Nooooooooooo.... they finally did it! They took my orange!
This is so not a big deal, and yet I'm kinda sad and upset.
After 43 years of only knowing the beautifully pervasive orange nightime glow of chicago's 8 billion sodium street lamps, today the city switched out the lights in our alley to LEDs. I was hanging out on our back deck when they switched on and I was just like "WTF is this bullshit!" They're so obnoxiously goddamn white. Where's my friendly familiar orange? Oh well, at least I still have the orange sodium street lamps out in front on our street, for now......... their days are certainly numbered. Farewell, orange glow, I will forever miss you. :( Anyone else suspicious of this new-fangled LED awfulness? |
The street lighting LEDs around here are often orange. Someone from the City clearly thought white was superior to orange, because the option was there had they wanted it.
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Dude, screw that! I will never forget flying into Midway for the first time (during a full moon) and seeing the glowing orange grid. RIP.
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I prefer orange too, but we must be in the minority.
I looked online in case there were pics of my city's LED-lit streets, didn't find any in a quick search (I could take and post some, I guess), but I did find other links showing they do exist. City decision-makers in the USA almost certainly - unlike us - feel that white is an upgrade. https://www.ignialight.com/en/projec...treet-lighting |
I too will miss the orange.
I generally hate LED lighting. The worst are LED string lights for Christmas. My wife got them and those had to go back in favor of nice, warm incandescent ones. |
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i get it, at build-out, the new LEDs will save $10M/year in reduced energy and maintenance costs, which is certainly a big win for a city as eternally cash-strapped as chicago. and i imagine i will eventually acclimate to the inevitablbe white-wash, but i will forever miss that sweet orange glow. soon we will only have pictures and memories of "the orange": https://data.whicdn.com/images/150286013/large.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/j283RVzL/night.jpg source: https://weheartit.com/entry/150286013 |
They should just use sodium-orange colored LEDs. With that said, I'm now pissed that Detroit is no longer unique in this area. They are obnoxious, but there's something beautifully apocalyptic about the city's industrial blight being totally visible after dark.
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Birmingham recently had all of our streetlights replaced with LEDs. I for one am a huge fan. Especially living in a city with such a high amount of crime, these lights illuminate so much better, and IMO aren't as intense on my eyes.
Next, the city is replacing all of our interstate lights in city limits. This has been a problem for decades in B'ham. The old lights apparently were much more easy to rob of copper, which caused a ridiculously low percentage of interstate lights to actually be functioning. It can be a little unsettling driving from downtown the airport at night. This is especially dangerous when it's dark during morning and afternoon rush hour. Large highway, high speeds, high traffic volume, and currently a TON of construction. All it takes is one headlight being out on the car in your blind spot... I don't know how other cities are doing it, when I lived in Tuscaloosa, the city handled all of the replacement work. However, here in Birmingham, the city essentially handed over maintenance responsibilities to Alabama Power. The power company shoulders the cost of replacing all of the lights, and then has an incentive to regularly maintain the street lights that they get to sell electricity to. |
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Also, things seem crisper and sharper-looking somehow with LED street lights, and objects are in their proper color. And, the fixtures they're in aim the light downward better, so there's less light pollution in the sky---you just might be able to see more stars at night than before. And of course when they turn on, they're already at full brightness, unlike those sodium lights. The City of Los Angeles started switching its streetlights out back in 2009, and it was a four-year project. At the time, it was the largest such conversion of any city in the world. I've noticed the change when driving in the hills and canyons. I feel I can see more stars in the sky. The LA suburb my parents live in (Cerritos), switched out all their streetlights to LED last year. It was a 1 or 2-month project (Cerritos is only a little less than 9 square miles, or something). Before the switch, residents were given the opportunity to vote on which type of LED lighting they liked based on brightness and color. There were like 6 or 8 examples installed at one of the big parks in the city, and residents were encouraged to visit them at night and vote on which type they liked (one for arterial streets, and one for residential streets). After the switch, it was interesting for me to see what the street I grew up on looked like with LED street lighting. It did somehow look odd to me, but I got used to it really fast (I visit my parents regularly). Oh, and no need to worry about historic or antique-type street lights. They have LED "bulbs" for those types of lights. The city I live in (South Pasadena) has a lot of those short lamp posts with the acorn-shaped glass tops that I so associate with "old" LA; those have been outfitted with LED lights. |
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those old high pressure sodium lights were just so magnificently orange. they cast such a mysterious glow upon the city. bright AF, but all so immersively orange. colors didn't matter anymore, after sundown the whole city just pulsated with this pervasive, inescapable glowing orange. everything was just orange. the buildings. the streets. the trees. the people. the cars. the sky. everything. just orange. magical. it's a mood the new LED will never have, because with their more true color light, you can now make out actual colors at night. i guess that's helpful from public safety aspect, but i'll always miss that mysterious orange. |
worst since the removal of green glow on lower wacker
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It's interesting to me that where you live, the city has jurisdiction over the street lighting on the interstates within city limits. In California, all road maintenance, road sign replacement, street lights, etc. on the freeways (interstate, US highway and state highway) are the domain of the state of California (Caltrans). Caltrans seems to have replaced all the street lighting on the freeways throughout the state with LEDs. |
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one thing I like about this city is not big on lights all together. but right outside my apartment are small led lights for a small parking lot that no one parks in at night because the store is closed.
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There is a pretty significant cost/time savings with LED (big shocker).
For the town I live (I'm on the budget committee so we get this information), a monthly sodium bulb costs about $5 worth of electricity. An LED about $1.5. Also, sodium bulbs need to be replaced every 3 years or so while the LED bulbs are projected to last around 14-15 years. For base cost, I'm not sure of the sodium module but the LED modules with bulbs cost around $500. |
I think LEDs are unspeakably awful.
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Where I grew up, some streets had those green mercury lights. The orange sodium lights were the invaders, and they look so artificial and wrong in my eyes.
I like the white, especially tinted green yellow. It’s more calming. It also seems more modern. The newest cities in the world, like in Asia, have LED streetlights. |
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