Comment by diggan
2 days ago
> 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.
> 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.
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?
Yep, right around your mid-40’s in my experience. Friends have said it started the day they woke up on their 40th birthday.
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).
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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.
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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?