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.

I mean, I guess they are brighter, but you're right they are obnoxious as fuck... I can't stand that LED hospital lighting, inside or out... definitely a mellow warm atmospheric lighting kinda guy myself.

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.

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.

yipes more to come!

https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news...y-plan/553510/

yeah. it's the wave of the future.

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.

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.

You will come to appreciate them. They seem brighter, but I think it's because it gives off a white light. You'll get used to it before you know it.
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.

i will eventually become accustomed to them, but i doubt i will ever appreciate them.

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

I really like LED streetlights too.

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.

I think it might be something unique to Alabama. ALDOT is horrendously underfunded, so many cities have to rely on local solutions instead of waiting for the state to do it. To be honest, I couldn't tell you if the state has any jurisdiction over any lighting along interstates, except at exits and certain interchanges. There are plenty of places along interstates leading into metro Birmingham where highway lighting is suspiciously absent.

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.

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.

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.

This really is bad news...you are not alone in your feelings on this :(

I hate the orange and something about that color band really messes with my eyes after a while and seeing the picture on the left just screams "old" to me while the one on the right is futuristic. My complex just swapped out all of the orange for white LED and it's a million times better and has already helped to cut back on the crime a bit. My borough still has the orange in most spots so I get to compare side by side (complex light, street light right near it) and it made me hate the orange even more.

i guess i just like old shit.

the way chicago so ridiculously over-illuminated its streets (and even alleys) with those orange sodium lamps made it look like the city was trying to re-enact the great chicago fire every single night.

but now "orange chicago" is slowly drifting off into memory land one light fixture at a time. :(

i can always enjoy seeing the density of orange streetlights and where they abruptly end at the city limits when i take a night flight out of STL, as the county municipalites are a hodge-podge and generally have far less streetlight coverage.

I'm not happy about the new lighting scheme either. . . here's a view of Fullterton Ave. as seen from the CTA elevated station. . .

https://pbase.com/temper/image/169211790.jpg

I'm shocked at how poorly lit the street is now. . . very strange. . .

. . .

Not the best photos, but a couple snapshots as I was landing at O'Hare back in March returning from a trip to Houston. . .

https://pbase.com/temper/image/169211788.jpg

https://pbase.com/temper/image/169211789.jpg

Not as bad as Detroit - which seems to have completely replaced ALL their streetlights - but it's starting to change. . .

. . .

pretty soon its going to look like Istanbul.

When they first started to transition to LEDs I wasn't a fan of them. Now that I'm used to them, it's strange to visit a city that has the old orange glow everywhere.

LEDs do tend to provide more visibility IMO.

I was in the Valley of the Sun last weekend, which was a huge orange glow city, I noticed that some lights in some intersections are all LEDs, while most lights along the surface streets are orange glowers. Another couple of months/years and I'm sure all the lights will be LED.

i think the pic on the right is cool but when you are down on the street i bet it is annoying like looking at a white tv screen at night.

For awhile up in the NYC suburbs we had this neat juxtaposition of lights on the new and old Tappan Zee Bridge. Since the old one was being replaced they never bothered to upgrade.

https://i.imgur.com/Cgwzpcj.jpg

I think the new LED lights make it a lot easier to see at night, especially while driving. I've noticed the improvement in NYC and Detroit.

I guess I'm the only one that thought this thread was going to be about fruit theft?

Anyway...

I definitely feel like the LED's increase visibility. I'm guessing they decrease traffic accidents. Still, I don't like them. I feel less comfortable in harsh, blue light. It feels odd. "Why do I feel like I'm in a big box store even though I'm outside at night?" When I'm in an area brightly lit by LED's and I see some of that orange glow down the street, the orange glow looks inviting.

Perhaps years from now, I'll be so used to LED lighting that the orange will feel weird? I don't know. Who lights their own home like an office building, with white LED's? Almost no one. You can't relax in that shit.

I'm with Steely. I hate the cold new lighting style. Gimmie the spotted owl killing, AOC hating, ozone burning orange tinge of yore.

They might make streets safer, but they also make light pollution much worse.

From National Geographic:

The orange lights have more of a gritty feel. Imagine an abandoned house (where folks died in it drinking lighter fluid), at night, on a tree lined street, and than with orange lighting. Place some new, hospital bright LED's... just doesn't feel the same.

Sanitizing the urban feel. But... the energy savings is worth it in the long-run.

I find this so ironic since I remember back when i was a kid all the streetlights in my town were white - I'm assuming some type of fluorescent - and the cool pure neutral light always felt so urban to me it somehow helped me pretend the town was a big city. Then when they replaced the light with orange it really bothered me since it just lost that edge. Now to hear people basically saying the same things about the reverse colour change... it really just prove to me that people's emotional response is often shaped by what they've become accustomed to how what mental associations they make between things. Therefore there's no point in treating these psychological reactions as absolutes and accepting that they're just products of a change.

I'm sure it'll help with folks with tinted windows. That's the problem for folks like me that have the darkest tints (illegal ones in NJ), the lighting in some areas can make it difficult to see when an area has poor lighting to begin with. Should aid in illuminating side streets with greater luminosity.

Really more of a mild issue in close city or town streets with no enough lighting or one that is blocked by trees.

Those orange lights are probably responsible for the death of at least one polar bear.

Come on Man, do it for Greenland!

I apologize, but I don't understand how you could possibly feel less safe with LED streetlights compared to the old standard.

I mean, personally, if I'm driving down a street that I am not familiar with in a more impoverished part of town, I don't see the distance glow of an old streetlight as helpful. These days, now that our streets are lit with LED street lights, there is much more that I can see as I drive down a street.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm getting the impression that LED streetlights here in Birmingham are less powerful than those outside of the Southeast? From some comments in this thread, I get the feeling that people are f***ing blinded by them... that just doesn't seem to be anything like our new streetlights.

i don't mind them, but i wish they were a warmer shade of white. blue light is fucking with our circadian rhythms, and these LEDs tend to be daylight white which leans towards the blue spectrum.

I don't feel less safe with LED streetlights. I think you misinterpreted me. In fact I said they're probably safer in terms of reducing traffic accidents since you can see better.

And I'm personally not blinded by the LED's, I just think that harsh blue light is less comfortable to be in. When I see warm incandescent glow down the street, it looks inviting. It looks like a cozier neighborhood over there. Know what I mean?

The issue of feeling safer, from crime, on the street is something I've never considered I guess. I'm having a hard time thinking of a neighborhood here in town that I wouldn't feel safe walking through at night. (Although I suppose women might feel differently.)

As for driving through a bad neighborhood? I feel pretty dang safe from crime. I mean, I'm in a big metal box that can go fast. Hopefully my life never becomes a scene from Escape from New York, LOL.

Greenland is not really green. We've been lied to all these years.

which is why most cellphones have a yellowish tint setting after a certain hour as to not screw with sleep patterns as we surf facebook at 2 AM.

Next thing you're going to tell me is that Iceland doesn't really have much ice!!! :P

I've been reading stuff lately on how night lighting messes with our circadian rhythms and all kinds of other things, and it's made me wonder if they should do away with all street lighting (except, maybe some major roads and freeways) after, say, 10 or 11 at night. People will sleep better. All that night lighting messes with nature a lot, too. They've attributed declines in firefly populations to night lighting, for example.

Probably a good thing if you're driving.

I agree that the orange lighting feels cooler and grittier when you're walking down the street at night, and I'll miss that when my area finally switches over. But in my opinion that's not nearly as important as improving visibility and safety for others. If it helps reduce car crashes, crime, and even perceived safety, then it's totally worth it.

True, and that's the reason my hometown is moving the opposite way Chicago is (for about a decade, we've been upgrading existing white lighting to new orange LEDs).

This explains it:
http://ricemm.org/en/the-reserve/

But in areas where light pollution doesn't matter that much, most people obviously think white is superior to orange, otherwise places like Chicago would be replacing sodium lamps with orange LEDs.




Also, I find it amusing to call the reserve "international", as if special effort towards darkness was needed from the States of Maine and New Hampshire :P (the parts that are next to it are virtually empty.)

Wouldn't that be catastrophic for crime prevention, though?

I think the best of both worlds is the way I do it - with thick opaque drapes. If I don't set my alarm I can sleep through a bright sunny day and I have no idea (from my bed) whether it's the middle of the night or the middle of the day.

In Chicago the adoption of LEDs will almost certainly reduce light pollution. The new luminaires are full cutoff, so they cast no direct light upwards unlike the old sodium vapor lights which had bulbous plastic diffusers and cast tons of light up into the sky (hence the crazy aerial photos).

The article is poorly written, it blames LEDs for increased light pollution when the increase is actually due to the expansion and growth of cities. In a case like the City of Chicago, the borders are fixed and we already have all the streetlights we're ever gonna have, so the switch to LED can only improve things.

Now, the different hue/frequency of light may have adverse effects on wildlife (or humans) within cities, but due to the full-cutoff designs, the new generation of LED lighting should prevent the spillover of city light into the surrounding rural or wild areas, and make those areas better for wildlife than they are now.

That's the usual argument, but I can't help but wonder if the reality would be the opposite: Criminals have to see too, and if it's too dark for them to see anything, they might skip it altogether and stay home.

You could also argue that, if it was really dark, criminals escaping some crime they just committed would crash their cars more often, running into trees and whatnot, which would make it easier to catch them.

I think it would be worth an experiment, at least. Pick a certain crime-prone area of a city, and for a few weeks or a month or whatever, turn off all streetlights except maybe the major roads after about 10, and see what happens.

And that's the impetus for my new movie script. :D