Cooler light is better at keeping people awake and alert, and people drive safer when they are alert. Given that car accidents are a major cause od death, that is a hard point to compromise on.
earlier posted article https://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-04-debunking-digital-eye...
One of the biggest arguments against blue light (specifically) being disruptive is that the sky spectrum in the evening is also blue (so naturally you'd be exposed to it). Modern airliners use blue lights for overnight flights with red lights at "dawn". I suspect screen brightness is more of an issue than any particular colour.
The amount of blue light you're exposed to from the night sky is trivial. Outdoors on a moonless night is 0.002 lux (of which, my understanding, about half is airglow and fairly blueish).
Compare to a not-too-bright single blue LED in your bedroom, emitting 0.5 lumens. You could spread that over 2000 square feet of surfaces and still have more blue light around than comes from the night sky.
Yes... that is why I divided by area.
It's kind of sad how many of us end up so impatient over common mistakes that we screw up just as badly in our eagerness to snap at people.
Obviously it's fudged a bit. The LED is not an isotropic emitter, and it's not at the center of a spherical room with perfectly reflective walls.
In practice, I suspect the amount of blue illumination from one dim blue LED in a large bedroom and the night sky are pretty much equal.
I have no stance on this. I don't even care. I can sleep well at night.
The only advantage red light offers is not disrupting your circadian rhythm.
Airplane instrument panels are lit with white. Saab, Volvo, and plenty of others use white or nearly white light for their dashboards.
Blue is used in theater only because it is less noticeable to the audience when it spills or reflects somewhere it shouldn't.
The real question is: especially with even 10 year old car headlights being so much better than the utter trash car headlights were 30 or more years ago, why are we still wasting so much energy, and impacting wildlife, and hurting millions of people's circadian rhythms, blasting streets with light all night?
There isn't even any argument in terms of public safety; there's never been any proof that lighting reduces crime. Lack of lighting forces people up to no good doing things where they shouldn't be, to use lights themselves - which stands out much, much more than someone doing something they shouldn't be under outdoor floodlights.
For pedestrians?
(I agree with your reasoning as it applies to highways, but most of the world's light pollution from overhead street lighting comes from lighting done either 1. within dense cities, or 2. within industrial complexes — in both cases to aid people walking around outside at night.)
I've found for example that it's extremely dangerous to go beyond 180kmh (110 mph) at night whenever there are street lights, while it's sort of ok if you just have side mirrors on the highway reflecting your own lights (not that I recommend to anyone to drive at such high speeds, especially in low visibility conditions).
This does not match very common naval practices, nor my experiences. I believe the underlying mechanism is that the iris responds much more strongly to blue light because that is more prevalent in daylight. Specifically this is about using red light to shine on things to see them. I could imagine that has very different requirements from the color of text on a HUD.
Use a red flashlight (or filter) if you need to find stuff in a dark room without waking up the occupants.
(There are quite a few mad people in this world, having said that).
I usually can't ride backward fast enough for that to happen.
The white lights are important for road safety but the Dutch have developed methods of softly discouraging the kind of traffic that makes the road dangerous.
This is especially common in residential areas. Most town centres are pedestrianized but retain brighter lighting as they can still be quite busy public areas in the evening.
But it takes about 45 minutes for your eyes to fully adapt to darkness.
So if we were to use red lighting at a level of illumination that assumes fully adapted eyes, it means people won't have sufficient brightneses for the first 45 minutes of their drive, which is likely most of it.
Go out on a very dark night and look up at the stars sometime. After half an hour, you'll be able to see stars that you couldn't see fifteen minutes ago.
* Okay they do exist but they are extremely rare. I know of exactly 1 within 10km of my home.