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.
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.
This seems to be totally oriented to cars. I find American cities incredibly dark by night. Walking around feels too dark and unpleasant.
It’s easier than ever to carry one.
(Or did you just factiously mean that people have smart phones on them which can function as torches?)
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/15/1096799/aging-hi...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Statistics show that people don't care about statistics but about confirmation bias and the media is eager to feed it.
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.
Good thing we live in cities then!
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.
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 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.
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
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.
Daily reminder that we live under capitalism where you're not allowed to just "take your time".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: final clause
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-....
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...
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.