Quote:
Originally Posted by aaron38
Vision is logarithmic with respect to brightness. Street light levels could easily be cut in half (brightness, not number of lamps) and people would be able to see just fine, and be able to easily see into shadows. Uniform dim lighting is better for night safety than isolated islands of glare.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
with the old sodium lamps, everything was just washed out in a sea of unrelenting orange. i liked that. it felt magical and moody. but alas, no more.
now, night time is a lot more like day time, there's no more weird transformation into "orange world" at twilight.
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These two points pretty much sum up my feelings on this issue. Particularly the second one. Humans have rod cells in our retinas that perceive the world in monochrome when lighting is dim, which means that for eons we've experienced the nighttime world as if it spoke a different, more primitive tectonic language than daytime, one of volumes, voids and silhouettes. This means that city streets bathed in a dim orange glow seem simpler, more solid, almost like negative space onto which we can project the color of our emotions or the forms of our imagination.
On the other hand, rods are better than cones at picking up movement. You'll more readily perceive a rat or cockroach scurrying across the sidewalk at night than during the day. Or something stirring in the shadows. In places far more dimly lit than most American cities, we don't lose the ability to see. Instead, our inanimate surroundings demand less of our attention.