I moved to a newly developed suburb a few years ago and they have yellow streetlamps. I can’t express in writing just how much I hate them! It is a visceral reaction - literally. Looking at that sickening yellow and the tint it gives to everything physically nauseates me every time I have to look at them.
But also its just one of those little things that I’ve seen all my life, never thought about and just took for granted - white streetlights. And now its changed. Its upsetting. It reminds me of the impermanence of everything.
About a year ago, my hometown starting replacing the white ones with yellow. I called the electric company and they explained that the yellow ones are more efficient - putting out more candles (a unit of luminosity) per watt. They are individually dimmer so you need more lights, but the long run cost is significantly less. So now there is a new lamp across the street from my parents house where there was never one before.
I can’t argue with the numbers, but I hate it.
Thank you for letting me vent. My wife is pretty tired of hearing about it.
My understandng is that they’re not only cheaper but reduce glare and light polution. I have also heard that observatories in the Califonria mountains can filter out that kind of light better than they can a white light, so they get a better view of the skies as suburbia sprawls out to the mountains.
In my area on a couple of roads (most notably a very main road) they have yellow lights for a 5 or 6 mile stretch. I find them ugly, but also somewhat dangerous (although I don’t know of any accidents that happened because of them yet). Anyways, the reason I consider them dangerous is that they are EXACTLY the same color as the yellow lights in the stop lights. So when your about a block or so away from the stop lights and at just the right angle, if you look up at the intersection while the light is yellow you often don’t even notice that the intersection has stop lights as it just looks like another street light. Until that is, it turns red and you hit the breaks. Funny thing is, you’d think by know, I’d know where all the intersections on this road are (driven on 1000’s of times) and which ones have lights, but I guess at night I’m just so used to relying on the stoplights.
I hate them, too. They aren’t very common, in my area, but I find them very depressing. And, while they may be economically efficient, they don’t seem to provide adequate light, even when spaced closer together than the old white lights.
I don’t like them either, their light seems dim, dirty, and dank. I can’t think of any in San Francisco proper, but I see a lot of them in Redwood City and San Jose. Come to think of it, there are new streetlights going up in a few parts of SF, and they all give off the good ol’ white light.
I like the yellow and orange street lights, as long as they’re working.
Bright white lights that really do nothing for nobody most of the night are pretty silly, when you think about it. Just give me the bare minimum needed for visibility and I’m happy.
We don’t have street lights near my house. I live in Nowhere. When you go into town they have streetlamps, but they’re neither white nor extremely yellow - certainly not the same color as a slow light. They’re yellowish, though. Same street lights as they’ve had for decades, as far as I can tell from my memories and my collection of old postcards.
One of the other towns has a white street light, but only the one.
Those yellow lights are sodium lamps, replacing the mercury vapor lamps.
Unfortunately, sodium lamps produce much of their light in the red spectrum. For those of us who are red-green color blind, sodium lamps are worse than no street lights at all.
I find it more difficult to drive on roads with yellow street lamps than no lamps at all.
The sodium lamps around here have a more orange-ish hue to them than yellow. Are there other sodium lights which appear more yellowish? In any case we’ve had light like this around my area since about the early 1980s when I noticed fewer and fewer white mercury lights around town. They were hard to get used to at first but now I see them just about everywhere.
Right by Best Buy and Circuit City on 76th street just south of Forest Home. I`m all over that !!
I have the same gripe. Its not like that intersection doesnt already have its share of accidents. Wait till solid gold McDs gets going with the car shows on Wednesday nights. (Ill be the one with the Red `73 AMX).
Hmm, interesting thread. My suburb has had the yellow lights for years…since we moved here in fact (14 years or so). Actually, I’ve very rarely seen white streelights.
Anyone from Canada (Ontario) want to confirm that the standard is the yellow streetlights?
Now having said all that, I really don’t like the mercury lights. They’re way too bright and as an avid sky-watcher, they spoil my fun.
Speaking only for my area, and this is something in which I have some first-hand knowledge. . .
The sodium lamps (in my area) with a comparable number of lumens as the MV lamps are about 1/3 to 1/2 cheaper. If they have replaced MV with sodium lamps and it appears “dimmer,” then they have probably used a lower-lumen lamp.
The placement of streetlamps in residential areas is a pet peeve of mine. A house I used to live in had a streetlamp directly across the road, and I could never sit on my front porch at night without being blinded by it, or see anything beyond the illuminated area. One of the reasons I chose my current neighborhood is that it doesn’t have them.
My only experience (that I can recall) of the yellow lights was about 10 years ago in Baltimore, MD. I was driving into the city from the airport and at the point of entering the city the freeway was suddenly bathed with a kind of golden glow from these lights.
It was really rather attractive, and seemed to make everthing look more pleasant than the stark white lights do. However, a brief driving experience is quite different from living around this kind of lighting and I can’t say if it would be better or worse than the white lights.
We used to have really bright white lights on all of the roads in town. They have been replaced by the yellowish (though not the color of a stop-light’s yellow light) ones over the past few years.
The old white lights were very bright. So bright, in fact, they reflected off dry pavement. Perhaps this isn’t visible to most people, but I have very sensitive eyes. They aren’t so much sensative to light as they are sensitive to changes in light. The bright lights made it difficult for me to drive at night. When it was raining (which is often around here), it was simply impossible.
The yellow lights that have replaced the white ones seem much more dim, yet they actually aren’t. They are simply more pleasing to my eyes. Yes, I agree that they are quite unattractive. However, they do not reflect off dry pavement. Furthermore, they seem to spread the light more evenly so everything is more visible making possibly dangerous items less likely to hide in the shadows.
A final note…there is no way in hell I would ever live in a residenial area without street lights. I like to be seen when I cross my street at night.
IIRC the low-pressure sodium lamps (the harsh yellow ones) are three times more energy efficient than mercury lamps. IMHO that justifies the disadvantages.