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Comment by tqi | Hacker News Reader

Its ironic, because this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research to understand why any of these problems he highlights are the way they are, and lazily attributes everything to OTHER people not caring. LEDs last longer, are more energy efficient, and also reduce light pollution because they are more directional[1]. Took me 30 seconds to google. There are enormous design standards for designing bike lanes[2]. It is almost certainly the case the design of this intersection is dictated by these standards. But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-... [2] https://streetsillustrated.seattle.gov/design-standards/bicy...

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Of course there are "reasonable justifications" for the shitty status quo, but that's kind of the point. Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons. The author points to Japan to illustrate that you do get measurably better results when people habitually try to do good work. We're not actually doomed to have crappy furniture, flimsy and buggy appliances, byzantine legal codes, ugly architecture, and hostile infrastructure forever. This society is the product of the choices we've made collectively and if we made different choices we could have a much better (or much worse) society.

Cheaper lighting costs across an entire city are a very good reason.

"Ugly architecture" is subjective. A lot of architects care very much, but they follow the academic line and lack the imagination and empathy to understand why elements of that aesthetic are unpopular and impractical - a completely different problem, even if it causes related outcomes.

Bugs are easy to write and hard to fix. MBA culture as a whole is fixated on quick extractive shareholder returns, not on celebrating supreme engineering quality. MBAs care very much too, but not about the things the author (and probably most of us) care about.

Some people do care but are simply not good at their jobs.

Even if you do care, people will assume you don't. Anyone who's done direct customer facing work or even just sold stuff online will know that people love to nitpick.

And so on.

The problem is narcissism vs empathy. Caring means trying to have some insight the experience of others. Narcissism is on a scale from blank unawareness of others to outright hostility, whether overt or covert.

There's a lot more of the latter than the former around at the moment, and corporate and economic values provide some conveniently expedient justifications for it.

The problem, essentially, is that you can't rage against the dying of the light all by yourself. If you're an architect and badly want to build great housing your goals are frustrated every step of the way. By people who don't care enough to do all the little things that are necessary to make a building 5% better in 20 subtle ways. You can only fight indifference for so long before you're empty.

What is the point of lighting being cheap if it produces a city where people don't want to live? Good lighting isn't unaffordable either. Cities with good lighting actually exist! And yet people will insist shitty lighting is somehow necessary. It isn't.

> "Ugly architecture" is subjective.

I think this actually illustrates the author's point and gets at the heart of the cultural malaise we are experiencing. If everything is subjective, nothing can be improved because nothing can be better than something else.

But this isn't the case.

The Mona Lisa is objectively better than anything I have ever painted.

Architecture is no different.

Some buildings quite literally are better than others and we can scientifically study this [1]. We can recognize that all opinions are valid, but that some are better than others. We do this in daily life too, if you are in the ER and the trauma team comes and tells you their opinion on your condition, you will value that opinion over the opinion of the person outside waiting for a ride. Art, music, architecture - no different.

Tens of millions of people visit the Notre Dame Cathedral.

Why?

Religious reasons of course, but many visit simply to marvel at the wonderful architecture. Contrast that with Rocky City Church [2] here in Columbus where I live. A big, bland, gray "modern" building that as our standards have dropped to nothing (remember everything is subjective so nothing can be better than anything else) we have come to accept as the norm.

This is the Nobody Cares phase of not just architecture but society as well.

  [1] https://annsussman.com 
  [2]https://rockcitychurch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/1.png

> The Mona Lisa is objectively better than anything I have ever painted.

No it isn't. If I saw one of your paintings and liked it better, there would be no way for you to prove me wrong. My opinion might be highly unpopular, but that wouldn't make it objectively incorrect.

How would you compare the two?

Then substitute one of my drawings (or paintings, if I painted) of a person. There's no way in the world that anyone--anyone!--would think mine were better. That's because mine are truly awful.

Even then, that's just an opinion that everyone shares. Objectivity isn't when everyone's subjective experiences align—it's when something exists independent of any subjective experience. If there were no humans at all, "beauty" would be meaningless. It's an inherently subjective property which humans ascribe to objects. Conversely, the Earth would still orbit the Sun, because gravity is objective.

In the same way I can state as an objective fact that Patrick Mahomes is way better than either of us at being a quarterback, I can say that any painting I've ever done isn't as good as the Mona Lisa.

A better quarterback wins games. What does a better painting do—win art contests? Judged by what objective criteria? Art doesn't have rules the way football does. A painting can't "win at being art"; each individual audience member either likes it or they don't.

> A better quarterback wins games.

Well, no, a better quarterback is just a member of a team. They don't dictate whether the team wins or not, they just contribute to it if they are good. Though we can't say whether a given quarterback is good or not because we don't have objective criteria to determine that. It's all relative and arbitrary - as I'm sure you'd agree with.

> What does a better painting do—win art contests?

Maybe? Why not?

> Judged by what objective criteria? Art doesn't have rules the way football does.

Football rules are arbitrary criteria, not objective.

> A painting can't "win at being art";

Why not? The Mona Lisa has the most viewers so maybe that means it is the best art?

There are many artists whose work was 'objectively' (that is, by consensus) bad until later when it became objectively good.

Some elements of beauty are objective. As in, they are hardwired into our brains.

Some cities are more beautiful than others. Prague is more beautiful than Detroit.

And yet, it's not as clear cut as that. There is some hardwired stuff in our brains (see e.g. the "bouba / kiki" effect [0]) but most people will agree that what is considered pretty, good, etc is cultural, not to mention changing over time - like architecture trends as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but also painting styles.

That said, a few posts back a commenter mentioned that the Mona Lisa is "objectively better" than anything they made; while I won't comment on aesthetics and appreciation, the assertion that the artist is more skilled in the arts than the poster is something definitely objectively true, simply because of education and experience. That's no guarantee that the outcome is better, but still.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

To your point, though, I think as you look around at McMansions and Wal-Mart there's nothing architecturally redeeming about those structures besides efficiency in building and internal climate control. We know the architectural styles are bad and there are (again to your point about skill) scientific ways we can measure this (Ann Sussman's work).

If you look at historical architecture patterns (mostly pre-WWI) they mirror how art has changed over time.

It's not that Impressionism came about and Renaissance became shit, it's that both are good and important stylistic contributions.

It's not that Gothic architecture came about then all the Romanesque stuff sucked. Both were good and unique.

We run into the same problem as "all art is equal" when we tend to express the belief that because we live in the time period we're complaining about that if only we waited a few hundred years we would recognize that our current building patterns are actually really good. That's just not the case.

What would you say to an idiosyncratic person who prefers Detroit to Prague? "Actually most people disagree because of their brains?" That hardly makes the Detroit-liker's opinion "incorrect."

Eh, I think as always is still just comes down to resource contention right at the root of the issues. We still all monk e, some things will never change.

> Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons.

I dunno. At the first problem, impeding cyclists that want to merge into a walkway zooming at 20mph without paying enough attention to even see their lane is ending is a quite good reason.

Maybe he should be asking for some "cyclist-calming" measure instead, so they will slow down before not being able to make into the walkway.

There’s a huge difference between “impeding” and “causing you to fucking crash”.

Like, what an insane take.

Solution then is to add slowing features uphill from the cut over.

"We'll fix our hardware bugs in software" :)

Sort of suggested by the article. The article mentions putting information up, so that bikers will not be surprised.

The curvet is not causing crash. Bikes have ability to slow down or even stop.

I'm not inclined to be sympathetic to cyclists, but the bike-murdering signpost right there is all the proof I need that there are people who hate them more than I do and that at least one of those people works in city government. I winced. It might actually be a felony, that act of transportation engineering. I'd at least listen to the prosecutor's theory of the crime.

It feels like zooming when you bicycle in those tight spaces at 9-12 km/h, which is a third of what you calld zooming. The point is that a collision at 12 km/h is pretty ok. The problem is that cyclists are always close to pedestrians so it feels unsafe even at slow speeds. The accident rate between cyclists and pedestrians are incredibly low so it is not really dangerous, but it feels like it.

The article explicitly says cyclists crash there going at ~30 km/h.

Crashes are another thing, cars going 100 mph here is probably proportionally the same as the people trying to take that at 30 km/h. The streetview of the location makes it even worse than I thought especially looking at the history of the spot.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/EcG7qKSNDDHjzWJk9

Hum... The bike lane seems to be designed to fill space and make the street run better, instead of being designed for being useful for riding bikes.

I can see why people get angry about it. But still, the article is asking for the wrong solution. And yeah, the people crashing on that fence at 30 km/h would just die hit by a car a few meters down if the article's fix was implemented.

What I read when I read about the bicycle lane is that bike lanes were a requirement, the user persona was assigned to a casual recreational rider on a small low speed recreational (<24" wheels) (aka kids under 10), when in reality, that hill is used by a road cyclist commuter, would only be used by a confident cyclist that close to traffic on that steepb of hill.

It's not that the traffic engineer didn't care about a quality product, they didn't care to research who bikes (and have car brain), and have never traveled out of the US, to the Netherlands, or met a cyclist.

Yeah, my first reaction was "you should not move onto the sidewalk if you cant break and control the speed". Unless it is some kind of abandoned place where no one ever walks anyway.

I am cyclist by the way. It is just that looking at picture, it is not exactly super difficult turn, if you have those breaks.

Directing bicycles on to the sidewalk doesn't even make sense in the first place. It just makes for pedestrian conflicts, difficult maneuvers, and automobile drivers are definitely not looking for cyclists on the sidewalk.

But is that even true? My mid-tier appliances are all great and I love my IKEA furniture. Some things suck some of the time. Other things don't.

Related to the Japan thing, but one thing they don't do well is avoiding harsh white lights. It's far more common to find unpleasant fluorescent or LED lighting there than the US. The idea that warmer (or even dimmer) lights are preferable in most situations isn't a widespread opinion there apparently.

IMO, the switch from sodium lamps to LED lamps (one of the article's gripes) was for a good reason: lower use of electricity. I also happen to think that the light from sodium lamps looked ugly--much worse than a properly working LED lamp--but maybe that's a personal opinion. (I would also question the study that "showed" white light reduced melatonin production, but that's a different issue.)

(Re "properly working LED": apparently many street lamps in the US were built by a single company, and that company's bulbs are prone to turning purple over time. But that wasn't a reason not to make the switch back when, because at the time no one knew this would happen. It's being fixed now by replacing the purple bulbs with better quality LED bulbs.)

They might not be good reasons to you, but that is not the same thing as not caring. If someone cooks something that without salt for health reasons, that doesn't mean they don't care about salt as much as me.

But street lights don't have to use harsh 3000 kelvin LEDs, there are warm light LEDs (2400-2700 kelvin). For example, these lights are widely available for home, yet most people just buy the 3000K LED bulbs because (IME) it doesn't occur to them that there is a strong aesthetic (and health) difference between these colors. i.e. They don't care.

Besides the color temperature, they are way too bright. It's like daylight in front of my house since they changed the lamps.

A lot of America especially has an issue with too many lights, and the lights themselves are too bright relative to the population. Found what I thought was a cool image on Wikipedia Commons while searching the subject that has the light use relative to the population density. Green's lots of light use, red is lots of population density. America's bright green light use. Yellow is fairly equivalent light use to population density. [1]

[1] Light Use vs Population Density, WP Commons, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Earth_li...

They shine through my windows at night and are truly horrific.

They’re down the entire alleyway behind my place, and a walk to the grocery store at 7pm during the winter makes your body and mind think it’s sunrise.

It's probably getting better but the amber-colored LEDs used to be rather inefficient. I've also heard that white lighting can slightly improve reaction times of those in traffic and leads to slightly clearer captures for security cameras. I personally think these benefits do not outweigh how extremely ugly and unwelcoming they are, but "city officials just don't care" is not what led to the adoption of white LED street lighting at all.

A lot of wildlife, like birds, bats, insects etc. are really confused by white light. There are some nordic countries which are experimenting with red street lights in outer districts which are showing great promise. (Don't have a reference atm but should be googleable)

> The author points to Japan to illustrate that you do get measurably better results when people habitually try to do good work

People in Japan habitually kill themselves because of their stupid work culture. Maybe that's not the best example.

That’s not limited to Japan.

And besides it’s a strange take to argue that you shouldn’t acknowledge good thing A because unrelated thing B is bad there.

Your rebuttal is dated. Suicide rates have been steadily declining in Japan and rising in the West to the point where suicides are actually less common in Japan than they are in the US currently. So perhaps it is a good example.

It’s possible to install warm colored LEDs with very little blue light output though. You get all those benefits without giving up the more-suitable-for-night sodium light spectral benefits.

Agree, but it's more expensive and less energy efficient[1]. Personally, that seems worth it to me [EDIT: "it" being using slightly less efficient lights that are more comfortable for people], but thats a difference in values not in how much I "care" about the problem...

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-....

> that seems worth it to me

How much more energy efficient is it? If it's a tiny efficiency gain vs the negative effects of blue heavy white light then I would suggest it's a bad tradeoff. Some studies have suggested that blue light doesn't affect sleep [1] but the psychological effects of cold vs warm light has been used by lighting designers for decades. Cold light is less comfortable and discourages hanging around, the positive spin is "energizing", it's often used in supermarkets and budget stores that value faster browsing, and impulsive decisions under a greater feeling of urgency. Warm light has a relaxing effect and is used, for example, in luxury stores and restaurants where people are intended to take their time. [2] For outdoor areas where people are intended to enjoy relaxing after dark activities warmer light would be far superior an experience than colder light.

1. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/blue-light-may-not... 2. https://www.tcpi.com/how-lights-impacts-psychology-mood-in-r...

sure - for your house. For lights all over the city that will be lasting years?

OK but blinding blue LEDs are most common substitutes, because it's the lazy default, and because people do not care. That's the point of the article.

Blue-white LEDs have become the replacement for High Pressure Sodium [HPS] traffic lights because that's what the LED light companies have to sell. In the early years of the transition to LED streetlights they had to sell blue-white LED streetlights because warmer LEDs were not competitive with HPS on the basis of lumens-per-watt.

Most of the people who understood the advantages of blue-free amber HPS light over white metal halide lights retired, and this little tidbit of information didn't get passed to the next generation of city employees.

> and because people do not care.

People care, but they don't know why they hate the blue-white LED replacement lights. I've complained to the city about their new lights, but have not gotten any responses about why they haven't deployed LED lights with a safe spectrum of color.

This comment about unsafe blue-white headlights got a few upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42444111

Blue light is safer for cars - it gives slightly faster reaction times, and lower the chance of drivers falling asleep.

The problem is that for pedestrians, the reaction-time is irrelevant, they're butt-ugly, and plenty of people go on night walks because they can't sleep but want to.

Half of this article is basically about cities being overly car-centric.

I’m not well-read on the old lighting research, but I’ve come across some explanations for why humans actually do much better with amber outdoor lighting than white. One of these points relates to how our pupils expand and contract with the amount of light available.

In some ways, car-centric cities are like that because people don't care. "I'll just take my car, whatever". They don't care about traffic, pollution, accidents, etc.

Or maybe they care about getting to their destination in time and not wasting half a day just going from point A to point B on foot/by (shitty) public transportation, or they'll be fired.

Daily reminder that we live under capitalism where you're not allowed to just "take your time".

My impression was that HPS lighting became so widespread not because of the supposed advantages of its light spectrum, but because it was simply the most light-efficient technology available at that time. Here in Germany, only main/multilane streets requiring more lighting were using HPS, residential streets mostly had lamps with white fluorescent lights, so switching those to LEDs wasn't as much of a change. But still, I'm wondering: what about curtains, window blinds etc.? It's not as if people are forced to endure the intrusion of street lighting into their bedrooms?

Low pressure sodium lights were more efficient, but they emit a single wavelength of orange light. These lights were strongly disliked by people who liked to admire their car in the streetlights (I suppose).

> residential streets mostly had lamps with white fluorescent lights,

… they used CFLs? The spiral fluorescents were invented in the 1980’s, I guess. I speculate the residential street lights used mercury vapor bulbs, which had a longer expected lifespan than fluorescents.

> But still, I'm wondering: what about curtains, window blinds etc.?

You need a good blackout curtain to deal with light pollution through your window.

Decades ago, my junior college's parking lot was lit by low-pressure sodium lighting. I recall the light being an absolute monochrome yellow, to the point that you had to be careful to remember exactly where you parked your car, because you weren't going to find it by color.

I can't vouch for Germany, but there used to be long, high-output fluorescent tubes and fixtures for street lighting in the US. They seem to have largely disappeared by the 1980s. They weren't very common, but some cities used them. They tended to be used on main streets when I saw them.

> they used CFLs?

Nah, the lamps used (I assume) standard fluorescent tubes. Although honestly I don't know how widespread they were. They were (and still are in some areas) all over the place in Munich (and also e.g. here https://maps.app.goo.gl/M3RPqkN5MHZuPG7f7). Hamburg (https://maps.app.goo.gl/fPGfeEwWXtUGFnTL7) and Berlin (https://maps.app.goo.gl/kSemA2Md84AEJ9Py8) also have similar-looking ones.

> But still, I'm wondering: what about curtains, window blinds etc.? It's not as if people are forced to endure the intrusion of street lighting into their bedrooms?

Of course. But that's the problem -- now black-out curtains are required. And maybe you hate those because you really enjoy waking up with the sun streaming in, and now you have to wake up every morning in blackness until you go open the curtains.

The onus shouldn't be on the residents. It's the same as saying, sure it's noisy but why don't you just wear noise-canceling headphones all day long?

Government services exist to serve the people, not make the people work around them.

Here in Baltimore the city seems to have purchased a huge batch of defective LEDs that are actually purple. It’s disturbing when you encounter one.

Nitpick: "are actually purple" makes it sound like they came out of the factory purple, but they're actually changing from white to purple over time as the phosphor coating fails.

They'll be near-UV LEDs with a phosphor to produce white, high efficiency, low cost, but garbage long term.

Just to be clear, these are about 1-3 years old. So yes they probably weren't purple on the day they were installed, but this is a defect and not normal aging. https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/136nz3b/til_...

The city employee who bought them is probably a massive Ravens fan...

i mean who wouldn't be the way they're playing

Might be so that they don't interfere with a certain species of wildlife. We have deep blue ones near me that aren't visible by a protected bat species.

It happened in NC, too: https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2024/10/duke-universit...

Florida too. https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2023/08/28/need-to-r...

They’re purple (blue is the other option) because veins are harder to see under purple light. They’re used to deter drug use, from my understanding.

Edit: final clause

Not true, they're just defective and degraded quickly, resulting in the odd color.

The funny thing is, in my neck of Seattle (the city this post is complaining about), I've seen some of the harsh white LEDs that went in switched over to a warmer color. I remember being quite shocked when I pulled into a city-owned parking lot one night and realized that all of the lights around were all now a warmer color instead of the harsh white. The lights in my neighborhood also seem to have been switched over at some point. I suppose they're the tunable LEDs, but clearly someone here does care.

In my city they started turning off all streetlights at midnight outside of major driving lanes and active center areas.

It's weird and somewhat unnerving at first but brilliant. I'd argue road-wise it is possibly even safer because headlights work so much better when it's pitch black by virtue of the human eye having so much dynamic range.

Pedestrians can't miss cars as they're blasting light through the dark; cars can't miss bikes because even passive reflectors are blaring in the surrounding darkness; even pedestrians end up being more visible because of the higher contrast, cast shadows, and movement that conspire to make them plainly pop out like cardboard props or Doom 3 flashlight jumpscares.

And when you go out of the dark zone into a major axis that's bathed in light that feels warm and safe it's like everything is suddenly muted and flattened as if reality went through a low contrast sepia-tinted desaturation filter. You feel like you see better but everything is muddled together in the sameness of uniform lighting.

The experience is highly cognitively dissonant and counterintuitive.

WTF? What about pedestrians? Are they walking in full darkness?

This seems to be totally oriented to cars. I find American cities incredibly dark by night. Walking around feels too dark and unpleasant.

I'm don't see why this is downvoted, I think it's an honest and legitimate question. What are pedestrians supposed to do when there's no car passing them right this moment? Carry their own torch? Rely on ambient light from the moon and reflected from nearby lit streets? Are we assuming there's such a high volume of cars that there's never a gap? I'm genuinely confused.

Where I live, even with streetlights, most people I see walking after dark carry a torch.

It’s easier than ever to carry one.

Honest question: Do you mean that most pedestrians are actually using (not just carrying on their person) a torch while walking along lit streets? I have essentially never seen that where I live, except some joggers have lights attached to their clothing but that's just so others can see them better. I can't imagine street lighting in an urban/suburban area being so bad that that would be necessary. That's a terrible state of affairs which, in itself, is a gross anti-pedestrian move.

(Or did you just factiously mean that people have smart phones on them which can function as torches?)

Clearly you have lived your entire life in a city under streetlights.

Here, if you go the the pub at night as the streetlights are turned off at midnight, so you take a torch (your phone as a backup). Its perfectly commonplace. To suggest this is "anti-pedestrian" is a bit silly. Rather, it's anti-light pollution.

> except some joggers have lights attached to their clothing but that's just so others can see them better.

Yes, generally the purpose of the light is so others can see you.

My god, we spend all of our lives blasting lights into our eyes (some people call these lights "screens"), we've forgotten how to live without it!

I use the flashlight on my phone to flash at drivers to increase the likelihood that I am seen.

I mean I quite often see people holding a torch (or maybe a lit up phone) while they're walking.

I'm in an urban area, but it's not as well-lit as a downtown environment. There's street lights every 2-3 houses and they're not super bright.

I personally prefer this over a downtown-like bright environment since it makes it easier to sleep and the ambience is just better at night.

> Carry their own torch

You state this like it is a bad idea.

If you have a cell phone, you have a torch.

If you are walking in a place where there are cars, having a light on you is a great way to reduce your risk of being hit. So yes, you should absolutely be carrying a torch if you are walking near streets after dark. Nordic countries teach this in kindergarden.

When I'm crossing a street after dark, I always flash my torch at potentially oncoming cars. Even if I'm at a lit crosswalk.

If you are walking in a place without cars, then the place probably doesn't have the infra to provide street lighting. You may want a torch, depends on the phase of the moon and your comfort level with dim lighting.

You are starting an unrelated conversation.

This comment chain started with someone suggesting that in cities lighting be turned off almost everywhere, and someone replied that pedestrians won't be able to clearly see where they're going without a torch (and I agreed). Where I live, no pedestrian in a city would ever need to use a torch to see where they're going.

You've posted a couple of replies saying that pedestrians should carry a torch so that cars can see them. Well, maybe, maybe not. But that's a different matter.

> WTF? What about pedestrians? Are they walking in full darkness?

During a normal night, you get used to the darkness surprisingly fast, and if there even a slight sliver of moonlight, your eyes will within seconds adjust and let you see things again without trouble.

At least that's my experience growing up in the dark countryside in Sweden and seemingly retaining this as an adult, YMMV.

YMMV as you get older and lose that superpower.

What range/years are you specifically referring to? It seemingly is as good as ever, and I'm 32 now. I'm guessing that would start being around 40s, when the general eye-sight starts to decline?

I don't think there is a rule for that? At least not in my case. My eyesight got worse really fast out-of-nowhere when I was like, 15 years old? And since then it didn't change anymore. I got myopia, after a few years of too much computer screen (the old CRTs).

How old are you? Most people experience worsening eyesight mid 40s.

I'm currently 37, I hope it doesn't start to get worse again anytime soon. I never used glasses regularly, btw. Always had the impression that would weaken my eyes long-term.

While there was a suspicion of eyesight troubles in my late teens, it really kicked in during a period I was working on pretty crappy screens, that was in my late 20's. It's not much but enough to give me headaches when not wearing them.

Yep, right around your mid-40’s in my experience. Friends have said it started the day they woke up on their 40th birthday.

There’s a new-ish body of research that suggests aging is non-linear/happens in “cliffs,” and that the first big decline is mid-40s. Something to look forward to.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/15/1096799/aging-hi...

About the time you start needing reading glasses to see your phone or computer screen. Between 40-50 years for most people. You will develop an appreciation for the people who complain about small fonts and low-contrast color schemes. And yes, adapting to darkness takes longer.

> people who complain about small fonts and low-contrast color schemes.

I already do this at this point, so guessing that's a club I'm in already, even if my eye-sight is perfect :)

Well, I guess I'll report back in 10-20 years and I can finally have this confirmed for all of us.

It's not usually possible to reply to decades-old HN threads.

This is a car-centric ableist take.

Not everyone has excellent vision. In addition to those who are actually visually impaired, your eyesight simply gets worse as you get older even if you had perfect vision when you're young.

And even if you can adjust to the night, which is Moon and cloud-dependent anyway, that completely goes away every time a car goes past with its LED high beams.

LED lights have way more capacity to be directional. There's absolutely no reason why street lights can't mostly point down to light the street and sidewalks with minimal light pollution to any nearby houses.

> This is a car-centric ableist take.

Growing up on a island with 700 people where the most common mode of transportation is probably bicycle (besides walking, or possibly moped), it really isn't :) People are really eager to jump on the "ableist" accusation, aren't they?

> And even if you can adjust to the night, which is Moon and cloud-dependent anyway, that completely goes away every time a car goes past with its LED high beams.

It really doesn't, at least it didn't for me. It's true that for some seconds you'll see less, but your eyes will adjust faster after that than the initial adjustment when you go from a fully lit environment to unlit, even without direct moonlight.

I'm not arguing for completely dark cities, that'd be bananas. I was just giving another perspective about how we can (usually) adjust to darkness if we let our eyes be used to it. Of course we should have lights in cities so everyone (not just us with good night-sight) can navigate without issues.

I am night blind, among other things and cannot drive. If an area doesn't have street lights it's much more inaccessible to me, I become fully blind and I usually end up not going. Lights off is bad for me, end of story. Whether my ability to walk around at night is a factor here is a subjective decision. I understand people in my situation are a minority.

Wouldn’t a headlamp or a flashlight achieve the same purpose?

> During a normal night, you get used to the darkness surprisingly fast,

Then a car drives past and your sight instantly adjusts to that, but takes several minutes to adjust back. Then you're stuck in subjective total darkness for a while.

Or, if you're in an area with mixed lighting (e.g. you walk past a house that incidentally lights part of the street) then your eyes can never adjust and you have to walk through pools of total darkness. I know this experience from rare situations where a few streetlights go out in a row, and it's not as easy as you just portrayed it.

> At least that's my experience growing up in the dark countryside in Sweden

That's fair enough IMO. I don't think it's feasible or helpful to plaster every centimetre of every rural road in street lighting. But the comment we're replying to suggested removing them in cities "outside of ... active center areas". That's a different matter.

Also it's terrifying for safety; way too easy to assault someone in complete darkness.

Completely the opposite.

Numerous studies show crime goes down when streetlights are turned off.

Simply put, you don't get scrotes hanging about in groups up to no good without lights, and anybody who is walking around is carrying a torch, making it obvious what they are doing (e.g. if you are breaking into a house, needing a torch instead of using a streetlight makes it obvious to everybody what you are doing).

No to mention a lack of streetlights makes if harder for somebody to hide in the shadows.

The real question to ask, is why people like yourself are 'terrified' [sic] of the dark. Statistics show the real truth of what you should be worried about.

> The real question to ask, is why people like yourself are 'terrified' [sic] of the dark.

Statistics show that people don't care about statistics but about confirmation bias and the media is eager to feed it.

I suspect your terror comes from lack of familiarity with natural light outdoors, and is a product of always having the lights on plus not being out of a house often.

The night is not 'complete darkness', we can generally see fairly well.

Also, I suspect your presumption on assault risk and assault rates comes from media, which is designed around building fear. Fear sells.

So I agree that you find the natural world terrifying, I just wish you didn't. Because the natural world is what we are fit for.

> Because the natural world is what we are fit for.

Good thing we live in cities then!

Let's put it this way. The fear is someone hiding in the shadows to jump a person, and then dragging the victim back into the shadows.

Bright lights on the street create more shadows. All you have to do is step out of the streetlight and no-one will see you, because the light-level contrast between the lit street and the surrounding space.

If there aren't any streetlights, so the surrounding space has the same illumination as the roadway, then that space is more present in more passerby's visual awareness.

So your proposed solution, "Streelights on every street" actually increases the risk you are so concerned about.

Get a flashlight?

I'm a regular outdoor runner and also an extreme morning person, so I'm often out running at like 3 AM, and it is absolutely not safer to be in complete darkness. Surfaces are not perfectly uniform and unobstructed and the ambient light from the atmosphere and surrounding city, even dead in the center of a major metro area, is nowhere near enough to see everything you might hit. I've tripped many times and even broken my hand before. It is effectively impossible to ever go full speed.

if you're out running at night, perhaps you should also be carrying some lights? both to help you see your environment and to help others see you.

I run at night on trails (during the summer, when it's too hot to run during the day). I wear a headlamp, and don't trip any more than I do in the day--despite the fact that the trails have rocks and roots. The only issue I have is that because the headlamp is inches from my eyes, shadows are almost invisible.

> The experience is highly cognitively dissonant and counterintuitive.

Hitting the next homeless person and throwing them 10 meter in the space will be quite the experience.

Honestly, this is not shitty experience because of regulation, this is just councils cutting costs everywhere except their salaries. Los Angeles these last couple days has showed what it means to do that. You'll literally be on fire some day.

I'm glad that darkness is respected in some places. The need to live in constant light is, to me, unnerving. Light pollution, like noise pollution, creates a myopic dome of sensory oblivion, separating us from experiencing the sounds of nature, the splendor the night sky, the emotions of isolation. I think we'd be better off with a nightly reminder of the natural world and expansive universe beyond our city block.

People are afraid of the darkness.

I really wish that wasn't the case. But removing lights is an uphill battle powered by irrational arguments and doomed to failure even on the cases where it's clearly the best option.

Even dimming the lights is hard.

I've grudgingly come to admit that also people who don't have great vision love bright lighting. I can usually see perfectly well by starlight, but that's not the case for everyone.

I was once in the US Navy, and stood many a bridge watch. When it got dark, all outside lights except for the navigation lights (red light on port bow, green on starboard bow, a white light up top and another white light on the stern). And on the bridge, we used only dim red lights, to avoid affecting our night vision. None of the navigation lights was easily visible from the bridge. And you could see reasonably well, even on a cloudy night.

I walk a lot and support this, even though I am not convinced it makes me more visible when not in front of the headlights. Typically, the danger happens when walking on the sidewalk perpendicular to a road. I can see the car, they cannot see me until I'm a few feet in to the crosswalk when I'm not lit up by a street light.

Where I come from they did change the lights to LEDs, but they turn off 2/3rds or 3/4ths of them after midnight; still enough light to navigate, but much less power usage and light pollution. There's a bike lane outside of town whose lights were motion activated, iirc that was installed about 20 years ago.

In the netherlands I have seen green street lights with motion sensors. Only on smaller streets and pedestrian paths, though.

That sounds cool.

Any way to test my light's spectrum? e.g. a cheap home spectrometer

Take a photo

Implies no white balance shenanigans

A sheet of paper will generally manage ok for white balance calibration. A 3 tone grey card would be better, but a single, simple white will suffice

Use a CD disk - really - it disperses light similarly to a dispersive prism. You can then see and estimate the amount of red, blue and green in a light. It works very well if you just want to check blue light sources at night. And you can even make a DIY spectrometer with it! https://youtu.be/p3MzQ1OF3lk

In my town, when they replaced the old mercury arc and high pressure sodium lights, they picked a pleasing neutral white for the side streets that's far better than the bluish-white mercury arcs they replaced, while using 40 watts each instead of 175. Win-win in my book.

The main streets have a different LED with a slight yellow cast, but not the ugly orange of high pressure sodium. Yes, we can have nice LED street lighting.

it is not exactly a huge secret that SDOT often would rather do weird compromises on a bike lane than inconvenience cars slightly. The NACTO guides don't really have anything on grades into turns, and the AASHTO and FHWA are notoriously not bike friendly.

This particular lane was done in 2018. https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs...

You can actually see the diagram here: https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/Maintenan...

The entire reason it goes up onto the multi-use-trail to connect to Alki Trail, is because that leaves room for a right turn lane; whereas, if Seattle narrowed the two lanes to nine feet, which is a perfectly fine width on an urban street according to AASHTO, then you could have an actual protected bike lane all the way through the intersection without any sort of shallow curve.

I don't understand how they're safer, because locally they've installed a few and they're already dying, and dying by strobing on and off at about 1Hz, which makes it quite hard to drive through. They're so bright that this failure mode is like a disco strobe light.

This failure is so severe that regardless of how it might be elsewhere, to me it seems like the people who decided to use these LED lights and continue to advocate for them really don't care about people.

anedcote but i've been using leds for 8 years+ now and there's big variance in such behavior between manufacturers.

Three led lights in my flat went within 3 months after I moved in. But some time ago I had an incandescent bulb that lived for years.

With bulb it depends on how/how often you power cycle. A good way to extend its life is to not power cycle it and to underpower it. Dimming a bulb also saves electricity and easier on the eyes.

With LED it is up to manufacturer. People say LEDs are cheaper but those leds are exactly the ones you have to keep buying. And good LED prices can go pretty high compared to bulbs.

On the one hand you have your Anne site, on the other hand there’s decades of data.

And only one of them is directly pertinent. None of the "decades of data" takes into account correct exploitation. But all talks about leds are about perfect spherical cow in vacuum that doesn't exist for average consumer

I am sure leds technically do live longer than bulbs. But the difference is not significant enough in real life.

Look up Dubai Philips LEDs. The problem with most consumer LEDs is that they are overdriven, so their life is short. In Dubai, the Sheikh basically mandated that the bulbs need to be underdriven, so the lifetime is about 25x that of incandescents. They only deliver about 1/4 the power to the individual “filament” that most similar Philips lamps would at the same light output.

https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...

That is interesting.

Leds themselves are often fine for long time. It is the circuits they are powered by that are very often crap, poorly designed, specified, too cheap. So heat can kill it. Or like my last cheap powerful bulb in kitchen that flickers when I have certain controlled resistive loads on.

I wonder how many tests are run in actual enclosures for example. Which for example might not dissipate enough heat.

One of the dead lights that died was above the stove so could be heat related. Other 2 maybe just bad circuits...

I think it is too expensive to run tests in real life changing conditions

Since only apparently anecdotes count as pertinent for you, here’s one. I haven’t bought a bulb in over 12 years. My LEDs have simply not gone out. I had changed bulbs nearly every 6 months before that.

Maybe spring the extra couple of dollars and get high quality LEDs.

Not anecdotes but practical data. Yes if you power cycle tungsten all the time at maximum brightness they will not live long (when I was a kid we used them this way and changed them often). Read my comment about correct exploitation

We essentially have a lifetime supply of LEDs because we label each one with the date and refund from Amazon when they don’t last the full warranty, which none of them do.

People assumed that LEDs would last forever because the crystals essentially do, but the encasement and all of the heat issues you have to deal with for the electronics makes that pointless.

Neat approach. I am not organized enough for that so I just buy whatever crappy leds ikea sells today.

The problem is almost never the LEDs themselves, but the power supply.

Sure, the actual LEDs might have a 50000 hour lifetime, but the crappy power supply they got from the lowest bidder and packaged with woefully inadequate thermal dissipation dies after a tiny fraction of that.

So... somebody responsible for the power supplies does not care? ;)

They care about being the cheapest option on Amazon, so that you will care about buying it. :)

And part of the reason for that is compatibility with existing light fixtures using legacy sockets designed 150 years ago at the dawn of electrification for incandescent bulbs, where the part dissipating the most heat was the light emitting element itself, and not whatever lays between it and the mains power source. If the customer doesn't want to pay for a slightly more expensive LED lightbulb, they sure as hell won't pay for a whole new fixture specifically designed around LED technology that will last forever.

This is anecdata, but I haven't replaced a single LED bulb since I bought the current set ~7 years ago, and it's nothing fancy, just basic IKEA stuff.

> But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.

He didn't say everyone was stupid. He said that no body cares. There is a very big difference between the two.

I tend to agree with him. Yes we can find examples, most commonly when it comes to safety standards, where there are systems in place that prevent the really bad stuff from happening. But why do those systems and checks need to be put into place? Because a lot of people simply do not care and would cut corners if their jobs didn't depend on them following the standards.

The problem with broad sweeping generalizations is that they never apply to all individual cases. It doesn't change the fact that the broad generalization is, well, broadly and generally true. Most people don't care about almost anything other than getting home to their families or pets. Most people will even happily admit that. It's not even that they're lazy necessarily (though a few people are). It's that they are working in what is, to them, "just a job / pay cheque." That's not even always a problem. It's just a fact of life that is as true as taxes and death. It's worth acknowledging because it is something that needs to be accounted for after identifying or choosing your fault tolerances. The systems and standards that you cite are the result of acknowledging this fact of reality.

The ones in the article clearly go against the best principles at https://www.savingourstars.org/ though.

LEDs last longer, but cities took the savings to add even more blue light, so the lifetime doesn’t matter.

The light pollution has absolutely increased because of the amount of LEDs that have been installed. This is well documented.

Also, the sodium line spectrum is easy to filter out for astronomy, broad spectrum blue LEDs add light pollution there.

Except he is talking about the color of the LEDs. Blue LEDs are terrible, just put orange ones. Has nothing to do with the fact that it's LEDs or hallogen.

I'm a big bike lane design nerd: that bike lane design absolutely sucks, and in more ways than the author mentions. The person designing it didn't care.

> There are enormous design standards [..]

I would suggest that "design standards" do not always make things uniformly better, certainly not for end users.

Go look into the design standards used in The Netherlands.

https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl18004/chap03.cfm gives a decent overview of some of those things. They are much better for end users because someone over there cared. Whomever designed the ones in the article clearly does not.

> They are much better for end users because someone over there cared. Whomever designed the ones in the article clearly does not

This is kind of my point, at a very general level the statement "$thing follows design standards" may or may not mean that $thing is actually better for users.

you guys are smarter than that.

in our civilization people observe and tell.

all that research is wonderful and helpful but how many percent of people can do that, can follow that, know where to find it, have an environment that enables them to get observations to the responsible people and how many of those have the trust to do that?

it doesn't matter how smart you are, any colony dies without enough people that fall into above "description".

and those people don't have to fall into that description, but smarter people rather figure out ......

While you're right on the LED part, this bike lanes is obviously misdesigned.. I have a similar one next to my house and fell from my bicycle due to its poor design, some French civil engineer also don't care :-(

We are starting to see some in my city in the US and while that is exciting and appreciated, many of them are terrible to ride on. There is one near my house that is so full of lane changes and curves, you really can do much more than 7mpg (walking speed). For some reason, they saw fit to make the bike lane weave in and out of the parallel parking? It's so bizarre and awkward that I'd rather just ride with the traffic in the street like we used to since that invokes less anxiety.

The bike ramp example was insane to me. OF COURSE it's not built so cyclists can zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour without slowing down. That's how you turn a pedestrian into paste.

Really, you should be dismounting and walking your bike onto the sidewalk, but if you're going to ride your bike up that ramp, absolutely do not do it so quickly that you risk crashing.

> this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research

It was a rant not a thesis. I get frustrated by a lot of what he talks about too and many of them could be made better and without much cost. It might even be a call to action, shine a light on the nonsense so people do better next time (hopeful thought).

One thing I want to point out is that white light has worse effect on light pollution than warmer light, at least as far as astronomy goes. If you ever go to a stargazing party you'll notice everyone uses red flashlights if they need to see anything in the dark because it doesn't drown out the starlight.

That's because the warmer the light, the less it is affected by Rayleigh scattering. In other words, shorter wavelength (i.e., bluer) light scatters more. This is the same reason that the sky is blue.

Animals are also more sensitive/more attracted to bluer light. These harsh white LED street lamps are a death sentence for moth species.

I would even argue that the current design of the bike line is better than the one suggested by the author.

It forces the biker to slow down and reduces the collision risks with others in the line.

It is selfish to think only about the biker coming from the hill. The biker that thinks it is okay to drive 20mph in that situation.

You can accomplish both with the right design.

By not merging the cycling and walkway, sure. That would be a better design.

But presumably real world limitations forced them to merge the two at this point, and forcing cyclists to slow before the merge is of obvious benefit to the safety of pedestrians and cyclists. Not to mention that road construction crews can't fabricate an infinite array of curbs and affordances as a simple practical limitation.

As others have cited, the author seems to have an "everything is an easy fix" perspective to the world, at least when viewed as their own requirements and needs being the only consideration. In reality, loads of people care immensely about all the things that they think are easy fixes, but the fixes aren't nearly as easy as they think. Like, anyone who has ever listened to a user tell them how their app could be made much better knows this, when all of their suggestions would diminish usability for almost every other user.

Yeah, that's why we put sharp turns at the bottom of roads too.

It is selfish to only think about the driver coming from the hill. The driver that thinks it is okay to drive 45mph in that situation.

Do you see the irony of your statement.

We put sharp turns at the end of roads.

If you have a high-speed road merging into a slow one without some indication that it's ending and a sharp turn at the end, you have a road that kills people.

[flagged]

Ok for LEDs and your general point but for the bike lane situation you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot : It's either non-standard compliant bike lane, which is a problem, or it is standard compliant and then it means that the standard is a broad, inflexible set of rules dictated from the top which is either too complicated for people in charge of the implementation or leaves them no room to adapt to a special case... or probably do not incentivize the implementers to think about what they are doing, all of which is a also a problem.

Maybe they would rather not have bikers bombing onto the sidewalk at 20 mph when they are going to be sharing that space with pedestrians. A sharp turn is a good way to prevent that. I assume there are several "bike lane ends" signs here, though, which should be an indication to slow down.

Imagine if you were talking about a road doing this for no reason. The engineers care about how fast you can go in a car around town, not bikes. You can't argue bike lanes get the same amount of care/effort as roads.

Roads do this all the time "for no reason." Plenty of neighborhoods have very sharp curves to get drivers to slow down. This is one of many "traffic calming" techniques.

Also, I'm not sure where you got the idea that engineers don't care about the speeds of bikes (especially around pedestrians).

The example by the author is an unsafe one. You think putting unsafe sharp curves at the bottom of hills for cars is acceptable?

Your example is good, and the matching example of a bike lane is the opposite of what was shown in the article.

> You think putting unsafe sharp curves at the bottom of hills for cars is acceptable?

Yes, it is absolutely acceptable and it happens all the time in road design. It happens specifically because people (apparently in all vehicle types) will speed on the long straightaway down the hill into whatever comes next. Many, many suburban areas with hills will have sharp curves or T-intersections at the bottom of hills as a matter of course and it does work at slowing down the traffic going down the hill.

If you look at street view on the actual road, that is exactly this situation: a very straight road with a lot of visibility, leading toward a very long and complicated intersection where everyone needs to pay attention and go slowly. Nobody traveling a reasonable speed on a bike will be surprised by that turn since they can all see it coming for literally a mile.

I assume the alternatives to this specific merge are either:

* Merge the bikes into the car traffic and pray to god that they obey traffic signals at the upcoming intersection (we all know this isn't happening), while also accepting that they accelerate very slowly compared to cars.

* Set up a dedicated bike lane with dedicated signals (which is very expensive).

The engineers here clearly opted to instead merge the bike traffic with the pedestrian traffic through that intersection so that the existing pedestrian signals apply to them. You can see that the bike lane continues after this intersection, so they literally just did this to handle the intersection.

TFA on this point reads like "cyclist (or illegal moped user) doesn't want to be slowed down and doesn't care about anyone else."

> Yes, it is absolutely acceptable and it happens all the time in road design.

Aren't there usually signs indicating the maximum safe speed when that sort of thing happens? We don't have context here but I doubt there is a sign telling bikers that they should slow down. And aren't roads in general much larger and easier to see from far away, vs this tiny little ramp? You also haven't explained why the big curb is vertical instead of sloped, or why the street sign needs to be where it is. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this thing is designed as a fuck you to bikers who don't obey the rules. We simply don't design roads that way, where it's designed to make you crash if you deviate from the standard even a bit.

We absolutely do design roads for all kinds of people to make you crash if you do not follow them. In fact, on pretty much all roads, you will crash if you decide not to follow the road, and frequently you will crash into a tree or a building. Drivers generally see this kind of design and complain about it but slow the hell down. Cyclists seem to be the same.

There is a sign ahead of this ramp saying in very big letters "BIKE LANE ENDS." It's up to the bikers to decide how they want to use that information. The sign, the ramp, and the end of the bollards marking the bike lane are visible at quite a long distance.

As for the street sign, it's a street sign. It's where the street is. It also tells you exactly where to use Google street view to get full context.

If you look at the street view (https://maps.app.goo.gl/Li9FSf29kXJWJLxW8), you'll see that it's been redesigned since the picture in the post. The current street view picture is from Feb 2023; the picture in the blog post also appears to be from street view (given the translucent quadrilateral near the fence) but presumably from before 2023. So...it appears that the bike lane was redesigned in a way that reflects two of my biggest complaints that were based on the outdated picture. Doesn't that sort of vindicate what I was saying? Why did they change it if the original design was ok? Like why didn't they do it the right way in the first place?

The sharpness of the corner is the same, which is TFA's real biggest complaint. Yours may have been the sign.

The context is even worse than the bike ramp. The bike lane dumps directly onto a sidewalk, which is not really bikeable anyway with the impending complicated street crossings that require stopping to push a button to get a crosswalk against a very confusing intersection across right-turning traffic onto a motorway on-ramp. Or stay on the street and shoot directly into a lane of traffic, and hope to find a gap big enough to cut left across the lane before it turns into a highway on-ramp.

Bikes has a thing called breaks. You are not helpless on the bike and if you are, you are really behind the maintenance.

And yes, roads for cars are intentionally build in a ways that makes high speed obviously unsafe at places.

Fair enough.

On a side note, I would personally avoid sharing the sidewalk with pedestrians, keep my speed and remain on the road. I know it's legal in my country to bike on (not high-speed) road even if there is a bike lane available. I'd rather share space with the plentiful, the cars, and have them slow down a bit, which cost them nothing, than bothering pedestrians.

Yes, the less sharp angle of the described bike-lane would imply that biker can get into the sidewalk in high speed without issue and harm a pedestrian easier.

Yeah, that's why when pedestrians have to cross where cars are that there is always a stop sign to make sure their high speed won't harm a pedestrian /sarcasm.

…we do put stop lights at pedestrian crossings on high-speed streets. They look like this: http://www.pedbikesafe.org/PEDSAFE/cm_images/PedHyb1.png

Hawaii Big Island does care about light pollution - for the sake of astronomical observatories. They use yellow low pressure sodium light. Yellow is dispersed less by air. The energy efficiency of low pressure sodium bulbs is also high, comparable or higher than most LEDs.

LEDs come in multiple color temperatures. It’s possible to install led streetlights that don’t suck.

Yes that bike lane follows some sort of standard. Still sucks.

DMV sucks. Know what doesn’t suck? AAA DMV services.

I think you’re right though. It’s not that people don’t care. It’s that we’ve painted ourselves into a corner of suck and we don’t know how to get out.

>But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.

Well thanks to all the replies below to prove may be he is not assuming it's because everyone is stupid.

I think this reply also amplifies what the author was saying. Just because the standard is like this and everyone is following the standard doesn't mean the standard is good.

This post is massive copium.

If you can't take a look around the U.S. and see that cynicism and apathy are running wild here, then you are either deceiving yourself or you live in an area that hasn't experienced collapse acceleration yet.

I think spending a week in Japan you would see what the author is talking about, they care, we (USA) dont.

There are also LED lights that are more pleasant to look at and don't blind you.

OP's point stands: nobody cares. Nobody even thought about it for a minute. Everything are items in a spreadsheet.

Took me less than a minute to ask a lady in the lights store I visited two months ago to sell me softer, more yellow, LED lights. I still save a ton of electricity but my lights are not blinding me. This awful bright-blue-ish white light is bad for our brains btw, but that's a much bigger topic that I will not engage in.

Thanks for this. My parent's neighborhood has these purple lights and they are terrible. I never cared enough to do even the slightest bit of to understand why this problem is the way it is, until your comment.

It’s* ironic, because you don’t even seem to understand his argument and lazily disputed the LED part which isn’t even remotely what he’s complaining about.

But, good job bruh, you defeated a strawman. Super proud of you.

Thanks grant!

Also, the Wikipedia link he points to has 2 references from the same research team the latest of which is over a decade old.

If white LED lights were so awful you’d imagine at least somebody would have done a decent, fairly cheap paper to show the negative impacts in the last decade where the uptake of LED street lights has been so widespread.

No, I can't imagine that because again, nobody cares.

You are demonstrating the problem very clearly btw: you assume people would have cared and that's why nothing was done.

Which is a puzzling thing to say. Because clearly, the people who care have no power.

LEDs produce trash light and I'm certain it'll eventually be linked to serious damage to human eyesight. Strobing alone is a nightmare, not to mention color temp like prison yard blue in street lights and car headlights.

I live in the Netherlands, in the burbs, and have to cycle a lot. That picture of a bike ramp... I can feel it. Whatever that document you googled says, it's wrong, if it justifies building ramps like that. That ramp is bad. There's no two ways about it.

But, responding to this particular example is missing the point of the article. Let me, for a moment, agree with you, and say that the ramp is within acceptable parameters: still, the author complains about a more general phenomenon, a lot of aspects of this phenomenon are very relatable. And it doesn't have to manifest itself uniformly and similarly everywhere in every detail.

For example, suburban houses in the Netherlands really show people care about the neighborhood. The want things to be nice. Windowsills are always decorated, have some art displayed in the windows, just for the passerby to enjoy. People mostly care to pick up after their dogs and to generally not litter. People even invest into community playgrounds, community garden patches etc. Life is good, at least in this respect.

But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light. It's a convention of sorts, that people understand without saying anything out loud. Do the absolute minimum, waste a lot of time doing nothing of value, don't rock the boat. And it is, as the author says, demoralizing. It makes my blood boil when defects discovered in our product, and instead of being fixed they get documented in a bottomless pit of our multi-thousands pages PDF manual, and the product is shipped regardless. A lot of these defects resulted not from honest mistakes, but from a desire to do as little work as possible, and to do only the "pleasant" part of the work: programmers prefer writing new code to fixing existing code. Testing is for wimps. Adding more stuff without fixing existing problems results in simply having more problems.

* * *

Now, how to make people care?--I don't know. I know of some things that worked, but they have bad side-effects (religion works, but sometimes it detracts into killing a lot of people, communism works, as in kibbutzim, but then it loses momentum, and is very prone to be exploited by external forces also, doesn't work on a large scale.)

>But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light.

In your country this starts way back in middle school, where this phenomenon is worse than I've seen in any other place. It would be incredibly surprising if this suddenly changed in the workplace when it's all people have ever known.

As long as the culture doesn't change at that age, there's no hope for changing it later in life.

That's unsettling :( My son is in second grade now, so I haven't been exposed to the middle school realities yet. Thanks for the warning!

https://blogs.transparent.com/dutch/untranslatable-dutch-wor...

There's a large amount of peer pressure to idolize scraping by, and against actually doing your best and putting in effort. While this exists in certain other places too (see classic "jock vs nerd" Hollywood stereotypes), nowhere is it as widespread. Moreso than the intensity - which isn't particularly severe, in the sense that e.g. serious bullying isn't more common than in compare countries - it's how institutional it is that sets it apart, even among a lot of kids who have the potential to do very well and go places if they'd put in a little effort.

Of course YMMV and these things have a large degree of local variance, but there's a reason the linked term exists as a cultural phenemonon there.

Everyone defends stupid decisions because they comply with existing standards and no curb is above the law. That doesn't change the fact that it's a bad design, and ain't nobody got the time to file an exemption appeal.

He does not care

> Don’t take anything here too seriously.

I’m not trying to sound snarky at all but I really do think you should reread the first paragraph of the article.

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