A French town where the lighting is alive | Hacker News Reader

A French town where the lighting is alive

bbc.com

150 pointsKaibeezy84 comments

One of the downsides of car-centric cities is that lighting has to be insanely bright because of the speeds of the cars. At human walking speeds, you can get by with substantially less light to illuminate; but that won't work if there are bright lights elsewhere nearby.

You can get by sure, but more lighting can help reduce crime. We have a few streets nearby which have non-standard street lighting. It's less bright and the lights alternate on each side of the street. It's great for the people sleeping in the houses on that street but people feel much less safe walking down it at night and if I were to decide to steal a car or burgle a house, I'd pick that street. At least from what I hear politicians discuss when streets are having new/more modern lighting installed the discussion is always around crime and personal safety and never around cars.

I haven't seen a credible study that shows more lighting reduces crime. I wouldn't be surprised if more lighting increased reported crime at night in the same way more policing increases the number of people who enter the justice system until criminals adapt. But most crime is done in broad daylight or beyond the reach of outside lights, so I doubt lighting has much to do with it.

I wonder how much lighting reduces crime vs just moving it around. If you have bright streets and dark ones, does the crime migrate to the dark ones? If all the streets are lit the same, does the crime spread out generally?

Do people feel less safe or are they actually less safe? Suburbs are often lit like a Walmart parking lot yet I suspect the amount of crime is quite low.

> people feel much less safe walking down it at night and if I were to decide to steal a car or burgle a house, I'd pick that street

A lot of it comes down to feelings. We need actual data, how much does crime actually goes up, not how people think it does. Otherwise, these people need to pay for the infrastructure and electric consumption. There is no reason why everyone should pay for their feelings if it does not bring concrete benefits to everybody.

Actually I've heard the contrary. There is less degradation (broken things, trashing glass bottles, etc), because people don't want to be in places they can't easily see themselves and move to more lit places.

> more lighting can help reduce crime

It works on a hyperlocal level, but on as whole city it's a zero-sum game.

"Eyes on the street" is the key to safety. If you have enough people out and about on foot, you see less crime.

This is not a function of any one thing.

A good compromise is having a low level of steady light, but when there is motion increasing the brightness.

It won't work for every situation - the constant up/down would be more annoying on a busy road, but we had a building with a large parking lot set back from a busy road that attracted lots of loitering in the parking lot. Swapping out the old parking lights to motion activated LED ones pretty much eliminated people congregating the parking lot at night leaving trash all over, tearing up the landscaping, or tearing up the lot doing donuts and other dumb stuff.

So heck yeah, effective lighting can be a significant deterrence - and with things like motion sensors and LED fixtures with integrated dimming it doesn't even have to be obnoxious by default.

Car requires a lot of infrastructure that are very costly. Traffic control, safety equipment, road bumps (how ironic) because indeed cars are fast and heavy. Biking made me realize how much it took to get a full fledged car culture.

Biking also made me realize just how incredibly useful cars are, which completely explains why cities are willing to spend so much money effort and space for them.

I've tried biking walking public transportation, cars are just better. I still bike for certain trips, but it's limited in usefulness.

I would be interested in knowing which country you live in? Can you elaborate what makes you say cars are better?

I don't own a car and live in a very cycling friendly place, but even I have to admit that a car is very convenient : - you can transport several person at once. If you have kids this is very valuable. - can go longer distances. I wouldn't go more than 15km on my bike as a mean of transportation, as opposed to as an activity in itself - you don't get wet when it rains - you can actually transport stuff. I do my regular shopping on my bike but for gardening I need to rent a car. Same for several things (large packs of stuff, pet food etc.) - you are just more free to go wherever, especially on a weekend. With public transport you are very limited and can't access a lot of wild places. I actually force myself to rent a car once a month so that I go around to different places and not restrict myself to my immediate surroundings and what I can access with public transport.

That said, I do not plan to own a car as long as I live in a major city, it is just financially unsound and not really needed for me on a daily basis as I don't have kids.

I ran into this issue moving from the USA (owning a car for 15yrs) to another country where public transportation is the norm. Lived without a car for 15yrs.

For the most part I didn't miss the car. I just took it as "life".

But, a few friends owned a car and a few times a year I'd met up with them and notice that my world seemed 4x larger with car. They were going all over the place because it was easy and comfortable and while I wasn't a hermit I stuck to easy to get to places. I also joined a surfing group and the person that ran it owned a van and we would not have been able to get to the various beaches without it in any reasonable time frame using public transportation.

Another area was running errands. Back in car centric USA I might spend a Saturday going to 3-5 places (Home Depot, Costco, Target, the Mall) and at each place I might buy something I needed and just put it in the trunk and carry on. Where as in my 2nd life I could only go to a single store in a day because I needed to carry what I bought. Maybe that's good but it felt frustating not to be able to get shit done as quickly. Sometimes I could order or have things shipped but it took an extra 10 minutes to fill out the forms, more if there's a line, and then I had to be home to receive the packages.

You can't take passengers in a bike. (Edit: Fixed, thanks agumonkey.)

You can't transport large or bulky items.

You are limited in how much you can transport (how much can fit in your backpack basically).

You can't safely store things. The value of a mobile location to store items is vastly overlooked by people who hate cars.

Cars are faster if you are going more than about a mile - even including parking.

You can't ride a bike in bad weather. Hard rain is very unpleasant, and snow is impossible.

If you live in a place with hills, bikes are just not practical.

Bumps in the road, potholes, etc, are very dangerous in a bike. There's a spot near me that has these "ripples" in the pavement that you can't easily see, and I fell after going on them, now I know to avoid them, but any new biker will also fall.

> You can't take passengers in a car.

You can take passengers in a car ;)

the carriage limit is real, the mobile storage aspect is true too, weather is nasty

> You can't take passengers in a bike.

Mostly true, though plenty of bikes can haul 1-2 kids or 1 extra adult. There is a guy in my neighborhood I see take his kids to school every day in one of these.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/8/20791435/radwagon-electric...

> You can't transport large or bulky items.

Cargo bikes or bike trailers are extremely nice in flat cities, and even in hilly cities, e-bikes make them feasible. I routinely haul 100lbs up hills in Seattle with a trailer behind an e-bike.

Here's an article by (admittedly a bit of a bike fanatic) about hauling patio sets, stoves, grills, etc.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/06/23/how-to-carry-majo...

> You can't safely store things

This is a good point and I think your observation about how it's overlooked is important. Going on multi-store trips in a bike is mildly annoying since you often have to take what you got from one store into the next store because you can't leave it on your bike.

> Cars are faster if you are going more than about a mile - even including parking.

This is highly dependent on the city you're in. In Seattle, bike is, by far, the fastest way for me to commute. My commute is 6 miles (West Seattle to Downtown). Biking, door-to-door, is 25 minutes. It's 35 minutes by bus or car. This is because a large chunk of the trip is on a dedicated use bike trail without stop lights or traffic.

> You can't ride a bike in bad weather

Amsterdam has pretty bad weather (it rains 50% of days of the year), yet somehow they have extremely high cycling rates. For me (in Seattle, also lots of rain), the game changer was getting a proper bike poncho: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLM_mTUuHlc

I agree that a torrential downpour like what you might get in the midwest is not realistic to cycle in. But for light to medium rain, the poncho punches above its weight.

> snow is impossible

They make it work in Finland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

> If you live in a place with hills, bikes are just not practical.

Seattle and SF are both quite hilly, yet both have among the highest rates of cycle usage. This is a barrier for those starting from a low level of fitness, though. And even for otherwise fit people, it takes a few weeks for your legs to adjust to the new movement pattern.

E-bikes make hills trivial, though, which is why they are exploding in popularity (in Seattle at least).

> Bumps in the road, potholes, etc, are very dangerous in a bike.

Agreed. This is one of the reasons it's so important to have dedicated bike infrastructure. Road damage is proportional to the 4th power (!!) of a vehicle's weight. So cyclist infrastructure, once built, degrades extremely slowly compared to car infrastructure.

The "shortcut" feature of bikes is something that cities should design for. Making a car "go the long way around" is basically painless for the driver, and a well designed city they may not even notice.

But bikes and walkers should have the advantage of more direct routes that take less time. Steps on roads on Queen Anne Hill being a good example, but there should be more of that type of thing. Grade separate bike lanes, bike tunnels, etc. They can be surprisingly thin and sneaking them in works wonders.

> You can't take passengers in a bike.

I take my 8 and 11y old daughters on my old granny bike. One on the handlebar, the other upright on the rear rack.

Besides you don't need passengers when everybody can take his own bike and chit chat while riding.

> You can't transport large or bulky items. > > You are limited in how much you can transport (how much can fit in your backpack basically).

False. Anecdote, I once bought a tree at a garden center. Everywhere I looked, people where struggling to put plants without spilling dirt on the trunk of their van/wagon. The only 3 who were fine were a pro with a pickup bed, a middle age guy with...a convertible and me...with a bicycle trailer made to carry kids.

> Cars are faster if you are going more than about a mile - even including parking.

Not so true. Cars are marginally faster or plain slower in many urban areas with lots of traffic lights and/or with heavy traffic.

> You can't ride a bike in bad weather. Hard rain is very unpleasant, and snow is impossible.

false. Hard rain is very unpleasant for drivers, most barely see anything. At least cyclists see where they are going. Also unless you live in a place hit by moonson, rain is rarely an issue. For the many days that forecast some rain, the actual chance of being riding at the exact moment it rains is not that high. There are not that manu days in a year hit by continuous rain all day long. Also I've commuted on snow for years, and more efficiently than many car drivers thanks to very efficient bicycle studded tires. In cycling we say there is no bad weather, only bad equipment. You wouldn't drive your convertible open during a thunderstorm, right?

> If you live in a place with hills, bikes are just not practical.

Not true anymore with e-bikes. Also fitness come with practice.

> Bumps in the road, potholes, etc, are very dangerous in a bike

You just learn to avoid them. Also skills increase with practice. Also there are bikes an bike. Using bigger tire volume help tremendously. Overall driving a car is much more dangerous. Despite the protection, odds of dying are statistically higher. Perception of danger in cycling is similar to people afraid of boarding a plane. Irrational. As is the perception of safety in cars.

Bike commuting in the US is fraught with peril - even in places with bike lanes.

Also because of suburban sprawl your commute on a bike can be an hour easy. I tried biking to work for a while - 23 minute drive but an hour or more on a bike. Great workout, but the lack of proper bike paths meant a few times broken glass gave me a flat miles (5-10) from home.

If you like a few miles away, maybe 5 or less, bike commuting can be a good option. Very few people live that close to work though.

It's really on a city per city basis, but so far my rule of thumb is any dense city will be slower by car. You drive around 18mph .. a bit above me (with a mediocre health and a bad bike) but my path is often shorter and I don't suffer from traffic jam.

Every time I used car or public transportation it was longer, more random (couldn't even tell when I'd reach my destination), costlier, more stressful during (angry drivers everywhere) and after (no certainty to find a safe parking spot).

What’s even more frustrating is that most people have integrated that with the “infrastructure you have to have” and then whine about the cost of a bike lane. We seem to have accepted that putting billions into motorways was ok, and use that against any other form of transport.

I'm sure this isn't enough money but ... car users pay taxes on gasoline to maintain the roads. Cyclists pay nothing equivalent. Of course cyclists pay normal taxes like everyone else. It does raise the question of should their be a cycle tax. Cars will have a similar problem soon, as they go electric all over the world whatever taxes come from gas will disappear and governments will have to find a new way to pay for the roads.

At least in the US gas taxes and usage fees don't come close to covering the cost of roads [1,2]. In the US all of us pay for roads through other taxes because the use fees and taxes don't cover the cost of the infrastructure.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-gas-taxs-tortured-...

[2] https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/

> car users pay taxes on gasoline to maintain the roads.

True. But then it’s counter-productive, because it really does not cover government spending to build and maintain roads (and motorways, and bridges, and tunnels). To be fair, roads are necessary and useful in a modern economy. But the same money on some reliable tracks for freighter trains could be even better in some instances, and now we have people saying that we cannot have that because trains are expensive. True, they are, but the comparison is flawed because we assume that roads are free.

Indeed, gas taxes will have to decrease, and that will be associated with increased maintenance costs (EVs and modern cars keep getting heavier, which results in more wear and tear). So it’s possible that at some point people will realise how much the debate is stacked against any alternative form of transport, but I am not too hopeful. Roads are just expected; people don’t really realise they we had to pay for them.

Cycling infrastructure costs far less. Road damage is roughly the square of the vehicle's weight. Also, we don't charge pedestrians for sidewalks.

> "Increasing a truck’s weight [from 80,000 pounds] to 90,000 pounds results in a 42 percent increase in road wear. Pavement designed to last 20 years wears out in seven." https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2017/06/22/murphys-law-how-trucks...

> It would take 700 trips by bicycle to equal the damage caused by one Smart Car. It would take 17,059 trips by bike to equal the damage caused by an average car. And it would take 364,520 bike trips to equal the damage caused by just one Hummer H2. https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...

When this all comes together, every cycling trip I take is a car left parked and that benefits everybody. That's why we don't tax cyclists for infrastructure and why it's counter-productive to raise it as an issue.

I was under the impression it was proportional to the 4th power of a vehicle’s weight: https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...

But this might be measuring something a little different.

Regardless, in my city (Seattle), an asphalt bike path near me (Alki trail) is still in perfect condition after a decade of frequent cyclist and pedestrian use, and adjacent car streets are riddled with potholes and cracks despite frequent patching.

I wonder how this compares to areas that have freeze-thaw cycles. Bikes do a lot less damage to the path, but at the same time bikes and walkers are much more noticing of path damage.

The bike path near me was resurfaced recently, it wasn't bad before but it's certainly nicer now.

It's actually the fourth power over the weight of the axle, so almost all road wear is from very heavy heavy vehicles such as trucks and the like.

That is true. The old ways are an expected cost.

Also bike infrastructure degrades very slowly over time.

This is making me wonder how light pollution would change if all cars become self-driving

Also, cars have gotten a lot brighter over the past 20 years or so. Since ultra-bright halogen style headlights became standard, it's become much more difficult for my eyes to adjust back to darkness after passing oncoming traffic. I always considered them hazardous to other drivers. My car's from the 80s and after passing some of these monstrous lit up things it's hard to tell if my own headlights are on. It seems like there's been some kind of race to have the brightest headlights on the road.

As someone with incredibly bad eyes, going from my 2015 Honda Accord's stock headlights to a Tesla Model 3's brighter LEDs have been a big boon on my driving confidence at night. Just offering a different perspective that I actually like the brightness race since it's improved my ability to drive.

As someone who see fairly well in the dark: I too often find myself nearly unable to see what's in front of me because of the car behind. It also makes judging the distance and speed of a passing vehicle a literal pain.

Yeah, cars behind you is another thing. Especially if it's a pickup truck with the beams high up at level with a sedan's mirrors.

> I actually like the brightness race since it's improved my ability to drive.

Unfortunately you are not taking into account how that brightness impairs other drivers ability to see.

I do agree with the parent, I do feel more distracted by bright flashes of blueish-white light from modern head lamps. Roads aren't flat. Cars bounce, dip, and hop over hills, bumps and pot holes. Never mind the jerks who regularly drive with high beams on or forget to turn them off when passing. Those sudden flashes of light cause floaters in your field of vision leaving you temporarily blinded. This is a problem that no one seems to care about and I feel like we are ignoring these issues on purpose.

More and more I'm starting to be convinced that driving at night is just absolutely insane for various reasons.

The roads are more insane ALL the time post covid. Tempers are flaring over restrictions, people divided over dumb shit, etc, ad nauseum.

I have to either move or quit my job because the commute is now soul sucking. People drive really selfishly, some even retaliating on road with vehicular violence. This morning on my way in I was merging onto the highway, then accelerated and move into the middle lane to cruise for a while. Apparently I misjudged a dude who must have been doing 80+ in the middle lane, in a 50 zone as he was up my ass in seconds when he was a few hundred feet back in my mirror when moving over. So he goes around me and violently cuts me off almost hitting me, on purpose (he had a passenger too). You believe that shit. Fucking guy was mad I got in his way when he was getting off in a few hundred feet anyway and should have just went into the right lane and grannied the remaining few hundred but no. I wanted to drink the blood from his still beating heart after that fucking shit and I almost saw red and lost it reaching for my bat. but I have to eat that, drive defensively, and go on about my day because engaging in road violence puts everyone else at risk and is pure dumb. Fuck em. It's a shame they can get away with this crap.

I drive fast, always drove fast, and if I'm doing 100 and come up on a bimbo box in the fastlane I'll be flashing my lights. That being said, I'll brake at a safe distance and wait them out like a dying hospital patient if they don't get the message. What I'm describing here is an old LA to Vegas 2.5 hr, radar watching mentality where you're highly aware and entirely sober and the point is low visibility and getting there in the dark, fast. Whatever has happened after covid is different. I don't think it's the frustration of lockdowns or whatever. I think people have lost a solid 10 IQ points and have had a few mm's shaved off their frontal lobes. No self control or self awareness. No sense of self preservation, (as I wrote that, outside a bar on a side street in Portland, a car just rocketed by at 70 in a 25 zone). So the knock-on effect of a lot of borderline people becoming total sociopathic assholes is that relatively responsible people like you and I start to lose our minds being surrounded by them acting like hyperactive zombies. This might be how our civilization falls - after all, it wasn't Justinian's plague that finally killed Rome, it just knocked out the last of the cultural niceties that allowed an empire to function. Whatever, this is a drunk post but feel free to deconstruct it.

We're collectively and purposefully ignoring an absolute ton of issues with cars

I feel like it was an issue that a lot of people cared about when only a few cars had super bright headlights. People wanted to outlaw it, or at least put an upper limit on it. I'm surprised that the world went in the direction of everyone having them, but maybe I shouldn't be, since a similar thing happened with giant military-style SUVs. Now that most people have crazy bright headlights they don't complain as much, or they're used to it, or they're like "got mine, screw you" as with most things. Older people like my parents just won't drive at night anymore because oncoming lights are too blinding. But if you don't regularly drive an older car it's easy to forget how you used to actually have better night vision when all the lights on the road were dimmer.

I've complained to people at work and they agree but they're like what are you going to do? And they're right. They pushed this on everyone.

I just drive defensively, dim the rear mirror (auto-dim ftw.) Tinted windows are a nice attenuator for sun, headlights and other illumination but suck at night for all around vision. I wind up having one of those driver AB memory settings and have B angling my mirrors slightly down so I can see wheels and just crane my neck slightly to see next to me. Sounds dangerous but im used to it, can still see most of what's next to me and it keeps flashes of bright headlights outta my eyes at night.

I'm not trying to criticize you, car dependence isn't your fault, but it would be nice if somebody with "incredibly bad eyes" wasn't forced to operate a piece of heavy machinery just to get around in the first place.

As someone also with bad eyes, everyone else going to LEDs has been a huge hindrance to my driving confidence at night.

The light your own car produces will always be only a tiny fraction of the illumination you see when driving because you only see the subset of it that gets reflected back by the road and other objects. But the headlights of other cars shine directly in your eyes.

When I drive at night now, I see mostly harsh headlight glare surrounded by inky blackness.

LED headlight arrays are far more effective at eliminating spill over than HID or halogen lights. My parents have a 2019 Acura RDX and the lighting on it is very precise and much lower than the previous cars they or I have owned. Being able to see farther at night significantly reduces the amount of accidents.

If oncoming headlights bother you then the move to LED should be embraced. Nothing like getting swatted with a HID projector lamp.

LED arrays are also a lot more compact, so features like self leveling will hopefully be more likely to spread to more models instead of being purely a luxury feature, further reducing the amount of overspill in oncoming headlights.

Do LED headlights help when drivers leave headlights on full beam when there is oncoming traffic? (The norm in California.)

That should be a straightforward problem to solve with an lcd layer for the windshield and a camera tracking the eyes of the driver.

Windshield could black out specific spots that are too bright for the driver. This could apply either for headlights of other cars or the Sun

Interesting idea, but the failure modes here are spectacular.

On the other side of things, I have decent eyesight at night until I see one of these headlights, which is frequent enough that I'm half tempted to just wear sunglasses at night.

I think what you are noticing is that the frequency of light emitted from halogen is very wide and generally warmer in color (almost orange), but at the other end of the scale, LED lights are a very narrow range of (blue white) light frequencies whilst being energy efficient makes it harder to see at night because the eyes are not used to this narrow band of light frequencies.

What I dont like about LED's is I can see them flickering in some situations, you dont get that with the warmer halogen bulbs, but even with halogen bulbs, you can see how a car is wired by seeing which brake light comes on first as the electricity moves down the circuit to the next brake light. In other words you can work out what side the wiring loom runs down to the back of the car!

> you can see how a car is wired by seeing which brake light comes on first as the electricity moves down the circuit to the next brake light

Suppose the loom doesn't run from brake to brake, but instead runs all the way back to the front of the car and back, for a 10 meter total run. With electricity traveling in wires at roughly two thirds the speed of light, this is just about 50 nanoseconds.

While sensitivity to slight timing differences can be acute (is there a term for the temporal equivalent of Vernier acuity?), detecting a 50 ns difference is implausible.

Some manufacturers are worse than others, Vauxhalls and Fords I could often see the delay between the two rear lights coming on. When ever I've had passengers in the car, I've asked them if they can tell which brake light is coming on first most dont notice it until I point it out.

Anyway just because you dont believe me doesnt mean I'm wrong!

It's not just car dependence, though. New streetlights are brighter than old ones, but we've been car-dependent since the '70s. It's CPTED.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_prevention_through_envir...

I guess I'm the only one who thinks this is a dumb gimmick. There's no way this is more environmentally friendly than dim LED's on a full lifecycle carbon emissions per lumen-hour. One of the systems bubble oxygen. That alone probably uses more energy than an equivalently bright LED. These are not going to be very bright at all. Then you have to maintain each "bio-bulb" with nutrients which requires energy to produce and distribute. This makes no more sense than replacing street lights with glow sticks.

I once investigated it for a company. I found that Luciferase uses 1 ATP molecule for one photon. I calculated that I'd need kilo's of ATP per day for a 200 lumen lamp. We stopped the project soon after (we also looked at closed ecosystems etc).

But maybe, with large surfaces, in situations where you only need very little light, It might work. A closed glass container though, I wonder, will it remain efficient? I think closed ecosystem haven't been that successful right?

Could you add some detail to your comment - I believe it's missing some biological nuance.

Specifically: sure, it you wanted to feed a pile of ATP to some luciferase to output photons. But that's missing the point that ATP gets (near) infinitely restored from ADP. If glucose is your energy source, that cuts your mass needs by ~50x ( C6=180g/mol, ATP=241g/mol, 36ATP per C6).

Good remark but we were thinking of luciferase outside the cellular context. Keeping cells alive is a very big challenge. But arguable keeping “naked” luciferase functional is as well…

For cells you need a lot more than just glucose, you needs some medium and fetal bovine serum and you need a way to remove waste and dead cells, etc.

> A French town where the lighting is alive

The title of this submission reads like a Doctor Who story synopsis.

Fabulous. Not just for the light-pollution & energy side of things, but because softer lighting is the thing sleep experts have been telling us to introduce into our lives in the evenings, all the blue light filters for our phones etc, to help us tell our bodies it's time to sleep...

But the comments here about bright light deterring crime are important (and true). Not sure what a solution is that deals with that AND helps us sleep better etc.

> But the comments here about bright light deterring crime are important (and true). Not sure what a solution is that deals with that AND helps us sleep better etc.

Every French home and apartment I've ever been inside (mostly in the Northwest) has been built or retrofitted with shutters that block out almost all outside light. They're installed on all the main windows including on living room and kitchen windows.

It's just part of the nightly routine to walk around and close them. (Or, in the case of newer electric shutters, just to hit the main button to close them all.)

Wooden panes that you fold onto the window from outside is a traditional part of houses all over France. They have been upgraded to roller shutters, but not always replaced (both coexist sometimes)

> (both coexist sometimes)

Indeed. My in-laws' 300-year-old granite farmhouse has a mix of modern roller shutters, pvc panel shutters, and wooden panel shutters.

I have a dark parking lot at a church that needs at least some lighting - it's a serious safety issue as that congregation is heavily weighted with seniors. Traditional lighting is often overkill/way harsher than it needs to be. Love to see alternative tech like this at least starting.

Looking at the present article, while these bio-lights are diffuse, they are probably the wrong spectrum. Due to the nature of the light-sensitive proteins in our eyes, humans do best with orange light at night. Our peripheral vision is most sensitive to blue light, and there's a reflex where we look at blue light in our periphery. Blue light is exhausting for us. Intense blue light is blinding.

Back when the lighting companies had all the money in the world to research their lights, scientists figured out how to use artificial light safely. Now that those scientists have mostly retired, and people alive today have no idea what it was like for artificial light to be precious, we're forgotten everything our predecessors figured out. Just last night I was at my current city's newest hotel, and while the lights are mostly pretty good, they also have a bunch of 5000K LED fixtures mounted at exactly eye level. Light is mostly useful to us humans when is bounces off of things.

In the 1970's the outdoor lighting industry standardized on High Pressure Sodium bulbs, because they're incredibly energy efficient AND because they're an almost blue-free light source. Low pressure sodium [LPS] bulbs are even more efficient and a perfect single-wavelength of orange (~590nm), but only a few cities (Flagstaff Arizona) really standardized on LPS.

I was whining to someone about how Phoenix, Arizona switched out its safe HPS streetlamps for 5000K LEDs in 2016 (I think they switched these to ~3000K after people complained about 5000K's effects on wildlife). The guy knew exactly what I was talking about, and said "I wrote the 1982 report that resulted in Phoenix's 1984 lighting ordinances." He'd recommended LPS, but the police didn't like how people have no color perception when things are lit with the single wavelength of LPS. HPS has a bit of a spread of spectrum from red -> yellow, with a peak at the pleasant orange color.

Arizona DOT is gradually switching out the safe HPS lights for defective LEDs. At first these were 5000K, but I watched them switch out one intersection's functional 5000K light for what I think is 3000K. LED streetlights' light is not nearly diffuse enough. I've come to referring to the bright spot under the lights as a 'cone of destruction', and have taken to lowering my car's street lamp visors to protect my eyes from the glare of passing under these streetlights.

Flagstaff Arizona uses pure-orange LED streetlamps, now that LPS bulbs are no longer being manufactured. These are wonderful... Not as nice as LPS, but 1000x better than "white" LED streetlamps.

If you're interested in the guy's 1982 report about street lights, give this comment an upvote, and I'll maybe work on that blog post.

They've been retiring the incandescent street lights around here and the new white LED bulbs they've been replacing them with are obnoxiously bright. I feel bad with the people on the 2nd stories because they're basically shining right into the windows. The orange LEDs sound great.

Reminds me of another very cool artistic project that used silkworms to build pavilions and other structures. Would be pretty cool if you could have a sort of symbiotic city.

https://youtu.be/MUVv4wtyMPE

> This phenomenon – where chemical reactions inside an organism's body produce light – can be observed in many places in nature. Organisms as diverse as fireflies, fungi and fish have the ability to glow through bioluminescence.

Humans are also bioluminescent, we just glow to dimly for our own eyes to detect.

Citation: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

I for one welcome our bioluminescent overlords.

Imagine it embedded right into the sidewalks/pavements to make them glow at night. Magical.

That could make you blind to your surroundings though, and studies show fairly consistently that well lit areas have lower crime rates. So imagine a dimly lit path that has a lighting system that makes it more difficult for your eyes to see your peripherals.

I was imagining more of a Bright Tree Village sort of thing, but sure, you can go with District 9, and you’d probably be right.

> studies show fairly consistently that well lit areas have lower crime rates

It works on a hyperlocal level, but on as whole city it's a zero-sum game.

That's not true. You are assuming there is a base level of crime that just gets pushed to other places. But if you discourage crime then it just doesn't exist anymore.

No, countless sociological studies proven that if people are in poverty and have no access to jobs and healthcare many will resort to crime.

And it does not disappear into thin air if you increase lightning or set up fences and so on.

Picture the ballroom of Beaty and the Beast. Avatar perhaps.

Or anything else, dimly, but gloriously lit. No high-tech beams of light, that's just gross, but a mist of light. Not threatening at all.

Already some walkable cities already bathe in this kind of light, they don't even need glow worms.

It's unreal how degraded 99% of the public realm is, when there's for a fact places in the world today, hosts of a functional 21st century economy, where you feel like royalty just for being outside. Like, why the low low low bar? Ah yes, because we made cities for cars, not people.

> there's for a fact places in the world today, hosts of a functional 21st century economy, where you feel like royalty just for being outside.

Not trying to sound like a dick - can you name some of them you know of? Looking to get a good amount of traveling in in the near future

I'd say any city in the Netherlands and Flanders; expensive, not tourist traps, desirable for their job markets and not just their history: Leuven, Delft, Amersfoort, on the smaller end, Ghent, Amsterdam on the bigger end. At night, it's like walking around the Versailles mirror room, but outside.

That's just the ones I'm familiar with, probably all European countries have these places.

Even stateside, I think there's some phenomenal examples. Savannah, Charleston, Louisville, have a really unique flavor, where the outside can feel magical, although rougher around the edges, much less walkable, but still, there's pockets here&there. They have this balmy verdancy, especially in the summer, at night when it's still warm. And the lightning bugs actually do light up the night! These are lived-in cities, and not just tourist destinations.

Again, there's probably hundreds more. I just really like the observable reality that there's plenty of fantastic cities, that are appealing to the senses (e.g. their light at night), and are not relegated to be purely curiosities for tourists.

  - Paris any foggy night. 
  - Manhattan 03:00 in heavy snow. 
  - Suburban USA Xmas light battle. 
  - Cannaregio and Castello in Venezia.  
  - Bavarian countryside and villages.
  - Chicago River architectural boat tour at sunset.

There was something like this created in Poland: https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/07/poland-builds-a-solar-powe...

led light consumes less… for all of you not from france, bear in mind cities can spend 2 millions for just 1 roundabout. how much cost to make this light keep working in 20 years ?

Does the US even regulate headlight brightness and function?

Yes.

Nearly everything about vehicles has US federal and state regulation. Headlight regulations being stricter in the US are why US versions of European cars up until about the 1980s had different headlights than their home markets.

49 CFR § 393, FMVSS 108 and a crapload of other regulations and regulatory interpretations. In general, these make IRS instructions seem a marvel of clarity.

FMVSS-108 S5.5.11(a) talks about brightness.

As someone working with taxes, I find your comment a little funny. IRS instructions can be verbose. I'll need to look up these headlight regulations then. Thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com