone be more correct.
No one doubts the purity of your motives.
> The other responder to your comment is correct. It is entirely perceived and there is no real change in luminosity and thus brightness is the incorrect term.
No one disputes that the effect is perceived.
> I was offering my insight as both a graphic designer and amateur technical 3D artist with solid grasp of color theory and optics.
No one disputes your qualifications.
> Meanwhile you just butted in to tell me I'm wrong and I shouldn't tell other people they are wrong.
No one said you were wrong. I simply said that my experience is like that of /u/icelander and /u/pducks32 in that I perceive blue light to be brighter, which you disagreed with in your previous comment, but seem to agree with in this one. I didn't tell you not to correct other people, I said nit picking (i.e., correcting a minor discrepancy which isn't important, relevant, or otherwise causing confusion) is rarely helpful.
Interestingly, /u/Karunamon pointed us to the [Purkinje Effect][1] as an explanation for why blue light is perceived to be brighter, so perhaps you aren't correct despite your qualifications (I guess you espoused both sides of the argument, which would make you simultaneously correct and incorrect :p ). This certainly isn't my subject, so I'll leave you to sort it out on your own.
You're going to great lengths to nitpick yourself, my friend. This is downright silly so I think I'm done. You're arguing just to argue. Feel free to have the last word.
There are people with flicker sensitivity that have headaches when exposed to flickering light. A link to a HN discussion that touched the problem of PWM and flicker in the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13330611
The orange lights provided good light but the same pole with a LED now lights up the area as if it were full moon or close to it. You cannot look directly at these lights where you could at the older lights. I have an orange lamp in the corner of my lot but the nearest LED is about three hundred feet away and it still puts out more.
One oddity which I cannot completely attribute to the lights. Birds in our holly bushes were singing at very odd hours for the first weeks or two but have apparently moved to bushes and trees in the back yard.
Ok probably not, but if humans can be out of whack from this, I wonder what other creatures will start to lose sleep - or will nocturnal animals sleep in all night?
Will the new lights attract more bugs? Will animals that feed on bugs be attracted to them?
(Interesting aside, I first noticed this while leaving LACMA (LA County Museum of Art) where the pure Instagram gold of Chris Burden's collection of old LA street lamps tightly packed, produces the same effect)
Regarding a city that's already done this - Detroit went full LED this year:
http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2017/01/led_ligh...
The difference on the ground is quite noticeable, partly because we're so used to sodium yellow and as LEDs are in the 6000K range - i.e. daylight ... it's 'uncanny', things certainly seem more HD - here's a picture I recently took at night:
https://iainmait.land/img/photos/1280/street_crossing_2_2017...
The OP article is about how Chicago is using 3000k lights so they're warmer - the cooler option was 4000k.
What I wonder is: ok, so LED ligts save a lot of energy, which is great. But do they all have to be #FFFFFF white? Given that there's LEDs in all colours, would it be much more expensive to build/ buy/ run e.g. orange LEDs?
Streetlights use arrays of LEDs anyway (to achieve appropriate brightness) so shouldn't have any problem using a mix of different colors.
Single color is the way to go. And the broad spectrum produced by phosphor makes for better vision compared to the narrow spectrum of sodium or straight-LED lighting. IMO the best option would be phosphor + yellow or green LED.
At night, what happens is that directly visible blue lamps in your peripheral vision cause a severe adaptation response from your eyes (a kind of “oh hey, it’s daytime” misjudgement), which causes everything that isn’t directly lit to recede into dark shadow as the rods are swamped. You end up using mostly cone vision, where the blue part of the spectrum doesn’t really contribute to brightness response anyway, defeating the original purpose.
Longer wavelengths don’t cause the same kind of adaptation, allowing the rod cells in the eye to remain useful down to much lower levels of overall environmental lighting.
Industry has made up bogus metrics/arguments about “mesopic efficiency” of high-CCT street lamps and car headlamps which are IMO based more on marketing needs than dispassionate scientific investigation.
I’m hoping that someday non-industry-funded color scientists will do some proper research on the glare and adaptation effects of different outdoor lighting sources.
My street’s new LED lamps could have their intensity chopped by 2/3 without adversely affecting anyone’s vision.
"Soft on light pollution" doesn't kill political careers.
Even if the science is lousy it might actually work out that way if there are streets with and streets without dimmed lights.
So the only way to control for this is to have the whole city dim the lights on some nights and not on others to compare when there was the most criminal activity.
The result was that crime increased where brighter lighting was used. One plausible explanation is that committing crimes, like most human activities is easier when there's sufficient light to see what you're doing, and using a flashlight is a poor option when you want to avoid calling attention to your illegal behavior.
http://www.popcenter.org/library/scp/pdf/130-Morrow_Hutton.p...
A criminal must be caught for his crime to be recorded, after all.
The index crimes increased as well. Those include homicide, assault, burglary and theft, all of which have victims.
You may have solved an issue with a new tunnel here in the Netherlands. The contractors and operators are puzzled why the accident rate of the new tunnel is so much higher than the old one, what with all the efficient and 'bright as day' white light. But if you're right and that adaptation happens then likely going into the tunnel your nightvision gets 'switched off' long before you still need at (at the tunnel entrance) because you're staring into the well lit tunnel, and at the end of the tunnel your eyes are likely still overloaded and are re-adapting to darkness.
The monchromatic lights they were using before probably did not cause any such adaptation and therefore did not mess up the nightvision of the drivers to the same extent.
They have tried to remedy the problem by dimming the lights overall and gradually upping the intensity as you get further into the tunnel but it is still a problem.
(sorry, only have a Dutch source for this: https://www.bnr.nl/nieuws/mobiliteit/10100389/rijkswaterstaa...)
So do I understand you right that would mean that during the night they should use monochromatic lights and during the day white?
Edit: I've sent an email to 'rijkswaterstaat', the federal infrastructure department of the government here with a link to this thread. Let's see if they reply.
I see the article says the intend to dim the lights, which is probably the most important factor.
I thought I'd get used to it by now, but I haven't. Maybe similar.
Your snark is awfully unwarranted and entirely unwelcome.
Luminous efficiency is not the only thing we should care about here. What we want is for the road and objects on it to be clearly visible to someone with dark-adapted vision, and for individual sources of light to be visible but not cause glare or distraction. Obviously a brighter light does a better job of making itself visible and illuminating things directly in its path; the problem is that brighter lights which are intense in the blue part of the spectrum cause more glare and more adaptation than dimmer yellower lights, which makes everything that isn’t being directly lit by them effectively less visible. If objects directly under the sweep of car headlamps are lit to the same extent as during a sunny day, then the shadowy bushes off to the side of the road and the kid running out from behind them are going to be very dark by comparison.
I’m not an expert in this specific topic (I’ve studied much more about color vision under well lit conditions), but several of the papers I skimmed when I started looking into it because I was frustrated about my street’s new LED lamps seemed to be funded by industry, and I’m not convinced that their experiments mirror real-world conditions of nighttime streets, or properly measure the effects of adaptation and glare.
The lighting industry wants to use a measure of luminous power based on “mesopic conditions” (i.e. mix of photopic + scotopic) because if they use the photopic function then blue light doesn’t really contribute much and their lamps don’t look as efficient or bright. My personal experience is that bright sources of blue light in my peripheral vision cause enough adaptation that I’m not convinced that a “mesopic” function as they’re using it is actually appropriate.
I should probably email some real color scientists to ask for clarification someday. If you know of a nice survey paper written by someone with industry-independent bona fides, I’d love to skim it.
But a 3 LED RGB light can produce softer light, with more lumens per watt.
The longer the wavelength, the easier it is for manmade artifacts to produce it. All the way from AM radio to X rays.
The shorter the wavelength, the harder the tradeoff between the expense of manufacturing the device and the cost of energy to use it.
That's why if you were tinkering with electronics in the 90's, you watched how LED makers started with red, then made green ones, and what a big deal it was when the first blues came out. They were faint, and expensive. It took some time for them to become practical.
It still doesn't answer my question about efficiency.
In that respect, they commit the planner's fallacy of acting on costs they can't observe.
(If your model says that the externalities are infinitely bad and inherently unaffordable you're probably very wrong.)
I.e. the very reasons it should be introduced.
The three main problems with carbon taxes are:
* they're compulsory (and therefore theft)
* they're guaranteed to be the wrong amount, as attempts to calculate externalities are subject to the socialist calculation problem
* they are usually motivated by a desire to control people's behaviour (see the point about driving above)
i.e. controlling other people's behavior.
Also, a tax is a law, so enforcing a tax is enforcing the rule of law. It's just a law that some people don't like.
Well, yes. Everything from murder to moral, legal police action can be so described.
> It's just a law that some people don't like.
... because it's legalised theft.
Libertarians (well, minarchist-Libertarians) support Government, and the rule of law. That doesn't mean we support _all_ Governments, or _all_ laws, as moral.
Yes, and public schools are legalized brainwashing, and hospitals are legalized slaughterhouses (after all, that's where most people die).
You can draw many comparisons like these if you ignore the details, but sometimes those details are exactly what's important.
A carbon tax had nothing to do with that.
I definitely wouldn't want the city to replace them with LEDs.
Actually HPS lights are very efficient, pretty much the same as LEDs on a Lumens per Watt.
From what I've read, orange LEDs are generally more expensive in and of themselves. And to order them for streetlights when everybody else is using white would probably be 4 or 5x more expensive.
Not to mention how bad it is for humans. I installed a bunch of 1850K lights in my house as well as f.lux on my computer and night watch on my phone. After 11pm, I try to avoid any light above 1850K at all costs.
And it has worked. I sleep a lot better since I went "all 1850". But when I have to drive late at night, it screws that all up.
For the better part of the 20th century we used mercury-vapor street lights, which bathed the streets in soft blue light. The complete lack of red wavelengths in these lights would make a red car look black, and made humans look like vampires.
The animals and the humans will be just fine.
Which is also good, so you stay awake when driving.
The excuse I’ve heard that “these are the same color as moonlight” is total nonsense. We don’t have 10 moons hanging 20 feet off the ground on every city block. Nighttime is not supposed to look like daytime. People are not supposed to be reading novels in the street at night, or critically examining the colors of paintings.
Moreover, much of the efficiency story is exaggerated. Recent types of high-pressure sodium lamps are very efficient. The big advantage LEDs have is that they (theoretically) don’t need to be replaced as often. We’ll see how it goes in practice over the coming decades.
The real story of course is that lighting companies have made a big marketing push, and from what I understand there is state/federal grant money available for new LED lighting projects (which are sold as “environmentally friendly”, etc.).
If cities want to use LED street lamps, they should be <3000K correlated color temperature, with as little blue light as possible. They should include diffusers, should be shielded to not shine in the eyes of pedestrians or drivers who aren’t intentionally looking upwards, should be spaced closely enough together that there isn’t a huge contrast between patches of dark and light going down the street, and should be set to a reasonable brightness. Human rod vision is incredibly adaptable to seeing in very dark situations.
“Color rendering index” is an absurd standard for nighttime lighting. (Not to mention a hacky ad-hoc metric from a few decades ago which is pretty terrible for any purpose, but that’s another story.)
Someone should make a “night vision clobbering index” by which to judge the SPDs of outdoor lighting.
Agreed that as "little blue as possible" is preferable, however, 1900K at high lumens should be the target, IMHO. Man is adapted to see at night via firelight and 1900K hits the mark.
Actually performed this experiment at home...
After having used clear bulbs for far too long, bought several of the following for our living room:
http://www.verbatimlighting.com/prod/led-lighting/candle-led...
The "feel" of the room is entirely different, particularly when unwinding after work. "Cozy seat at the fireplace" best describes it. Our baby falls asleep gazing at the bare bulbs.
Conversely, for the locals loitering to rap in our alley, bought a "clear" 150w mercury vapor fixture and bulb from e-Bay. Installed the light and even the cockroaches no longer venture into that eerie glow. If the mercury vapor alone doesn't solve the loitering issue, one can purposely damage the fixture's transformer so it produces an intolerable buzz.
Perhaps the correct lighting depends on the situation.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00CRHG63Y/ref=pd_aw_lpo_60_b...
Also they flicker too much -- a lot more than any other lighting source. It's utterly hateful and distracting, especially when you're driving or looking at a moving object.
They also fuck up dark adaptation, which makes people materially unsafe. I want the best possible night vision when I'm out alone at night -- to better be able to detect, avoid, or defend myself against any sort of miscreant that might be hiding to ambush me.
This is especially problematic because many of installations of outside lighting are done in order to provide better security, but if they're lights that dazzle and destroy dark adaptation -- this ends up being counterproductive.
The LED lighting in the streets in my town (Bournemouth, UK) doesn't exhibit this, but certainly is very 'blue' at first, and my mother (who lives there) didn't realise the effect of the blue light in terms of sleep; she used to leave her curtains open at night and wasn't sleeping well. Closing them has helped greatly in that respect.
Good fluorescent bulbs will have electronic ballasts (the driving circuit) that supply current to the bulb with a higher frequency (in the low kilohertz) than the time response of the bulb's phosphor. Thus, any sort of flicker gets low-pass filtered and doesn't appear in the output light.
Even with a subpar magnetic ballast that drives the bulb with line frequency, the phosphor never gets close to fully extinguishing -- so there is flicker, but the instantaneous light output never gets less than, say, half the maximum instantaneous light output. Look on page 3 of http://www.usailighting.com/stuff/contentmgr/files/1/e18f88d... for some instantaneous light vs time graphs for fluorescent bulbs.
LEDs have a much higher frequency response (in the tens of megahertz, easily) -- they respond quicker and more faithfully replicate their electrical drive signal as light output. You can see on page 4 of that report how violently jagged the LED's light/time plots can get.
If the manufacturer didn't want to include filter capacitors in the LED's driver because of cost/reliability concerns, well, I hope your eyes enjoy that signal because the LED, unlike the fluorescent bulb, isn't going to smooth it out.
Thanks for the idea. I can't stand blue headlights, so I'm going to add orange safety goggles to my shopping list.
So, this may be a "change." But it's a change away from a few decades of orange.
One thing I wonder, is whether they will continue to deliberately "light everything", or whether they will implement some tuning to restrict lightflow to more relevant areas.
It isn't just street lighting. In places like Chicago, they've chosen in many areas to make that light as much as possible a seamless and universal presence. It doesn't just illuminate the streets and walkways. (Because crime, is the primary rhetoric around this.)
P.S. One difference between the sodium vapor (and before them, the mercury vapor) lights and the new LED lighting, is that the former hang down within a diffuser. This makes it easy to have illumination up to the second story windows. The LED lights I've seen have the LED's within or at the edge of the overhead hood. I wonder whether such broad illumination is as readily achieved with them. Also, the LED's are very bright pinpoints of light. Especially if they are going to go for "illuminate everything," this could make looking down the street kind of uncomfortable. I, for one, do my best not to look at those bright spots -- they are painfully bright, and I even worry about vision damage.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000QDRVNA/
Well, there's some Scotch brand, here:
https://www.amazon.com/3M-Scotch-616-Lithographers-Tape/dp/B...
I agree with the article they have a "gloomy" effect. They are also pretty much the exact same color as the yellow in traffic signals, which can make driving at night a tad more annoying.
LED lighting is much easier to make directional. With LED lighting, the difficulty is making it more isotropic.
LEDs + phosphor, not so much, due to their wider spectrum. That less is emitted directly skyward doesn't help if what's reflected off pavement can't be filtered out. (Pavement is surprisingly reflective even though it's "black".)
I've never observed street light color making driving at night annoying; for the 3-5 second interval the yellow is on.
Just curious, have you ever been tested for color blindness?
Edit: Just googled myself, it's called Selective Yellow[1] and the reasons are interesting and depending on the source different [1][2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_yellow
[2] http://www.french-cars-in-america.com/why-did-france-have-ye... https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g187147-i14-k711979-Ye...
The problems are twofold -- the lights don't last as long as advertised, particularly in enclosed fixtures. Warranty claims are difficult, and they cost 7-12x the legacy bulb. In reality, they are spending more than they did with legacy bulbs because they need to dispatch people when they (frequently) break vs. do scheduled maintenance.
The other issue is that new bulb tech is harder to buy thanks to the carnival marketplace. Legacy bulbs involved a janitor looking up a part number written on the fixture. Exceptions were limited -- exhibit space needed a fancier bulb. The new stuff has different color temps, intensities, etc that nobody understands and many people disagree about.
I'm skeptical about cost savings in these programs. If there are cost savings, my guess is that the savings is stemming from the "managed service" model that the vendors push (i.e. Contractors making $20/hr, vs a $45/hr city worker) and less from the electric bill.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/articles/27751961/
Was discussed on HN previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13330611
It literally changes the colors we see in our environment. Always took colors/lighting for granted until the war on incandescents.
Funny you should mention that. I just wrote this: http://kk.org/cooltools/finally-led-light-bulb/ a few days ago. This bulb has a yellow-pinkish hue and I think it's great.
I liked them. Pleasant for night driving, easy on the eyes, and not blending in with everything else.
I image I would like them even more today. Eyesight fine, but dammit, with age you start loosing contrast after sunset. Driving the city at night, especially in rainy weather, gets really tiring after a while. And the headlights on newer cars seem to be in fierce competition of unpleasant blue harshness.
Now to get the same effect, you've got to provide your own lighting.
Yellow is summer, warm Sun, early autumn, fire, warmth, life.
It's just a human/animal thing to like all that, feels right and safe, feels home.
Now, winters, are cold and blue. What culture are you from that you consider "westerners" liking too much orange?
Probably Asia. I believe the aversion to warm colors stems from skin tone, as sallow predominates in that region of the world. In the "seasonal coloring" used by many women (such as my wife) such a coloring would be termed "Winter", and is best complemented by a blue-cast. In Northern Europe and its diaspora populations the warm-cast-favoring "Spring" and "Autumn" predominates.
It doesn't interrupt our circadian rhythms at night the way blue light does. We westerners also have an obsession with street lights. Unless you live someplace where your nearest neighbor is 10 miles away, you have street lights shining through your windows all night long.
It's distinctive to LEDs, must be something in the power supply. But why do so many LED lamps do it?
Chicago Gun Violence in Infographic http://heyjackass.com/
Chicago - major city (you've heard of), Yeovil - small town (you haven't).
It gets even stronger on cloudy nights in the winter, when all that orange is just bouncing back and forth between the (reflective) snow and clouds.