Pretty interesting.
They don’t support this claim about led’s, and many groups are concerned about harsh cool light interrupting circadian rhythms. They’re also hideous.
Most LED streetlights replaced sodium vapor lights, though, which produce the sickliest, most horrible orange color known to humanity. Just about any LED is an improvement over those.
It's hard to think of a more normal sense of the word "orange" than "emitting and/or reflecting predominantly wavelengths between 590 and 620 nm." I guess you could argue that sodium is close enough to that lower edge to be yellow?
There were articles a few years back stating that the blue emissions from these LEDs were rather energetic and damaging to the retina. Conversely, some articles used to claim that red light actually improves the health of the retina. I don't know if those results were corroborated or debunked afterwards.
I know that personal beliefs and biases affect our perceptions. But such diametrically opposite experiences are surprising. I'm curious to know what everyone else experiences and any insights on this.
Unfortunately, most pole lights are 70CRI, too bright, and the light is too white (4000K+).
The flicker is pretty annoying because the transition is an abrupt on-off. Where I am the city had the bright idea to wrap LED ribbons around the poles in the downtown area to make it look more interesting. They connected the ribbons without diffusers directly to the power source of the streetlight. So what has happened now is that as you drive or walk you are looking directly at an unshielded flickering LED.
I still continue to install incandescent bulbs. They look better, and as I live in a cold-weather country the heat they generate is welcomed.
https://inside.lighting/news/24-05/heres-why-led-streetlight...
If we were switching away from LED to sodium vapor lamps instead of the other way around, they would have written the exact same article but in reverse, still claiming the change makes us less safe.
What an annoying/bad article. "Here are our guesses of this when we could have actually figured it out". It's not like these are in space and hard to get to, they are on the freaking street. Get a crew out there and figure it out.
Then they go on to do a _bunch_ of handwavy "science" about blue light while not really making any point (IMHO).
> One thing that Bullough suggests pedestrians and drivers do to stay safe under purple streetlights—or any lights, for that matter—is to remove sunglasses and blue-light-filtering glasses when walking or driving at night.
Ahh yes, for all the people that wear their sunglasses at night, I'll make sure to let Corey Hart know.
This just seems like an incredibly low-effort article with zero definite facts and enough hand waving to sprain your wrist.
Without them halogen headlights in my side mirrors give me a migraine after a while.
Deductive reasoning points to a failure of the phosphor layer in a specific type of led.
I mean, to be fair, the city maintenance crews don't generally run tear-down youtube channels with appropriate equipment to take a close look at a failing semiconductor-based light assembly.
But the general point is correct. What could be done is connect with some of those crews' offices, understand what warranties are provided with the municipal purchase of those bulbs, and how much comes out of the infrastructure budget to do an early replacement of these bulbs. Hopefully these bulbs weren't purchased from a RANDOMSYLLABLE amazon china dropshipper who disappeared after 3 months.
But yes, that requires talking to municipal governments, and there's not enough click revenue to support that level of journalism anymore.
Maybe a youtuber who runs a tear-down channel can do that.
This is how most LED bulbs in use today are purchased. In theory, LED is absolutely superior when engineered correctly, but it rarely is on a statistical basis when looking at the available products.
It's hard to make an incandescent bulb that is shitty, other than making it not last for a very long time. I'd rather a dead bulb than one that turns my street into a nightclub.
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/dublin/2025/02/05/almost-...
I had someone complain to me about how it was a change made by the Green Party for bats: how ridiculous!
No, it’s just a faulty light…
I first experienced that in a bathroom in England. Door open, regular white light. Lock the door, blue light. I thought I broke something when that happened.
I've (not seriously) considered buying a pellet gun to shoot out the 4 massive neon purple lights at the entrance to my quaint 1970s era neighborhood. They didn't remove the old light poles after installing the new ones about 3 years ago, so it's double lit with sodium vapor and purple now.
Curious is there is a single person on the planet that prefers the white (er, purple) street lights?
But driver safety is probably way more important than my hobby
Makes you appreciate how tricky it is to balance cost, lifespan, and quality when you’re manufacturing millions of these for cities.
Though that said, just go and replace them as they would have had to for sodium vapour lamps they had before? And this time replace them with something that runs them at a lower temperature, especially if the environment during a summer could be hot from external temperature.
Most everyone has seen these now, in "Edison Bulbs" or elsewhere.
Simulacra•5h ago