Dutchie here. I haven't see these red LEDs become widespread although I do sometimes see dim green lights on bicycle paths.
Another interesting regulation here is related to insulation. Small bats tend to get inside walls and under roof tops. As people are improving insulation en masse, this act may kill or displace these bats. So you have to check for them and make amends if they're there. A common and easy way is to attach a bat home to your house. Some of them are really cool:
I love my little bat friends. During summer months I can time their forage session to the minute. Then I just watch them circle around the garden picking up the mosquitos.
Everybody complained at first, now it's just a curiosity. The bats thrive though and don't get killed near the roundabout. The lights don't need to be everywhere and only on the spots where the bats fly over regularly and get hurt by traffic and/or the environment (by which I mean the stuff related to the road, called Straatmeubulair in Dutch).
Heh, that part of Zeeland is referred to as Belgium by my friend from Zeeland (from near Goes). Thanks for linking it though. We were at vacation in Zeeland last summer and I wondered if we missed this (I think it would been cool to go there if its not far from route), but we were nowhere near there. I guess we didn't go to Belgium ;)
Unrelated to bat lights, but a friend of mine who is having a house built in Utrecht mentions that all the homes in the new neighborhood will have integrated bat housing. I assume he means something like the "bat bricks" from https://www.ibstockbrick.co.uk/kevington/eco-products/.
I asked this of our bat expert friend. Apparently not. The droppings, of which there won't be many for a small house, are quite dry and will naturally fall out of the opening.
Does remind me of the old low-pressure sodium street lighting that was popular in the UK when I was growing up. They’d glow pink for a while when they first turned on, before turning a deep orange.
They're still around here in Poland. I don't think they get installed anymore, but where they still work fine they're still there.
I love them. That's the best night-time lightning out there. Blueish LED lightning is unsettling in comparison. These orange street lights are comfortable to eyes and make the streets look pretty.
Sodium light is actually pretty great from light pollution perspective, because it is extremely easy to filter it out, as it is a very narrow band. Astronomers prefer sodium lamps, for example.
Dead moths prefer sodium lamps too, or something. Currently, LEDs are kind of stupid, too. The parking lot outside my home has fixtures with builtin LEDs which will last, like forever. So there's no need to make the LEDs replaceable like a bulb had to be.
Except they do break (they dim into a faint glow, and the brown out completely) and they have to replace the whole fixture.
> Dead moths prefer sodium lamps too, or something.
Isn't that just because it is very hot so they die?
> Except they do break (they dim into a faint glow, and the brown out completely) and they have to replace the whole fixture.
That's the big lie of LED industry; we can make ones lasting 50-100k hours... except we won't cos that would put price up by a bit and get out-competed.
It's exactly the other way around. Now I'm afraid this is some kind of common misconception, like "not only are LEDs great when it comes to efficiency, they don't pollute the light either!"
The ones around here direct the light downwards at the street instead of almost-every-direction like the old ones did, so it's kind-of true that the LED ones have less light pollution (I know I'm getting a hell of a lot less light into my windows), but it's because of the lamp shape and not that they're LEDs.
yes this was my observation, since the ones outside my house were replaced I have much less light into my house and I can see the stars. I assumed it must be some factor of the LED design that makes it easier to direct downwards though
It's not really true that they pollute less. One thing that has happened due to their "lower power and longer life" is that they are being installed in a lot of places where they aren't needed.
Where I live, the city decided in the downtown core to wrap non-diffused non-rectified LEDs around the poles in spirals. What this means is that if you're walking or driving, you are looking directly at the light as opposed to a traditional fixture that is pointed downward and may also have a cover.
One of the reasons my wife and I moved to the country is because there is so much LED lighting everywhere that the sky glows white at night. Our neighbors have also taken to competing with each other to see who can install the brightest spotlights around our city house. One guy installed a 15000 lumen flood in his driveway which was lighting up our bedroom at night through the blinds.
I really think we're going to have to ban certain forms of exterior lighting or nobody is going to be sleeping well.
My mother told me that a neighbour across the street from her that we know installed a light like that because he was paranoid that people were going to break into his car at night or something. It's been changed to a different less-bright light. She thinks another neighbour must have complained. The new one is still on most of the night but it's not as bright. I think it's ridiculous. If someone is going to go into your car, a light isn't going to stop them and in fact, might even discourage people from looking if it's too bright.
These new LEDs are just trash. Some houses, you see them stuffed in a foot apart all around the soffits on multiple levels and when you walk at night they just make the place look cheap and tacky compared to how it used to be before when people would place an incandescent flood at ground level shining upward.
Would have been amusing if you mounted an adjustable mirror on the wall near your window to aim the high-power beam straight back at their own window if talking to them first didn't work. Seems fair. It doesn't need to be pointed directly at you after all.. when it could be pointed at the driveway instead..
I have such a core memory of reading in the back of the car by the yellow sodium lights that take the colours out of everything. They're really efficient even by modern standards but the bulbs need replacement much more often than LEDs and they aren't made in the UK any more so they're an expensive niche import.
I definitely prefer the warm yellow sodium glow to the harsh 'operating table white' LEDs a lot of councils replaced them with but I think they're finally getting the message now because by the time they got round to my street they used much better warm white LEDs to replace the sodium lights.
There are some of these red lights near my parents house (in the UK), and driving through them did definitely give off a ye olde low pressure sodium vibe, albeit a bit redder.
Not enough in dangerous areas though and no city would choose different lamps based on violence statistics (or they would have to admit certain areas are worse to the wider population that never checks statistics).
Correct. It also doesn't interfere with peoples' sleep, which is why it's polite to use the red LED on your headlamp when walking through a campsite at night.
Unfortunatly cheap led floodlights have made too many houseowners think they need to light up every tree and wall from below for the entire night. In some streets you could turn of the municipal streetlights entirely and not see a difference.
I don't understand why red light is not the default for night lighting and street lamps and maybe even car headlights. Red light allows you to see while still maintaining your night vision. Blue or white or whatever other color you use will ruin your night vision and only allows you to see what is decently illuminated and anything outside that zone becomes invisible.
Technology connections (youtube channel) did a video about this. There was a trade-off between night vision and circadian rythm disruption vs driver safety.
Cooler light is better at keeping people awake and alert, and people drive safer when they are alert. Given that car accidents are a major cause od death, that is a hard point to compromise on.
The blue tint disrupts your sleep cycle and helps keep you awake when driving at night. There's definitely a trade off to be had depending on where these lights are located though.
It's not really the "blue" part. It's the "forcing yourself to be awake when you shouldn't be" part that disrupts your sleep cycle. Driving at night when you should be in bed is so much more the problem than whatever color the light is. For you as human at least =)
says what evidence? it's pretty much been debunked for a long time, and the whole premise is apparently based on bad science. I'm pretty sure i read an article here on hn that showed that this whole blue light scare was based on old science with extremely limited sample sizes and extreme exposure. i tried to link to an article from 2016 that still says that it affects sleep because i hastily read the first part. trying to dig up the article i read seems to be hard, but at least I'm still pretty sure that the science is not settled on the matter at all.
If you're referring to melatonin then the science really isn't that clear. Most light suppresses melatonin production.
One of the biggest arguments against blue light (specifically) being disruptive is that the sky spectrum in the evening is also blue (so naturally you'd be exposed to it). Modern airliners use blue lights for overnight flights with red lights at "dawn". I suspect screen brightness is more of an issue than any particular colour.
The dynamic range of the eye is confusing for aspects like this.
The amount of blue light you're exposed to from the night sky is trivial. Outdoors on a moonless night is 0.002 lux (of which, my understanding, about half is airglow and fairly blueish).
Compare to a not-too-bright single blue LED in your bedroom, emitting 0.5 lumens. You could spread that over 2000 square feet of surfaces and still have more blue light around than comes from the night sky.
The US Navy agrees with you, and is one of the reasons why interior lighting in ships/subs is red during battle so you can quickly switch between daylight and red without eye adjustment. Plus it looks cool.
Yeah I have red LED lighting in my boats for night lighting and also use the red light almost exclusively on my headlamp at night when camping, to maintain my night vision.
Our eyes are the least sensitive to it so it requires more light (which means more overall brightness, which actually makes your night vision worse and limits visibility of everything not lit, because your iris closes more) and it provides poor visibility/contrast and no color vision.
The only advantage red light offers is not disrupting your circadian rhythm.
Airplane instrument panels are lit with white. Saab, Volvo, and plenty of others use white or nearly white light for their dashboards.
Blue is used in theater only because it is less noticeable to the audience when it spills or reflects somewhere it shouldn't.
The real question is: especially with even 10 year old car headlights being so much better than the utter trash car headlights were 30 or more years ago, why are we still wasting so much energy, and impacting wildlife, and hurting millions of people's circadian rhythms, blasting streets with light all night?
There isn't even any argument in terms of public safety; there's never been any proof that lighting reduces crime. Lack of lighting forces people up to no good doing things where they shouldn't be, to use lights themselves - which stands out much, much more than someone doing something they shouldn't be under outdoor floodlights.
> why are we still wasting so much energy, and impacting wildlife, and hurting millions of people's circadian rhythms, blasting streets with light all night?
For pedestrians?
(I agree with your reasoning as it applies to highways, but most of the world's light pollution from overhead street lighting comes from lighting done either 1. within dense cities, or 2. within industrial complexes — in both cases to aid people walking around outside at night.)
As a pedestrian, I'd be much happier with a LOT LESS light at night. Though I have to admit that the overhead street lights aren't my biggest concerns (except for the newer awful white/blue LEDs). Car headlights are what really piss me off. Heck, even tail lights can blind me at night.
Bright night time lighting is often installed here as "security lighting". Meaning the bright light is primarily there to make people uncomfortable and not commit crimes.
The pink-orange glow of sodium bulbs was so nice and inviting compared to all these daylight blue parking lot projectors. I wish I lived somewhere where outdoor lighting needed a permit and the issuing authority rejected everything above X lumens or Y color temperature.
I actually find that my visibility on highways is worse for the parts that are illuminated by streetlights than for the parts that are only illuminated by my car.
I've found for example that it's extremely dangerous to go beyond 180kmh (110 mph) at night whenever there are street lights, while it's sort of ok if you just have side mirrors on the highway reflecting your own lights (not that I recommend to anyone to drive at such high speeds, especially in low visibility conditions).
> Our eyes are the least sensitive to it so it requires more light (which means more overall brightness, which actually makes your night vision worse and limits visibility of everything not lit, because your iris closes more) and it provides poor visibility/contrast and no color vision.
This does not match very common naval practices, nor my experiences. I believe the underlying mechanism is that the iris responds much more strongly to blue light because that is more prevalent in daylight.
Specifically this is about using red light to shine on things to see them. I could imagine that has very different requirements from the color of text on a HUD.
With red headlights you may see better, but other drivers (and pedestrians) are going to have a harder time seeing you, especially in daytime rain, which is half of their purpose.
Use a red flashlight (or filter) if you need to find stuff in a dark room without waking up the occupants.
And you'd be mad to put one at the front of your bicycle. In poor conditions, most any car driver would logically think the rider is travelling away from them.
(There are quite a few mad people in this world, having said that).
The Netherlands has many streets that are designed as "low car" streets or "bike first" streets.
The white lights are important for road safety but the Dutch have developed methods of softly discouraging the kind of traffic that makes the road dangerous.
This is especially common in residential areas. Most town centres are pedestrianized but retain brighter lighting as they can still be quite busy public areas in the evening.
But it takes about 45 minutes for your eyes to fully adapt to darkness.
So if we were to use red lighting at a level of illumination that assumes fully adapted eyes, it means people won't have sufficient brightneses for the first 45 minutes of their drive, which is likely most of it.
I only know that I adapt in about 5min. I read books in fbreader on a black bg and red text. The backlight can be very low in that app, depending on the phone you can read with an almost black screen. I start at 50% in five min I can it down to 10%.
Adaptation begins immediately but takes much longer to reach its full extent.
Go out on a very dark night and look up at the stars sometime. After half an hour, you'll be able to see stars that you couldn't see fifteen minutes ago.
If they think there's no airplane nearby. A light works every time, for any flying vehicle regardless of transponders on planes being enabled for example.
It is very typical for municipalities to have political parties that only operate locally.
The Christelijke Arbeiders Partij was founded in 1956 for the Bunschoten municipal elections. At the time the only people that could be elected were tradespeople, fishermen and farmers. Workers were put in unelectable positions by the elite. The CAP was founded out of dissatisfaction with this.
Your comment reads like you've never been to amsterdam if you think you randomly turn a corner and this happens without any awareness that you're in the only few streets where they are.
Do you get disconcerted when you go to the beach or when you turn a corner and see a picture of a lady in a bikini in a storefront?
> It's disconcerting to be walking around Amsterdam, turn a corner, and there's a woman dancing in a rented box seeking customers.
Well, to be fair, it's not really widespread all around the city, it's not like you suddenly turn a corner and there is a surprise box right in front of you.
Some people actually argue it's good for safety and particularly reducing crime, but you won't catch me agreeing with this motivation. I'll bet there is some curb appeal/property value angle, too. People seem eager to abandon reason when it comes to their home equity.
Darkness is camoflauge, and diminishes situational awareness of victims.
It doesn't inherently stop crime, but you and potential witnesses will indisputably have an easier time taking a shitty photo/identifying an assailant after the fact given ambient lighting.
Yeah, I just feel there are better things to be done to address crime than ramping up light pollution. It gives me a similar feeling to those anti-homeless bench designs; an attack on the local symptom which avoids addressing the underlying issue.
San Jose, CA has/had low pressure sodium lights to reduce light pollution for the benefit of Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton since at least the early 1980's.
It's not to reduce light pollution, it's to have all the light pollution be in an exceptionally narrow band that the observatory can then filter out.
The reason LED lights are so terrible for astronomers is because although they require much less light to achieve the same visibility, the spectrum is very spread out across multiple peaks, with different manufacturers having different peaks.
The upsides far outweigh the risks. Bats are very good at pest control and even help with dispersing seeds and pollinating plants. My favourite feature of theirs is that they take care of all the mosquitos so no need to buy or use repellent.
> My favourite feature of theirs is that they take care of all the mosquitos so no need to buy or use repellent.
I am not so sure about that. I don’t think bats are either necessary or sufficient for effective malaria control. In parts of the world where there are bats, you still have a problem with mosquito borne illnesses such as malaria.
Malaria still kills half a million people each year, and has been doing so for centuries. Then there's Dengue fever, West-Nile virus and Zika. I'd say the scales are tipped in favour of keeping around some of those mosquito-killing bats.
I have a hope that over the next 20-40 so years, we see extensive commercialization of digital night vision (not the crap you get on amazon, but the solid-state version of high-voltage IITs that the military is currently testing), flat lenses, and AR glasses, such that we get to a point where acceptable-quality night vision is as ubiquitous as acceptable-quality cameras are now on smartphones.
One of the big upsides of such an outcome would be that we could ditch things like streetlights entirely, cutting back a great deal of light pollution.
These are also used on a highway close to Rotterdam (also The Netherlands). They are only used over a stretch of maybe 100m, but leaves a gap for bats to fly through.
Here are some images, unfortunately the article isn't available in English:
Right which is why I say it will screw with their contrast.
I say this because someone I know who is colorblind can't use a red headlamp when outdoors. A lot of people use red lights to preserve their night vision, but for this person they can't see clearly with it vs. a white light.
Didn’t know this before either, but it seems a common type of colorblindness, protanopia, results from a general insensitivity to red light and also hinders distinguishing between reds and blacks.
Small nitpick, I think people use red headlamps to preserve other peoples night vision not their own. Or am I getting that wrong? Wouldn't white light work just as well or even better for for one’s own "vision at night"?
No, red headlamps help the wearer too. Red light triggers less of an adaptation [1] response than other hues relative to the amount of useful illumination they provide. Red light lets us perceive our surroundings, but doesn't trigger our eyes to close the pupils and become less sensitive to the incoming light.
(Blue has the opposite effect, which is why a room lit only by blue light can feel both dim [hard to see] and harsh [unpleasantly bright] at the same time.)
You're correct, and the other responses saying otherwise are misinformed. Protanopes do not have long-wavelength cones and thus have reduced sensitivity to that end of the visible spectrum, i.e., red light appears dimmer to such individuals. This is also why red on black (or vice versa) is a color combination with poor accessibility, since it has reduced contrast for protanopes as the red appears darker and thus closer to black.
This would actually be an awesome movie plot. Town adopts red lighting, Dracula moves there, a string of grisly murders ensues, corrupt town bureaucrats refuse to get rid of the red LEDs despite mounting evidence, nightvision/flamethrower-equipped mechs needed to roast out the vampires. Well I guess its not peaceful coexistence.
I spent months underwater on a submarine and we used mostly red lights in the sleeping quarters and the control room. I don't know the theory, but I figured red lights don't produce the momentary blindness of looking at a white light.
I did that search on Google (not limited to "news") before adding my question, I saw stories dated 2019 and 2022 that were almost identical, but the headline on the latter suggested the system "would" (future tense) be installed.
I found a webcam, but the night shots were black & white so not much use.
" Despite a currently robust population, a recent study by the National Audubon Society of data from the Christmas Bird Count indicated that populations had declined by 61% to a population of 73 million from historic highs of over 190 million birds.[12] As a result, it is now classified by the IUCN as Near Threatened."
Do you believe that the aviation lights on the turbines is what's killing the birds, as opposed to the other parts of the structure? such as the spinny blade bit?
nah I don't mean the lights, I just mean the general effect of technology we use and not always aware of the side effects. I never hear it as an argument against a windpark
The moon is white. White is the most natural color of light at night. White street lights are probably the most natural approximation.
The article doesn't say anything about white light, but does say "Normal street lighting can affect a bat’s flight" but doesn't go into detail. I would love more detail.
The intensity of a street light is vastly higher. They typically produce 10x-100x more foot-candles versus a full moon on a clear night at a bright latitude.
Even under ideal conditions, the earth receives ≤1 lumen per square meter of light from the moon. A single streetlight can project tens of thousands of lumens (or more) over a relatively small area.
Presumably having white light would also not be harmful assuming it's as dim as the moon. Which, don't get me wrong, can get surprisingly luminous, but not when compared to street lighting.
> The moon is white. White is the most natural color of light at night. White street lights are probably the most natural approximation.
You say "white" as if there's only one color white, which isn't the case when you're talking about a range of lighting temperatures. The moon also has a unique light profile that it reflects. It's not the definition of white. Either way, if you're advocating for something resembling 6500k daylight white lighting at night, there is nothing at all natural about that. The moon casts a very dim light, even at its brightest.
4000K is too high imo. In France the maximum is 3000K for example. For some cases (natural parks, building illumination etc) the limit can be lower 2700K or 2400K.
Sounds like a marketing ‘puff piece’ to me. Here, accept this ‘fact’ about red lights, unsubstantiated by any details or references as truth. And you’re going to like it because it supposedly is environmentally friendly. And because it ‘feels good’ you won’t ask any questions and repeat it to friends and family as if it were truth.
What are you talking about? People exploring nature at night have been using red lights for decades. It's standard equipment.
There's no mystery around the reason to use red light either. Nocturnal animals, especially mammals, have far more rods than cones in their eyes. This means they are much more sensitive to brightness than they are to color.
Red light in practice is far less bright than white light for the same input energy (a bit more complicated than this) and for quite a few animals they may not see it at all or very poorly.
None of this is theorizing, the effect can be readily seen in practice.
Another interesting regulation here is related to insulation. Small bats tend to get inside walls and under roof tops. As people are improving insulation en masse, this act may kill or displace these bats. So you have to check for them and make amends if they're there. A common and easy way is to attach a bat home to your house. Some of them are really cool:
https://media.s-bol.com/gJJMmEXxPyRr/781x1200.jpg
I love my little bat friends. During summer months I can time their forage session to the minute. Then I just watch them circle around the garden picking up the mosquitos.