A call to improve London's lighting at night | Hacker News Reader

A call to improve London's lighting at night

ianvisits.co.uk

85 pointsedward147 comments

I actually quite like the gold/yellow light on "traditional" British street lights. Not only is it arguably more "natural" than whiter hued light, but I think it actually illuminates better. I live in a city in another country that uses white street lights, and I find the illumination to be a lot worse than that of sodium lighting

Yeah I agree. NYC went full on LED a few years back and I hate it. I have a lamppost right outside my apartment window and previously the light didn’t really bother me, now it’s this horrible cold LED that’s super bright flooding into my living room.

I get that they’re cheaper to operate, but they throw shadows differently and have more blue wavelengths in them (in nyc they’re 4000 kelvin last I looked). It personally feels much less magical to me and 3-4 years in I still haven’t really gotten used to it.

Similar feelings in Chicago.

It also makes me feel less safe at night. I get that the orange glow makes everything look muddy, color-wise, but it doesn't kill your night vision to the same extent as the bright white LEDs do. Sure, things directly under the streetlight are lit up like it's daytime, but I can't see for @$#% in between the streetlights or behind the bushes or whatever.

I'm curious why it seems that no city has tried installing amber LEDs in an effort to try and realize the efficiency gains without quite so many of the downsides.

>I'm curious why it seems that no city has tried installing amber LEDs in an effort to try and realize the efficiency gains without quite so many of the downsides.

Flagstaff, Arizona did. There are some drawbacks, mostly that they simply don't get as bright.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/how-flagstaff-arizon...

Aha. And that article also explains why. In terms of lumens per watt, it appears that the amber LEDs are actually about 40% less efficient than the low pressure sodium lights they would be replacing.

True. That said, LED lighting has a directionality advantage as well. So it turns out you need less of them to get the same basic coverage as the sodium lamps. Here’s an account of how Tucson, with its many observatories, managed to keep within budget using standard, high-efficiency blue LED fixtures:

“If you absolutely must use white LEDs, you could do what Tucson has done,” Hall said. “They... switched out their whole high-pressure sodium system to 3,000 degree white but reduced their lumen budget for street lighting from 480 million to, like, 170 million [lumens] or something. And you need to do that. For every white LED lumen, you're increasing your skyglow by a factor of about three, but they cut the lumen budget by about a factor of three. So overall, they managed to wash out the skyglow because they’ve got a lot of observatories down there.”

> high-efficiency blue LED fixtures

The extra blue is probably screwing up the circadian rhythms of humans and animals:

* https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-ha...

* https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/06/21/482936520...

Lumens per watt is the curse of bureaucratic/industrial mandated lighting. Problem is people hate lighting with low CRI, people also hate dim blue light. But you can't put a number on hate like you can lumens per watt.

Efficiency regulations for residential fluorescent lighting delayed adoption by probably 25 years. Because regulations mandated lamps with terrible CRI.

My opinion is that the whiter LEDs are a welcome change from their orange predecessors. I'm normally very nostalgic, but I make an exception for orange street lights.

The new NYC lampposts also spread wide light cones, which is good for road safety but means they intrude through house windows. Astronomers have also complained about the lights worsening the "seeing", which is already bad.

Exactly, I wish they at least had some sort of shade on the back towards the sidewalk that stopped it throwing that much light back on the houses. Do we really need that much light on a one way, residential street?

"Seeing" is actually about how steady the atmosphere is. The old sodium lights emit in a narrow part of the spectrum which can be mitigated against by using light pollution filters. These allow all light through, except sodium frequencies. Sadly, filters are ineffective against modern LED lighting which emits across a lot of the spectrum.

It's actually garbage for road safety because bluer lamps spaced so far apart creates less even lighting, blows out everyone's night vision, causes distracting glare in peripheral vision, and makes it impossible to see into the shadows.

The ideal for road safety would be more uniform lighting from a larger number of closer-spaced lamps, placed at lower height, diffused, shielded from the sides, and colored orange (and optionally uniformly dimmer).

It would also help road safety to ban the new bluer types of car headlamps, which cause much worse glare than previous yellower ones.

> which cause much worse glare than previous yellower ones

The color has almost nothing to do with that. Newer headlights are much brighter, and mostly use projectors now. The increase in glare is mostly due to the projectors, because they emit all their light from small point. You'll notice that newer cars with halogen projectors are almost as bad as one with HIDs.

It would be interesting to see how a headlight would look if it were able to emit the same amount of light on the road but from a rectangle spanning the entire front of the car. Minimum glare, still effective.

> color has almost nothing to do with that

The color makes much of the difference. (What really matters is the total intensity in the shorter-wavelength part of the spectrum, so sure, making the lamps much brighter and less diffused is also bad.)

Shorter wavelengths cause significantly more glare, because the peripheral part of the human retina is packed with rods and S cones. Intense light including shorter wavelengths also causes the eyes to become bright-adapted, making it harder to see in the dark.

The super-bright halogen headlamps emit much more blue light than previous incandescent headlamps, and are included alongside LED headlamps in my complaint here.

Bigger, much dimmer, more diffuse lamps would help, but they should also be less blue. (And people should stop mounting headlamps on their SUVs and pickup trucks at other drivers' eye level and aiming them straight ahead.)

I’ve seen exterior fixtures that have shielding options to prevent light from being cast at houses, but it’s an added cost. We sometimes install them on commercial buildings that abut residential areas to prevent light pollution into neighboring homes.

This also seems like a choice. There is no reason LED's cannot create warmer light, and there is probably a solution to scatter the rays and not give that "clinical" kind of light which LEDs are known for.

I have an LED desk lamp with a temperature setting, and when it's on the warmer settings it really does produce a pleasant light.

LED lights do in fact have the ability to do different color temps, some fixtures have tunable color temp as well. In my home, I use lamps that output 2200-2700K depending on the dimmer setting. Lower color temps output less lumens per watt, and the goal of exterior lighting is generally to improve visibility, hence the 4K color temp.

Here’s a cutsheet for a Lithonia wall pack fixture showing the different options, there’s also a chart showing what the lumens per watt is based on the color temp: https://img.acuitybrands.com/public-assets/catalog/1008038/w...

The color a LED emits is given by the choice of materials (specifically, the band-gap, with E=hν, ν being light frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_gap#Light_emitting_diodes... )

"Tunable" LEDs are just multiple LEDs, the goal being to change the emission peak. Peak wavelength can be mapped onto a black body temperature trough Wien's law (λpeak =2.8e-3/T) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien%27s_displacement_law

I don't really know how the mapping is done, though, as there are different ways to map it since the LEDs won't have the same emission curve as a black body.

Isn't 4000k far more "natural"? A full moon is 4000k.

Not at that brightness. Moonlight is extremely dim.

Moonlight for some hours of the month, never exceeding a rather low intensity, a minuscule intensity compared to a single led streetlight.

The night time lighting humans(and our non-human co-inhabitants of earth) have evolved with and known for a very longtime comes from fires of various types, flames with a much warmer color temperature.

Humans have had fire at night on a regular basis for a pretty short time, evolutionarily speaking. And that goes double for what animals might have seen; actual fire is so resource intensive that until a few hundred years ago the vast majority of the night was lit only by the moon and stars.

Also, intensity is orthogonal to color temperature.

Use of fire predates anatomically modern humans by some hundreds of thousands of years.

Consider the spread of lactose tolerance, a recent (no more than 10,000 years and perhaps less) mutation which has spread to 35% of humanity in that time. We have had plenty of time to co-evolve with fire, and doubtless, we have done so.

Well, we certainly didnt co-evolve to be fireproof in all this time, so what adaptation to fire do you suggest we did evolve?

Its probably to do with cooked food, not vision - which is already co-evolved with the Sun, for when we are active/hunting/etc.

For one thing, we find a controlled fire soothing and attractive.

Wild animals very much do not. It's likely that our mucus membranes have also adjusted to the presence of more smoke: this doesn't prevent cancer, which is a post-reproductive problem for the most part, but it does keep smoke inhalation from being immediately debilitating.

Does it mean that fire doesn't fool our circadian rhythm into thinking it's still daytime? Sure, why wouldn't it? We've had a very long time to adjust, and getting appropriate amounts of sleep increases fitness in an obvious way.

We haven't had more than a hundred years of adjusting to bright blue-wavelength light after dark, however. So it could affect our circadian rhythm, and as studies show, it does.

You might be able to get the city to add some metal to shade the light coming into your room. I don't know about the US, but here in Germany it took me one call to the city office and two weeks of waiting.

Agreed. THere's a street lamp outside my bedroom window. It used to be a dull yellow, which was still plenty to illuminate the surrounding sidewalk and parking spaces. And didn't impact my sleep. A year or so ago, the bulb was replaced with a bright white bulb. It might produce more light, but it's a distracting color and brightness when outside and it's bright enough that we have to install black-out blinds to sleep.

It’s worth mentioning that if a street light shines in your window you may be able to contact your town and have them shade that side.

My city has a contact on the web, you identify the light and what you would like shaded, and they come around and block the light on that sector. In my case it looks like they painted a section of the diffuser black.

I have one too, and now they’ve stuck a white ANPR camera directly under the bulb reflecting the light back anywhere but down. The local councils in the UK are clueless when it comes to lighting.

I agree. Somehow I feel more "secure" (I don't know why) with gold/yellow lights.

White light reminds me of: dentist clinics, hospitals, metro stations... not very friendly places.

And yet, the opposite is likely true; yellow lights feel warmer, but white lights make people feel exposed. You generally feel safe from other people in well lit places.

There's research about e.g. subway incidents and safety when they got better / brighter / whiter lights.

When I was growing up my father was pretty frugal, so he was very early on the train of replacing all of our home's lightbulbs with fluorescents. However, I don't think he really understood what color temperatures meant, so he always seemed to buy the bulbs with the higher temperatures. Higher is better, right? So he always went with the super sterile cold 5000K bulbs, and just as you say, home felt like some sort of weird sterile warehouse.

When LA went over to LED it caused massive problems because the tonal colours of LA at night changed radically.

https://la.curbed.com/2014/2/3/10156584/las-new-led-streetli...

I guess Los Angeles must be practically a utopia if "making movies look somewhat different" counts as a massive problem for that city.

Massive problem, eh?

Yellow lenses are used in sports to increase contrast in lower light situations. I wonder if yellow lamps have the same effect and provide more perceived visibility with less light.

I did the opposite and got yellow-lenses glasses: https://www.jins.com/us/jins-screen#night-use

No affiliation, and no idea if there's truth to any of the marketing copy, but I'm personally very happy with them especially when driving at night due to the awful intensity of LED brake/tail lights on other cars.

Orange safety glasses will work better than this, if you don't mind looking silly.

These are prescription though :)

My local council, prior to recent events in London, decided to turn off all lights after 1am (or thereabouts) "to save money". There was a backlash, and also at the same time when LEDs became more affordable, so the lights are back on, but they're not the same as the good old fashioned orange/sodium lights. The light is more focused on the ground, and it makes driving a little bit more 'interesting' in the evenings. Compare that to the orange lights, where it was more diffuse and even.

Improving the lighting is also at odds with wanting a dark sky for the local wildlife too. It has a noted effect on birds for instance.

Apropos of nothing... I also remember a story about a northern country replacing traffic lights with LEDs and then spending even more money adding heaters because the old lights were naturally warm, and melted any ice that stuck to the lights. Can't find a link to it at the moment.

In my towns in France, it's actually the opposite: more cities are turning of the lights between 23 and 5 and I personally love it. It gives a sense of "city-sleeping" peacefulness

>Apropos of nothing... I also remember a story about a northern country replacing traffic lights with LEDs and then spending even more money adding heaters because the old lights were naturally warm, and melted any ice that stuck to the lights. Can't find a link to it at the moment.

The Technology Connections channel on YouTube has an excellent video on this, called 'The LED Traffic Light and the Danger of "But Sometimes!"': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8

My council are also started turning off their lights during the night. I understand it but I hate it. I feel sorry for the dude across the street that now comes home from work in the dark. Personally I feel a lot less secure now staring out in the darkness with a lot of houses and people nearby but we can't see them. I think in more suburban and rural setting this might make sense, but this is still in the town with many people so it makes little sense to me.

I think partially the problem is people(us) have designed their lighting and safety around the street lights being on, and now they are not it is an issue. I have lived in other countries where the norm is for houses to have subtle outside lights that are permanently on at night. But around here they do not and people are more paranoid so all the terraced houses instead have over-active motion sensors with massive flood lights. That are now very noticeable when a poor late night clubber/shift worker/early morning dog walker/baker etc walks by...

>Not only is it arguably more "natural" than whiter hued light, but I think it actually illuminates better.

I think it is neither "natural" or better illuminating. Sodium lamps have CRI of around, what, 30?

I'm glad that these sodium lamps are finally getting replaced everywhere, and cities at night won't have that monochromatic depressing-ugly-yellow lighting.

CRI is not used to measure whether a light helps people with practical vision tasks at night. It’s quite possible that a light with CRI zero, totally monochromatic, could be the best choice by some objective measures.

If CRI is low, all colours on an object are fucked. Ao people in general are going to be worse at idebtifying what they are looking at or reacting. You won't be able to look at a picture, read text on your credit card, etc.

Sure what you outline is possible in some spesific scenario, but it's not gonna work for 99%

I'm happy sodium lamps are getting replaced, I'm not happy with the replacements which might be worse.

With LEDs it should be very possible to light streets with low temperature close-to-blackbody light. (I don't know if the proximity to a blackbody radiation distribution is the same as CRI etc.) Who wouldn't want this?

LED light can be about as far as it’s possible to get from a blackbody spectrum, if similarly to that is what you care about (I don’t, art galleries do).

There are two ways of doing “white” with LEDs:

• Separate red, green, and blue, whose spectrum is spiky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#/media/Fi...

• Phosphor, which may give you a spectrum like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#/media/Fi...

I find white light depressing.

My home city has metro coaches with either yellow or white lights. Me and a few friends of mine would skip the white ones because we found the yellow ones more comforting. On the other hand, my dad prefers white and in a room with types of lighting he will always go for the white ones.

I prefer natural white lights. I don't light rooms with them, but the light that terrarium/vivarium bulbs made to mimic sunlight give off is sublime IMO.

I like daylight bulbs as well, living in Germany they are a lifesaver because it is cloudy all day and dark at 3-4PM in the winter. However in the evening, around 8PM, I change over to the yellow hued ones. Best of both worlds.

I live in a country which uses both (it's moving towards white lights but it's not uniform), and I like yellow lights MUCH better. The very bright white lights just hurt my eyes.

Same, but recently more and more streetlights are refurbished with 2700K LEDs instead of 4000K and I like these much better.

not just the light temperature (2700K would be better), but the idea that a street light must be a bulb boxes in the design. led lights can be made in any sort of configuration, since it's an amalgamation of bunch of small point sources, not just one big point source.

it would be neat to have light strips alongside the sidewalk and the road, as well as above. that way, the light can be lower intensity in aggregate while still providing the necessary illumination (via surrounding light vs. flooding) to make out details. our eyes are highly adaptive, and we don't need a lot of light, but rather, light from many angles.

also, the safety argument is often overstated in relation to the intensity of light. you only need a little light to reduce crime and accidents to its threshold. more isn't better in this regard.

Compact light sources aren't recent invention, and various lighting methods were tried. I think pylons with bulb boxes still come out best in illumination quality vs. price/maintenance.

Living in London (specifically Haringey, which is mentioned in the article), I was amazed - positively - when my residential street switched to directed, white, LED light.

It lit the street and not everything else.

I could see a few stars in the night sky, for the first time since moving to London.

I no longer had to deal so carefully with light leaking into my bedroom.

Oh god I hate the yellow lights. When I moved to the UK in the 90s it took a while to realise what was "wrong" at night, then I realised it was the street lights. Every colour and definition disappeared, hard to spot the right car etc, and late evening strolls was less enjoyable as everything was blasé. I am glad there are a lot fewer of them around now.

Also the sodium lights are also much easier to filter out if you do astronomy. So much lighting is bad nowadays - lighting the sky rather than the ground.

my little subdivision transitioned across a few years from the orange type lamps to LED, I have commented on it a few times here.

The primary effect is that its like having a near full moon effect at all times of the night. Not looking directly at the light reveals a landscape that is not harsh on the eyes but never catch a lamp straight on.

Fortunately around me the birds caught on pretty quick at first singing at odd hours until they sorted it out.

Overall its a benefit as it has opened up hours people can walk the sidewalks and even in the street without worrying about wildlife blundering into them

I'm quite fond of the orangey hue myself. Harsh white light is awful. The contrast between the dark of night and white light is too great and it messes up my vision (migraineur with stupid light sensitivity issues).

I've recently encountered a couple of construction sites which are illumunated by a particularly pleasant green hue at night. That might be even better.

And while we're on the subject of street lights, can we please stop with all the light pollution?

Street lights should be a balance between visibility, light pollution, and night vision protection. As a tax payer I'd also like them to think about efficiency, longevity.

A daylight colored bulbs are probably not doing our night vision any favors (but then head lights have the same problem, yes?). Going from a lit street onto a side street with few lights is potentially a problem depending on the kind of street lights.

> A daylight colored bulbs are probably not doing our night vision any favors

More importantly, colour temperature >3200K screw up the circadian rhythms of humans and animals:

* https://www.darksky.org/our-work/lighting/lighting-for-indus...

* https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/conservation/led-street...

It's a race to the bottom.

Light with more white in it feels brighter.

Drivers prefer whiter headlights because it feels like the road is more illuminated.

Car manufacturers move to HID or LED projectors for whiter light.

Whiter light causes the pupil to contract significantly more.

Drivers with contracted pupils from the white headlights find the yellow sodium bulbs in streetlights and parking lots too dim.

Governments and businesses replace the sodium bulbs with bright white LEDs.

At every step along the way we're seeing less of the night. Shadows become darker. A person or animal coming in from the shadowed roadside is increasingly invisible. A mugger can jump you from an alley with no chance of being seen because the shadows are so deep.

Now we have to increase the portion of the Earth that's illuminated at night for "safety". This disrupts animals more and deepens the shadows further.

It's incredibly stupid and there's no way to stop it without some overarching power a) doing a scientific study into night lighting and b) using that as a reason to impose intense lighting regulations and enforcement.

Too late now.

This reminded me of Theydon Bois, a village just off Greater London on the Central Line. From Wikipedia:

> A notable characteristic of the village is its almost complete absence of street lighting. Villagers have consistently voted against the installation of such lighting for decades, fearing that it would damage the traditional village ambience and require a rise in council tax. Only the approach to the tube station features a small number of lampposts.

Theydon is a funny old place. Good spot to enter the forest though.

It's the same in the village where we live. Everyone carries a torch (or in my case one of those pen-sized maglites). It may not be suitable for central London, but the system seems to work fine round here.

Sounds like heaven to me. I really dislike the absence of dark. Especially during the summer when it is hot and I would like to increase airflow by opening up the windows.

The claim, in favor of such widespread lighting, is that it makes something "safer", but the evidence seems weak on that:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/02/what-...

I came across this¹ paper which seems to claim that the provision of 600,000 lumen "lighting towers" in a public housing project reduces crime. It may be true, but the same could probably said for plans of unleashing packs of wild hyaenas during the night.

All a bit too Panopticon for me.

1. https://urbanlabs.uchicago.edu/attachments/e95d751f7d91d0bcf...

No mentions of the carbon footprint reduction these LED allow:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/research/impact-bartlett/impa... In the UK in 2005, there were 8.12 million lighting points on the country’s streets using approximately 3.14 TWh of electricity, meaning CO2 emissions of 1.32 megatons. 6.31 million of these lighting points were streetlights.

Bartlett research found that lower levels of brightness are required for white streetlights than for yellow sodium vapour lights. Switching led to energy savings of 30–40%.

They're not pleasant to live around. They switched ours over a few years ago. Couple of things that bug me, they break your body out of it's natural rhythms, I find they really wake me up when I'm out late. They also mean everyone living near one has to go out and buy blackout curtains.

Agreed - the white streetlights are worse overall. They're substantially dimmer, making safe driving more difficult and dark streets more scary. They are actually far less efficient than the classic orange sodium vapor lights when measured in terms of lumens/watt.

I would guess they're white just because white LED's are now the cheapest colour, and whichever company was paid to do a study was given criteria to ensure they came out looking best. The study probably also took manufacturers claims of "100,000 hours lifespan" at face value, despite the fact half of them in my street have failed in under 2 years, which should have been detected in a small scale trial first...

At least they don't PWM flash...

I've had them in our place in the UK for a few years. A bit weird for the first few months, but soon got used to them.

The benefits far outweigh the problems and it's one the of the more minor changes we are going to have to make to the way we live if we re going to have any hope of curtailing climate change.

>The benefits far outweigh the problems and it's one the of the more minor changes we are going to have to make to the way we live if we re going to have any hope of curtailing climate change.

Surely this position is not absolute? Indeed, the most effective way to eliminate human-induced climate change is to, well, eliminate those causing it.

In your view, can any attempt to curtail climate change be justified? I'm genuinely curious and mean no disrespect, should you feel such.

> In your view, can any attempt to curtail climate change be justified? I'm genuinely curious and mean no disrespect, should you feel such.

That'a actually a really interesting question. Clearly there are quite a few "finally solutions" I would put entirely off-limits - mass slaughter, compulsory sterilisation or contraceptives. Outlawing meat? Nope.

But I think there's quite a few possibilities between 'lets kill people' at the one end of the spectrum and 'lets change the light bulbs in public street lighting, even if it's a bit harsh' at the other.

The irony of this comment is that they're very bad for local wildlife, so ecologically damaging in another way.

Now we get birds doing their morning call at 2/3/4am.

I'm sure there's something out there, but something I haven't seen is a breakdown of the environmental impact for _producing_ the LED lighting versus the alternatives. I'd be interested to see that.

You can have yellow LEDs as a middle ground.

A lot of people here are talking about how the warmer "yellow" lights feel nicer on the eyes or generally give more of a glow than a bright LED. I agree that the yellow lights are nicer to look at but a brighter LED does provide more illumination and can help people feel safer and actually be safer when traveling at night.

There are always trade offs. Is safety for those who must commute late at night a fair trade off for lights that are less pleasant on the eyes?

I'm sure there's a happy middle-ground. I get the impression many places are just tossing lowest-bid LEDs into existing lamps and calling it good enough.

Somebody needs to drag the local politicians/town council to Home Depot (or the UK equivalent) and show them the warm-white vs bright-white vs other consumer LED bulbs. And if they still choose the bright-white, fire them/vote them out.

More likely it works like this - someone "connected" finds cheapest possible LEDs one can get away with on alibaba, then the tender is setup so that unlikely anyone else will meet the criteria, money change hands and residents enjoy poor lighting... meanwhile council cries they have no money and another apartment is bought in Spain.

Meanwhile traffic crashes and pedestrian deaths are up because people driving (even during the day) can't resist speeding and looking at their phones.

Also meanwhile, cars are getting super bright headlights that actually make it harder to see at night in the city (signs and windows will reflect a lot more than people, you'll be blinded by oncoming cars...)

My point being, there is no safety tradeoff being evaluated - we're getting super bright, super white LEDs because of economics (white/cool LEDs are cheaper) and a general fascination/desire to get the brightest thing possible.

> Also meanwhile, cars are getting super bright headlights that actually make it harder to see at night in the city (signs and windows will reflect a lot more than people, you'll be blinded by oncoming cars...)

Any sources for that? I always read that the only times bright (LED) lights blind oncoming traffic is when they are improperly installed aftermarket.

This might be more of an issue in the U.S. where car illumination standards are different.

At night, nearly every vehicle I come across produced > ~2018 has blinding headlights that require me to squint drastically.

I don't drive much since I'm in New York, but I certainly feel blinded by oncoming traffic whenever I'm in a car outside of the city. SUVs with bright LEDs in oncoming traffic make it super hard to see personally. I don't ever recall that as a problem when I was younger, but maybe it's my aging eyes and more SUVs on the road (I still think it's the LEDs though).

Interesting. Walking around downtown Manhattan at night I'm frequently blinded by traffic.

Yeah true, main streets in the city will do that to you too, for sure. I live in Brooklyn, so there's far less traffic around at night over here.

I see lights at different heights for SUVs and pickup trucks than for cars, I don’t see how it matters how the light is installed when it’s eve level for people in cars.

I can see the light’s blinding reflections in other cars’ rear view mirrors at night when a higher vehicle is behind them.

My pet theory is it has to with the size/shape of modern cars. Having an older car, I'm sitting lower to the ground and am eye level with the headlights with what feels like every compact SUV or whatever is popular now.

I'm in the US so as as others pointed out it might be more of an issue here (due to higher vehicles - SUVs/trucks - taking over).

As a side note, the crazy lights are bad for pedestrians as well: they're so bright you sometimes have to look away from incoming traffic (esp. if there's a hill involved, tilting the vehicles) and they make it harder to estimate distances (all you see are the lights, which you can't look at, and not the vehicle they're attached to).

I don't learning where to look is emphasized enough during driving education. You should not be looking directly at the other car or towards their side of the road when driving in the dark. Just resting your eyes on the right side of the road will make a huge difference. I was thought that you should turn on your high beams when the approaching car is two car lenghts in front of you. A lot of people do around here. Never a problem with when you don't look into the headlights and you can see more during what would otherwise be a dangerous timing.

> There are always trade offs. Is safety for those who must commute late at night a fair trade off for lights that are less pleasant on the eyes?

Are you referring to people that commute by car or in general? I don't generally have a problem with very bright lights on a highway, but do we really need them on residential streets? I didn't feel unsafe taking subways and walking at 3-4 am in NYC pre-LEDs. In fact I much preferred it, the city felt dreamier (for whatever subjective measure of "dreamier" is, of course).

> I didn't feel unsafe taking subways and walking at 3-4 am in NYC pre-LEDs. In fact I much preferred it, the city felt dreamier (for whatever subjective measure of "dreamier" is, of course).

In general.

Because you didnt feel unsafe it does not mean that you were unsafe and that other didnt feel unsafe.

I agree that the yellow lights look nicer in general.

I guess to clarify, I didn't feel any more unsafe pre-LED than I did post-LED. And of course my experience isn't everyone's experience.

Probably the most unsafe I've felt in the city was a random fight between passenger's on the subway in mid-day when the guy I was standing next to flashed a gun. Probably should have moved away from him now that I'm thinking back on it, for some reason I just kept standing there -- NYC sort of trains you to just accept wild situations I guess. Except if the person starts taking off their pants, then you definitely have to move to the next car.

> Is safety for those who must commute late at night a fair trade off for lights that are less pleasant on the eyes

If folks are that concerned about their safety at night time then they shouldn't live in London. London is not a safe city and never will be, no matter what part of it folks live in. That's part of the London-ness of living in London tbh.

I'd vote to keep the non-white lights. Adds to the duttiness. London needs more dutty after the oligarchs took over central and general gentrification silliness.

It's mentioned in passing in the article, but there are very serious concerns about the cool temperatures of modern LED street lights. This is a great podcast that goes into depth: https://www.bigbiology.org/season-3#episode53 One idea that particularly struck me was the point that flora and fauna generally have a long time to adapt to temperature changes (although those at each end of the spectrum will clearly suffer more), and large temperature fluctuations have happened in the past. But this rapid acceleration of cool streetlights is something that hasn't happened in earth's history before, and it's unclear how or if organisms will be able to adapt.

I would encourage anyone here to watch the documentary "Saving the Dark" [0]. It discusses light pollution and the pros/cons about the new LED lights.

[0] https://youtu.be/6fHxNn-FEnc

I wish we could just stop using street lights or at least turn them down significantly. I've done a lot of walking at night and a lot of the time you can see just fine. On darker nights (no moon) you can simply carry a torch. There's simply no need to floodlight entire streets all night long.

There is a lot of research into the effects of light on sleep quality and it's bad. I have to put significant effort into blocking out street lights in my bedroom which means using blackout curtains even in winter. It's also bad for birds and other wildlife which rely on lighting to determine the time of day. I used to live on a street which turned the lights off completely at about midnight and it was so much better.

Not everyone has 20/20 vison and may well have poor night vison.

Plenty of people feel unsafe walking around poorly lit parts of a city at night.

The problem isn't the lighting. Its the city.

One of those is a lot easier to remedy than the other.

That's most likely an age thing. I feel the same as you but then my grandma complains about those same dark lights that I find too bright. I also remember finding nights even brighter as a kid.

For context, a woman was kidnapped off the street and murdered fairly early in the evening in an area that's considered pretty quiet and safe in London recently.

I don't see the relevance. Criminals aren't cave bats - they're not going to reconsider an act because there's a street light. They'll just move on to another opportunity or do it anyway.

I echo globular-toast's complaints because I have a bright LED street lamp right outside my window which prevents me from sleeping unless I close my curtains, meaning I can't wake up to natural light in the morning.

Street lighting is excessive and unnecessary and unless there's a study that says otherwise, I doubt it has any impact on crime.

According to the ONS, more violent crimes happen at night than during the day, so lighting does have a measurable effect on crime.

The conclusion that lighting itself is causing that effect cannot be drawn from that information. There could be a number of other factors for why violent crimes happen at night.

The relevance is that it is politically difficult, especially currently, to not want street lighting. Evidence isn’t so relevant and arguably the psychological benefits to the citizenry are worth the costs.

Is there any reason to think different lighting would have prevented Sarah Everard's murder?

I agree, but I think the issue is that LOTS of people just don't have good night vision. I have excellent night vision, and I feel safest with low lighting because it allows me to retain my night vision to see into unlit corners etc. I also don't feel as much "on display". But yeah, for a significant minority of people who have poor vision, the brighter the better, because they just can't see in the dark normally.

Then bring a torch. The torch will help you see into dark corners too. You wouldn't drive without lights. I'm not sure why people walk around without one.

A few years ago my local government installed lighting over 14 miles of highway only because they could get federal funding to do so. There were 0 light related accidents and 0 crimes that would not have occurred without lighting. Now we get the privilege of some of our taxes going to maintain the lighting and pay the electric bill.

Yes, I am bitter. A decision like that should be backed by evidence that it will actually improve something.

> An example that has often struck me, mainly by not being struck by them when walking around the City of London is how few lampposts there are in the City. Have you ever noticed that they’re almost non-existent? That’s because most of the street lighting is mounted on the buildings.

That's one of the most significant differences between most parts of most British cities, and many other European cities.

I doubt it will change, since it would require laying new wires and (probably) getting permissions from building owners, but I think the absence of street light poles makes a street look much nicer. (But without a pole to lean the bags against, where would Londoners leave their refuse on bin day?)

Even better than building-mounted lights are lights suspended from wires strung between buildings, as in Copenhagen [1] (that is unusually heavy rain, the photographer was "lucky").

[1] https://teemusphoto.com/copenhagen-street-photography/

The "hanging between buildings" style of lights is absolutely trippy on a dark, windy evening while looking down a streat, it looks like the power is going on/off.

I live in Malmo and they have the same way of mounting lights for the streets in the inner city.

Eh, i very much prefer fixed lampposts that aren't going anywhere

If they transition to white LED lights, it will be a big shame. White light disrupts our circadian rhythm, our sleep-wake cycle. It affects bugs, bats, and all sorts of wildlife. It would be much better for everyone if they moved to red street lights.

https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/products/led/red-led-...

I was totally with you up until the suggestion for red street lights. Besides the fact that it would make me feel like I was living in a horror film, I have a camping head torch with red and white lights (actually I've owned several over the years, from pricey to cheap) and the red light setting is close to useless. The only time I use it is if I wake up to step out of the tent and pee (it's great for not blinding me and waking me up) - but for actually doing anything it just doesn't provide enough light to see. Factor in that a big reason for street lighting is safety, and I don't think red lights will cut it, sadly, in spite of your valid points. Yellow lighting seems to be the happy median.

> The only time I use [red light] is if I wake up to step out of the tent and pee

> for actually doing anything it just doesn't provide enough light to see

It sounds from your comment like red light is good enough for collision avoidance. Why else would light be needed from street lights? We all carry phones with flashlights nowadays.

I already mentioned in the parent comment - one of the main reasons for street lighting is safety, and a big part of that is making people feel less comfortable committing crimes because they think they might be recognized. Under red light, you are unlikely to be able to make out someone's face well enough to describe it later.

Has there been a massive surge in crime now that all the criminals feel comfortable wearing their covid-masks? All this stuff is handwaving. Reminds me of all the pre-covid arguments about not letting demonstrators be masked and how muslim women's face coverings would bring society to a crashing halt because you could not interact properly with someone who had a covered face.

In other words: little or no evidence. Just some people have a fear of the dark and others find that the indiscriminate lighting of streets disturbs their repose and relaxation.

Red light are meant for viewing high-contrast easily-legible maps in the dark while not ruining your night vision, and also to not give away your position as easily as a cool light would. Their purpose is quite specific. I agree that they would be an extreme measure for street lighting, and I think that colorblind people would find them problematic.

Overall, I agree with you. Red lights are great for maintaining night-vision, but they're an extreme option. Color-blind people may also not get much use out of them.

That's not how color-blindness works.

In classic deuteranomaly the red and green cone peak sensitivities are closer together so red and green light are perceived similarly.

The red cones aren't gone and in low light you aren't even using your cones, you're using your more sensitive rods. Rods are inherently color-blind in all of us.

What is useful about a red light is that it has very little blue. Blue light is what causes the iris to contract.

So the ideal night lighting would be a brightish mix of red and green to give the rods lots of light to see with almost no blue in it to stimulate the blue cones and cause the eyes to contract...

Oh hey! That's what the yellow color of sodium lighting does if there aren't a bunch of stupid SUVs with bright white projector lamps all over the road.

Fancy that.

Is there anywhere that uses street lighting that is adaptive, i.e. after of period of no movement, the lights dim and then fade back up as a pedestrian/vehicle approaches?

I’m sure the real answer is [less bright LEDs and force the community to adapt to dimmer night lighting] but, you know, safety

Does this author want the minimum required amount of light pointing down and trying to avoid light pollution or do they want lots of lights hiding in bushes pointing up at building walls? It seems they change their mind part-way through the article.

The ones they've installed in Islington are awful. The old orange ones had a charm about them. The new ones are cold and harsh. I don't understand why such a cool temp was picked.

I don't understand why such a cool temp was picked.

Same as most government decisions. Some combination of "it was cheaper" and "I don't live there, it's for the plebs".

I'd use the Hanlon's razor [1] here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Quite a few members of the government do live in Islington

Islington is the stereotypical place where MPs live/lived in London.

Boris Johnson, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn, Emily Thornberry, Margaret Hodge …

To be fair:

• Corbyn has been an MP for Islington South since 1983

• Thornberry is MP for Islington North since 2005

• Margaret Hodge was on Islington council for 21 years

So I would say it's somewhat unfair to accuse it of being a stereotypical choice for them. They live(d) amongst their electorate.

Yes, but there in nevertheless a stereotypical "Islington Set".

- https://the-politics.wikia.org/wiki/Islington_set

This is what I don't understand. Our phones have night modes where it moves the color temp away from blues. The fact seeminly knowbody in charge of exterior lighting has figured out the same thing boggles me. Also, the abundance of cheap nighlights that are "bright white" instead of a calming "warm" as LEDs have taken to calling themselves.

To be fair, phones do this to not interfere with your sleep when you use it late.

When it comes to street lights, there's an argument to be made that you do want to interfere with/defer the sleep of anyone who's walking/driving outside.

The problem of course is collateral damage to people's houses where street lighting leaks into their windows, but assuming this is mitigated, I think street lighting that intentionally defers sleepiness is better.

The issue is such lighting (blue) also makes your night vision far worse. They’re actually much more dangerous and have increased road traffic accidents where they have been installed. Warmer lighting seems to be worse, as it does not illuminate the target area as brightly, but it ensures your eyes can see further outside of the target area.

White LED street lamp makes the road super clear, but messes up your night vision. You don’t see the pedestrian about to step in the road, then you hit them. Could have been averted with warmer, orange lights.

Same goes for those cars with the bright white headlights as well. they are absolutely blinding for on-coming traffic

That bit is fairly easy to understand. Warm white (low colour temperature) LEDs aren't as efficient (they don't produce as bright a light for the same power input) as cold white (high colour temperature) lights. So if they just go down the options looking for the most efficient LED, that's what they will choose.

I'm reminded of a Technology Connections video about what happened when his town switched from incandescent to LED stop lights <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8>

Of course, while I was looking that up I found out he made a video about sodium vapour lights! <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIC-iGDTU40>

Light higher than 5000k at night should be a crime. It is surgical and has already ruined many streets I used to enjoy walking and driving.

the UK's implementation and seemingly general view on lighting seems to be very different than to the rest of Europe. For one, it is quite minimal, the major highways and public parks are barely lit. And the lighting used is so orange and so little lumen that it leaves the eye struggling to either adjust for the reflection of the moon or the street light, straight up awful. I don't mind a balance between preserving traditional feel around pubs etc but we definitely need to have public paths adequately lit.

Somewhat related, a few local authorities in the UK do not light paths in many of their parks to discourage people using them. They say it increases safety. The logic is that it dissuades well, lets say, less than wholesome people, from congregating at night in the parks and also it dissuades normal people from using the places thinking they are safer if they are well lit but who might have more risk of bad things happening at night.

I feel such attempts at 'logic' just apply people's biases and make a mess.

Unless there is solid evidence they should not be withholding lighting.

Some folks want to drink outdoors or chillin the park, and they will with or eithout light, but like this a lot more people will break their nose or leg

Maybe someday everyone will wear night vision goggles and their cars will drive themselves with similar cameras and radar. Then we can finally have the stars back.

Meanwhile the blackout curtain industry is boooooming.

Are we advocating for ultra bright streets because some people might be criminal. It's nice that we suddenly no longer treat criminals like guilty but only society. Can't wait until US and europe turn into third world countries.

I wonder if subsidised door cameras (and dashcams while we're at it) would also reduce crime.

So sad for Sarah's family and friends!

The current lights are great, they have their charm. Unfortunately councils just wait to have an excuse to spend our money (ideally on affiliated companies) on any vanity project they can get their hands on and then hike the tax.

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