Comment by a_e_k
3 days ago
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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Also it's terrifying for safety; way too easy to assault someone in complete darkness.
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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.
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Get a flashlight?
> 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.