Ville de lumière, or too much?
The existence of LED lights that are cheap to buy and run has revolutionized how we light up city landmarks, but can there be too much of a good thing? Montreal has no overall policy on how much light is too much at night.
Joey 18:45 on 2020-01-19 Permalink
Somewhat related, walking home in the snow last night I really missed the old streetlights – the snow was almost brightly illuminated, it didn’t have that warm orange colour.
CE 18:56 on 2020-01-19 Permalink
My street still has the old orange-tinted lights and it looks a lot nicer right now than the streets with white lights.
Ian 11:28 on 2020-01-20 Permalink
I do like the darker streets for sleeping but it’s also a lot harder to see potholes at night…
Blork 12:34 on 2020-01-20 Permalink
I have two issues with LED lights. The first is color, but that is theoretically easy to deal with as long as whomever is in charge knows to get “warm” toned LEDs instead of cool toned. But the bigger problem for me is that LED lights are extremely bright pinpoints instead of diffused sources like you get with non-LED lights. This can be really harsh on the eyes, particularly for people with sensitive eyes or bad night vision.
It seems to me this could also be easily fixed by just placing a bit of a diffuser over the lights, but few people are complaining about it and hardly anyone thinks about lighting in terms of “quality of light” so it ain’t gonna happen.