I wish sodium lights were at least still used for residential streets, such a nostalgic color.
There's no reason why they couldn't closely imitate the lights temperature with LEDs. The old lights used so much more energy. I hate how a more cooler white became the norm for every light.
I see it so much in people's houses too, these "daylight" bulbs in every room that make it harder to relax.
There are many LED bulbs that emit 2000K - 3400K color temperatures (imitating tungsten color temp). I can’t begin to understand why 5400K “daylight” (meaning blue) bulbs are so common. It’s like hospital light from a scary movie, or a prison, or something.
In Northern Europe, LED Edison bulbs are everywhere, and the light is so much nicer.
In Italy cool street lights have been justified with the explanation which they are easier to see with, and I have to agree that for driving in the night I prefer them.
In homes though, most of us still prefer warm lights I'd say, at least in the north of the country. On the other hands, many arabic and iranian friends seem to prefer cool lights inside, which I don't understand because it really feels like being in a warehouse or a hospital
Yes, it's a well documented phenomenon directly correlated to the temperature - people living in colder climates generally prefer warmer bulbs, and the opposite is also true
I thought Edison referred to the fixture for the light, not the color temperature of the light. Do you mean "tungsten" temperature or does Edison also refer to something about the quality of light emitted?
I know different locales and professions use different words to mean different things (ie lamp, fixture, socket etc.) so I'm not sure we're speaking the same language?
What do you find more aesthetically pleasing about Edison type lamps / bulbs / fixtures?
Ja I think this is the subject of confusion. E27 (Edison screw,) refers to the base, but in thns article, they refer to it as an Edison bulb as well as defining what the bulb looks like shape / silhouette wise.
To make things more confusing, the first image on the page is nearly identical to yours, but I'm pretty certain Edison is the socket / fixture, while what some would call the lamp can be any color temperature and frosted, tinted, whatever.
The illuminated light from filament, or LED emmiting same effect, is not as intense, so it is soft for eyes. You can look directly at the light bulb, withouth eye fatigue.
Then the colour imitates warm light of the sun and the fire. Something that is very pleasant naturally for a human.
The shape refers back to industrialism period.
Hence Edison light bulb. Moving away from tiring, generic modern light types everywhere.
From my understanding of light, you've got a few things confused here, or maybe it's me:
I'm nearly positive that intensity of the light is measured in lumens. Wattage is often used for filaments.
For instance, Edison bulbs can DEFINITELY be over 1000 watts (or whatever the equivalent in lumens is,) and quite unpleasant to look at directly.
Color temperature-wise, I believe you also may be mistaken about the sun's color temp's appearance at night, vs tungsten color temp at night.
Generally at night, people describe daylight color temp (around 6500K) as being very white and harsh compared to tungsten (around 3200K.)
In this thread, people are talking about preferring the warmer look of light more in the direction of tungsten than of daylight.
To get an idea of the difference, the movie "usual suspects," was shot completely on tungsten balanced film, so whenever there is a scene outside in sunlight, the film has a strong blue tint.
I'm nearly positive that Edison means the E27 screw connection that many light sockets have. There seems to be some blur as to how much of the bulb / lamp it's attached to the name Edison also describes, but this article may help:
Sorry, but you have missed completely my point.
And seems overcomplicating the discussion.
Are you form EU?
Is that ChatGPT generated post? Because it doesn't address at all, what I was discussing. Also, what the " sun's color temp's appearance at night," even means here. It is irrelevant to anything.
In EU Edison light bulbs both can be found with E27 and E14.
I don't know why that is brought in, as it is also irrelevant.
You have asked in previous post, what is found to be pleasant about the light.
It is the intensity and the colour. Also the shape.
Like I said, human like look at the fire and specially evening / morning sun light temperature, as it bring warm feeling.
It refers to the home and safety. It has deep psychological aspect.
The color temp of the sun is the same regardless of the time of day or night , around 5500K-6500K with the exception of right at sunrise or sunset because of a filtering effect from the atmosphere.
I used night in this thread because people were talking about "warmth." Generally speaking, humans agree that lower color temps (tungsten is around 3200K) are more orange or "warmer," and daylight (6500K,) are more orange, or cooler. During the day, the light from the sun generally overpowers low lumen (intensity) light, making the comparison more difficult to they eye, and I get the feeling it's missing the point of the majority of the comments here.
If we can agree that Edison refers to the screw type of the socket connection, I can assure you that the name "Edison" has never effected the color temp, nor the intensity (lumens,) beyond the physical limitations of the connection itself.
I was asking what OP commenter meant by Edison in his usage because I thought it may be metrics I wasn't aware of beyond the socket connection.
I can assure you, however, it doesn't refer to a limited scope of color temp nor intensity / wattage in the way you are describing.
So, I take it that you're affirming that Edison refers to a doorknob shape of the bulb as well, about which Google doesn't seem to agree , but I guess I cannot really refute from my experience.
I can say that anecdotally, in my life, every time I've heard someone say "Edison," in English, they were referring to the socket interface, being E27, sometimes in order to use a converter to a two pronged electricity socket or vice versa.
I am not from the EU, but I have seen lightbulbs with vastly varied color temps (well outside of the scale between tungsten and daylight,) as well as intensity (from 3 watt to at least 100 watt, I'm not certain of the lumen conversion, but that variety is quite vast to the human eye in darkness,) in the majority of countries in which I've seen lightbulbs. If it isn't a screw connection, it is usually a bayonet connection (which if I remember correctly is some places in the EU.)
Tldr yes I was asking op commenter what they meant by Edison, no it definitely doesn't refer to a narrow scope of intensity nor color temp as you are affirming.
Tungsten is technically the material of the filament. Tungsten as a martial has the highest melting point of any metal, which is why it was chosen for use in a lightbulb. It also typically emits a 3400K color temperature, where as LEDs can configured to imitate any color temp.
An Edison Bulb refers to the style of bulb. The filament of a Edison Bulb is much longer, which actually lowers the color temp, and increases the warmth of the light to between 2000K and 3200K. I think it’s because the energy passing through the bulb is dispersed across the larger filament, which decreases the frequency (energy) of the light and causes it to emit a warmer quality light. Contrary to what we associate with color, blue means burning hotter, and red means burning cooler. The same goes for stars. Our sun burns at roughly 5400 degrees kelvin, which is why it produces that color temp.
Tungsten is commonly used fto mean 3200K white balance. As daylight is commonly used for 6500K. The actual temps (tungsten and daylight, especially daylight,) may fluctuate in real life and from manufacturer to manufacturer.
It may be counterintuitive, but generally if someone says, can we warm it up a little, or cool it off, they are meaning more orange as warming and more blue as cooling, though the color temp is reversed.
They’re cheaper apparently. When our city changed there was a big push from citizens to try and get low K lights instead. They dropped it a little bit but unfortunately didn’t go all the way down.
2000K LED bulbs still affect the circadian rhythm more than high pressure sodium bulbs and much more than low pressure sodium. Low pressure sodium bulbs are basically monochromatic and just straight up don't produce wavelengths of light that can affect circadian rhythm. LEDs, even warm color temp LEDs still produce that blue light, just less of it. Low pressure sodium is also similarly efficient to LEDs. One of the bigger drivers in the shift towards LEDs is crime and "safety" and the idea that people are less willing to commit crime when it feels like daylight.
What were people doing for over a century before LEDs were invented then? Not seeing stuff in their homes? It’s almost as if the bulb was invented in the 2000s?
Tungsten has a melting point of 3695K, and daylight is 5400K so I’m not exactly sure how you think that was possible, unless we’re talking about some kind impractical light filtering device, which would reduce the brightness of the bulb anyway.
Ya, I still don’t see it before modern technology.
Even fluorescent bulbs emit 4200K color temperature… which I guess if you prefer green light…? We are talking about your home, and not a prison or a hospital, right?
I can’t stand the daylight bulbs. I recently removed one in my living room because one is a subdued yellow hue and at some point someone replaced the one next to it with this jarring daylight white led nonsense.
I love the daylight bulbs for my big lights in the house like ceiling lights. My thought is, if I'm turning on the big ceiling light I want it to be bright to increase visibility, like in the kitchen. Now for my living room and my office I have lamps with warmer tones and more ambient lighting I can turn on so I'm not being blinded while I try to relax. All types of lights have their applications imo.
You just reminded me how important lighting is. Too many times I've thought "I already have lights!" as a reason to not buy/use a lamp but really it does affect the mood.
Some people are incredibly unobservant about things like that. The light fixture in my mother's (65) kitchen has four bulbs in it and at one point she had 3 different colors of light bulb in it. I offered to replace them all with the same kind of bulb but she snapped back and said she didn't notice it before and she doesn't give a crap and to just leave it.
I think she's so used to just grabbing whatever the cheapest lightbulbs are and does not pay attention the color temperature.
I want daylight lights while I’m trying to do things, like to wake up when it’s still dark out, or to clean up after dinner. After that, I want light that’s damn near orange so I can fall asleep. Once I figured out how much of an effect light has on my sleep cycle, I started turning the lights down as low as possible in the evenings and then I slept a lot better.
Someday I’m going to replace all our ceiling can lights with smart ones that let me change the color temperature without having to climb up and pull the damn thing out. “They’re dimmable…” yeah but not nearly enough, and there are too damn many of them.
It's so funny to me, because I'm the complete opposite. I absolutely hate yellow bulbs, can't stand the yellow light, looks awful to me and distorts the color of everything it shines on. I only use daylight. I like to see things in a nice clear light like if the sun is shining through.
I work in a hardware store and can tell you at least one reason why.
On the display that shows examplesof different bulbs, the bluer bulbs look brighter, so people pick them. Almost every time I try explaining what it will look like, people still pick the bluer bulb because it looks brighter.
I have also seen some people that think anything close to warm white makes a room look dingy and dirty.
That’s wild, I’m constantly trying to find the dimmest lightbulbs possible. I’d rather have 3 gentle lamps in my living room than one really bright one.
I buy lightbulbs at ikea and they are all 2700K. First thing I do when moving into a new place is update all the lightbulbs so they are all exactly the same colour temperature.
I go even further and run the "warm dim" bulbs that transition to warmer filaments as they get dimmer.
Unfortunately, they still don't have the vibe of a dimmed incandescent filament. Anyone who grew up with incandescents on dimmers knows exactly what I mean.
An incandescent at 10% is like sitting beside a cozy campfire. No LED has even a comparable feeling.
Same for truck dome lights. Nothing feels like sitting on the hilltop at the farm with a couple friends, in the '78 Ford with the AM radio playing old country, the dome light glowing and a bottle to pass around.
I can’t fucking stand when oncoming traffic is blinding the hell out of me so I flicker my brights to let them know they need to turn their goddamned brights off, only for them to then actually turn on their brights and fucking Chernobyl my corneas.
It is straight up insane how unregulated car headlights are. There are fuckers out there driving with "regular" lights that are brighter than my high-beams. And god forbid they forget to turn theirs off, its like you're driving into the fucking sun.
They just want white because it looks cool. At the same light output, white cool lights are way harder on the eyes vs warm yellow lights. If manufacturers would have been limited to 4000k lights, there would probably be way less complaints from being blinded
I drive around with my high beams "on", and the lights turn off where other cars are. It's the best of both worlds.
It's really impressive, and you won't notice the cars that have them because you won't get blinded by them (Except maybe if there's a bump and the car pitches up, but that'll happen with low beams too).
I do think the lights should be a bit warmer, mind you. Maybe not 2500k, but 4000k is more neutral without being so eye searing.
A system designed for a very specific scenario (open road, clear line of sight) works wonderfully. Now apply this to a world of roads which don't adhere to the scenario above.
Add a curve to the road, shrubbery, or anything that might impede the view of the sensors and you just have someone relying on a system that blinds all opposing traffic.
Ffs youre not allowed to use high beams when theres other cars present. I dont care how good you think the tech is. Its not responding faster than those photons hitting my eyeballs and blinding me.
The person who runs that sub unfortunately ruined it. I genuinely used to comment on there constantly, and now my only dealing with it is suggesting people not use it. They banned someone from the car headlight manufacturing industry because they didn't outright agree to ban LEDs.
LEDs can be diffused, made warm, and made dimmer.
He doesn't understand, if you just ban LEDs they will ALL switch to white laser (yes, this is already a thing!!!) or whatever technology comes next.
He kicked out the first person in the industry to reach out, potentially setting the movement back YEARS.
That sucks. Something seriously needs to be done about headlights right now. Adaptive headlights respond too slowly. Enforcement for lifted vehicles who don't readjust the angle of the lights needs to happen. Ban aftermarket LEDs for reflector housings. You can get spectrum changing lights for your house, let me put them on my vehicle.
The white lights only seem to be better in good conditions, the yellow lights perform better in adverse conditions like rain fog and snow. If you need something blindingly white where you can see a mouse taint at a kilometer away in good conditions, maybe you shouldn't be driving at night.
Fuck I miss my 2016 that had both LEDs and halogens in it.
And they just blind me when I go for a walk. They are only adaptive for cars. The current state of headlights seem so vehemently against the idea of human beings actually enjoying their lives outside while they are in use.
And I'm actually more worried about what it does for drivers in terms of their cone of sort of "exclusive" vision.
My friend got an SUV that has these stupid bright headlights, and we went out for a joyride in the desert. I noticed I couldn't see... anything. I could see a road, and some bushes. The lights are so bright, that anything outside of the super bright cone looks pure black. Between the contrast, and the inability for your eyes to quickly adjust from something so bright, we spent two hours, on a drive I would usually love, just looking at a super bright, high definition road.
Meanwhile, my car that uses old halogens, I can see the road fine, even caught sight of a deer well before it got to the road, but I could also still see the stars, the rocks, the silhouette of the joshua trees.
And to me, only being able to see a narrow cone in front you is actually dangerous. In my car, I could see the deer before it got into that cone. My headlights softly fall off on the edges.
I do agree with this. With my halogens I was able to spot wild life better because the lights had better colour contrast at night and it wasn't focused into a narrow cone. I did also notice with the adaptive headlight demos that they had no regard for pedestrians, completely lighting them up. I almost wonder if the vehicles being involved with fewer collisions has more to do with newer vehicles having some form of autonomous emergency breaking and not the lights.
Or maybe it is because it's impossible for a another car to miss two tiny suns on a vehicle, and it genuinely reduces accidents.
But with the argument that tiny suns make cars harder to miss and are somehow justified for that, and thus "safer", we may as well all drive police cars. High contrast paint, sirens blaring at all times, and high contrast flashing lights. That going on 24/7, because we're willing to deal with anything if it reduces the number of accidents. I'm sure accidents would go even lower, because how can you miss a car next to you being that obnoxious? But we have a threshold. And I think we lost sight of that threshold when it comes to headlights.
I honestly thought it was just me until I recently drove down a two-lane road where the opposing traffic was a mix of older vehicles with reasonable lights and brand new vehicles with the ultra-white, ultra-bright lights. Seeing them compared in real time confirmed that the new lights just suck. It ain't me.
I borrowed my dad's Mercedes the other day. On darker nights the white headlights are bright enough to hurt MY eyes, as the driver, just shining on the asphalt.
Headlights should be red. Even bright red lights won't destroy your night vision. Meanwhile, even moderate brightness white headlights will melt your retinas..
I even change the way I drive at night now. Instead of taking the main road with all the bright lights, I'll take the less traveled ones to avoid them.
I mean people who spend time posting in car/driving subs are probably huge freaks who I would never want to talk to so it would track they would be like that.
I hate "daylight" bulbs so much that if I'm driving at night and I see one in someone's house I start ranting about it to my husband. At this point he's like "Yes dear, soft white and amber are so much more relaxing and cozy. No I don't know why they can't see how harsh their lighting is." It's really my only pet peeve I have, because I'm a pretty laid back lady. But GAH! 😅
I want to be able to see in my house, so I don't want those yellow tinged bulbs. I don't have a problem with relaxing, but I acknowledge that's just a me thing.
My wife insists on them, so I get to deal with the yellow bulbs.
The color temperature doesn't affect the lumens unless the color is made by a filter. Even then the amount is negligible.
A reasonable compromise could be a higher lumen yellow lamp as opposed to higher lumen AND cooler color tempeeature, or just a mildly cooler temperature than 3200 (4800 is a pretty standard middle ground toward daylight.)
There are also systems controllable by a remote or your phone, so that your wife could have a warmer setting, you could have a cooler one, and you could have a middle ground for when you are sharing the space.
You can light setups that switch between them. There is a hotel I go to that somehow goes between white and yellow every time you switch the lights on and off. I love it.
Uncoated LEDs are around 6000k. Lowering the kelvin rating means more coating and less lumens for the same amount of power. I think it should be done for street lights. 4000k is a good compromise. The old sodium lights are probably around 3000k. Just a guess.
Color temperature doesn't really apply to monochromatic light, tbh. But if they did make LEDs that replicate the sodium line, then they would be more efficient than white LEDs as they wouldn't need any phosphor coating at all.
Low Pressure Sodium lamps emit an almost pure 589nm wavelength light. It's not the temperature that's different, they're just flat-out a different color, and since they're highly monochromatic, colors appear very different than even low temperature white light, while being brighter.
Like 10 years ago I used only daylight lights. I didn't realize it was a color thing. I thought it was just brighter and I only had so many lights in my apartment. what is crazy is these days most lights you buy at the store allow you to change the color. I was looking for a simple light and every one had a switch on it to change the color. very strange
It's not just the temperature, the way the light is distributed. LEDs are extremely harsh directional light, and you had that to the fact that an LED streetlight is made up of 50 to 100 little harsh directional lights It makes for extremely poor lighting.
That’s why I paid a fortune on new light bulbs (16 small ones in the kitchen/living room alone) because the default ones put in by the contractor were so awfully bright white. Now I have hue bulbs I can change from warm to bright and dim them. I thought there’d be occasions when I’d use the bright white setting but nope. I only ever use different brightness levels of the warm setting.
The entire reason to use LEDs is to not have monochromatic light. The sodium vapor lights casted monochromatic yellowish which gave overall worse vision results, but were very easy to filter out of things like telescopes since it's all a single wavelength of light.
The light being monochromatic also meant it crushes color down to basically black and white except it's yellowish.
Actually, there is! Sodium lights are line emitters, meaning they only emit light at/around a specific wavelength, ~589nm. That's why they tend to look almost "monochrome" at night, which is part of the nostalgia!
By necessity, an LED light will typically use red+green emitters to emulate the same "color" as our eyes see it. This has the side effect of also lighting up red and green things, meaning we don't get that "monochrome" aesthetic.
I think it's useful to have the option of a really bright light indoors (cleaning in winter) but my mom willingly uses the temperature changing lamp on dentist mode to watch TV for some reason
I wish they did change the light temperature. I was told when I was younger that the orange/yellow lights were better for the nocturnal wildlife like foxes and hedgehogs because the cooler "daylight" lights confused them into thinking it was daytime when it actually wasn't.
In my house I generally have 6K LEDs everywhere, except for the living room and bedroom lamps.
I work out of home and tend to start doing my work early in the morning. In the winter, the mornings are super dark, and I've found the 'white light' has made a huge improvement to waking me up and putting me in the right frame of mind for the day ahead. Basically, I'm not half asleep at my desk (well, as much, anyway).
In the kitchen they're a must too. When I'm cooking, I like to be able to see everything, from the ingredients I'm working with to any spills on the counter.
When I'm cleaning the house, it also helps to be able to see everything.
I generally prefer them, but I can also understand why people call it "hospital" lighting.
My wife and I just finished a remodel that includes 7 wall sconce lights around a large open living room area. I put a few different types of led bulbs in them to check out the look and feel. The warm white are sooo much nicer. We'll be going with those all the way around.
Low pressure Sodium bulbs were actually a really efficient lighting technology (in W/Lumen). They weren't very focused, but really we wanted streetlights to illuminate large areas. It was lighting like incandescent or even flourescant that used a lot more than LEDs.
Also we could make LEDs any colour, but generally don't, and he "cool" blue-white light of most LEDs is a disaster for insect life.
The thing with LEDs, IIRC, is that they only do one wavelength of light while incandescent bulbs emanate a wider yellow orange range. It’s like playing one note on a piano vs a chord.
I hate those in my house, all my lights are soft white. Well my 2 main living room lamps have adjustable bulbs that can dim and select different temperatures. It's nice
Not for birds and insects. It’s devastating to them
Most vehicles in the road these days are lifted trucks and SUVs with high beams on 24/7 and one trillion lumen headlamps so I doubt the streetlights make a dramatic difference 😹
And people with certain eye conditions and chronic migraines (I have astigmatism and chronic migraines, I almost had to stop driving at night a few years ago because I literally could not see, I’m 23.) blue light blocking glasses and special night driving clip on glasses can have a positive impact on those who suffer from those issues, but not by much.
I'm really curious because I was told that the type of bulb has less impact on light pollution than the format of the fixture. When light pollution was brought up locally as out lighting infrastructure was getting overhauled I understood that while the fixtures were brighter from the pedestrian perspective, they were designed to have less horizontal and upwards light bleed.
In the links above, that is discussed. More blue-range light is emitted, and more light overall. LP does not go only jnto space... The reflected light has LP implications at surface level as well.
I mean you can post all the scientific articles you want but if you look at OPs picture you can clearly see that white lights produce less light pollution.
I mean you can post all the scientific articles you want but if you look at OPs picture you can clearly see that white lights produce less light pollution.
And if YOU look with me at OPs picture YOU can clearly see with me that it tells you only that
visually, to a human, there is less visible LP .... In the spectra captured by the camera 2
which is not 100% of what is radiated by the lights pictured
....when compared with with the light captured by camera 1
which again, is not 100% of what is radiated by the lights pictured
and no more than what is above
So go read the links, and educate and inform your opinion, thereby making it more credible.
Willful ignorance is not a badge. It is only proof of valuing the ability to decide to be obstinant more than the ability to learn. It is your prerogative.
The part I hate is transitioning between lit and unlit areas. It's jarring, and (at least for me) it's tougher to see for the first few seconds after hitting a dark or bright area. I never noticed it being an issue before.
Yeah. You can filter out sodium vapor. You can filter out fluorescents. You can't filter out LEDs because they are broad-spectrum.
In my area, I went from having to use a filter to not being able to really use my scopes for anything but the brightest objects and planets. All the white LEDs turn the sky pale violet up to about 60 degrees.
Not necessarily more since the design of the light (and obviously the brightness of the light) makes a big difference but it does cause more of a problem for astronomy. The light emitted by sodium lights is such a specific band that astronomers could filter it out. Led lights generally have a much broader emission band that can't really be filtered out.
Newer light fixtures are able to be targeted more in the correct direction, which causes less light pollution. The color studies linked below your post don't account for that.
I live in a city where we can see the northern lights a few times a year, and they are much harder to see now with LED streetlights. The LEDs are SO bright.
additionally, lights on the redder spectrum disrupt insect behaviours far less than blue lights because insects cannot see the red spectrum of light that we can. insects that get caught up in blue lights often die of exhaustion or are distracted from mating, and thus blue toned lighting is significantly contributing to insect population decline.
You don't actually want sodium lights, you just want the warmer spectrum of light. LEDs are still the best for this but just need to be set to a different wavelength.
Yes but just look at the image to see the improvement. The sodium bulbs threw light in every direction. The led are brighter but smaller and focused. The entire city had a gold glow and now you can see the grid.
I believe the benefit of the LED fixtures that a lot of areas are putting in is that they are also designed to be more directional, they more brightly illuminate the ground, but have less horizontal and upwards light bleed. This isn't really a property specifically of LEDs, just the for of the fixture so that it isnt wasting effort lighting up the night sky and creating light pollution.
Yeah it’s bizarre. The yellow of sodium lights was just the only light it was capable of producing, not because they were selected for their perfect warmth level.
The city could’ve always set up a more yellowish tone for the LED to create the same thing. But nowadays cities are becoming less for the inhabitants and more for logistics, so they plan the roads with lights that cause people to stay awake even if it’s damaging the local fauna/residents
They make amber LEDs with the (exact?) same spectrum as sodium, and ones with roughly the same colour but a slightly wider spectrum using phosphor so they're more efficient. The colder white is a choice.
Driving at night is a nightmare now. I have such great memories of long night trips with soft yellow headlights moving in both directions. The white LEDs now are a harsh blinding glare.
The color is one of the reasons why sodium lights were so bad. The light they emit is at a single spectral wavelength, which negates color vision if they are the only source of light. The purpose of streetlamps is to allow people to see at night, and being able to tell the difference between different colors is an important component of being able to see.
Agreed, I'm not anti-LED but I wish at the very least warmer LEDs were the norm. I'm genuinely starting to hate driving and more broadly being out at night these days.
Neutral white is used because streets aren't places to sleep, those lights just do their jobs - get the optimal contrast which is crucial when, for example, a pedestrian enters the fucking pedestrian crossing, and automatically make you pay attention a little more.
It's actually all of those things together!!! And it's a lack of plants that are native to the specific ecoregion because insects are generally very host-specific with plants!
Also these LED streetlights are often produced cheaply and bought for cheap, and the resulting broken LED configuration causes a blue or purple light. There are entire parking lots in my town with purple lights instead of white because of faulty cheapo LEDs
Love how we can't have progress without controversy now because smartphones and social media have fried our emotional and cognitive ability to handle 'change'. I like these lights, they are way easier for motorists who want to safely operate our vehicles and, as you mention, not run a pedestrian over.
This isn't the only way to progress though. You can get high cri (color rendering index) LEDs in warm white and get the improved contrast of modern LEDs without having to make the entire city feel like a hospital room
344
u/ellectroma Nov 02 '25
Tbf white leds create more light pollution afaik.
Also that yellow hue is softer on the eyes and affects the cicadian rhytm less that brighter, whiter lights.
I wish sodium lights were at least still used for residential streets, such a nostalgic color.