Tuesday, April 28, 2015
New streetlights are headache-inducing
From WPIX:
It’s a bold plan: Replace all 250,000 city streetlamps by 2017 to reduce New York’s carbon footprint.
The $75 million plan, lead by the Department of Transporation, is already underway. For those who live in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, the new lights have already been installed. But residents say that when the sun goes down, it doesn’t quite feel like nighttime anymore, thanks to the new LED lights.
In fact, the lights are so bright, they are casting shadows and glare onto the houses themselves.
“Walking around at night, I have to wear sunglasses, otherwise the glare is blinding,” resident Jolanta Benal said.
Benal said her street looks like a movie set when the sun goes down and that she is losing sleep at night.
“In our bedroom, the light is ghastly , glaring, bright and invasive,” Benal said.
Dr. Jeff Gardere, a psychologist and frequent PIX11 Morning News contributor, said Benal’s troubles are real. Her trouble sleeping is directly connected to the amount of light hitting her bedroom.
The DOT told PIX11 News that “given the fixtures are different from previous fixtures, we are looking into ways to mitigate community concerns.”
14 comments:
They've bee here on the upper est side beginning last September, starting over on Second Ave and slowly working west.
They are awful. The source-point is so small and intense with no diffusion that it causes a lot peripheral glare.
A stark, cold light. The mid-block sodium lamps are still there. When those went in in spring 1973 I thought of them as "crime lights".
Now, those look nostalgic.
I understand that LED's are superior to the previous lights, but some form of shade-diffusion is necessary to make them more tolerable.
There are different fixtues in use. The one in this story has a projector lens and the flat lens type used mostly on the highways. The main promblem with both light is incorrect installation. They must be perfectly level,and most are not. DOT has to ffabricate a jig that can be used as a level and not rely on the installers"eye".. The projector types used in the streets cause so much glare that you can't see pedestrians pedestrians when behind the wheel of a car.as far a this woman is cocerned,invest in some good shades for your widows........
How about adding dark shades or dark curtains to your windows ?
Anonymous said:
"How about adding dark shades or dark curtains to your windows ?"
How about D.O.T. thoroughly research the lamps before implementing such a drastic change.
It looks like the only benefit that will come from these lamps is that it should cut costs for TV and Film shoots.
Yet again another case of improper vetting and testing awarding incompetence with bloated contracts in the name of conservation. The horrible irony is that this is supposed to cut costs when its done, but it will take decades to break even from the initial spending.
LED's have a bluish light which screws up your sleep patterns making your body think it's daytime
The complaints about bluish light square with current scientific findings that such a glow coming into bedroom windows at night can certainly be quite harmful to health. The DOT's choice of these light coincides with its other sleep-destroying policies - i.e., the waiver of the NYC Noise Code protection to permit after-hours construction projects throughout the city.
LED lights can be made in any color temperature. They could have made LED lamps with the same orange glow as the sodium lamps to increase contrast and reduce glare.
Light scatter & pollution is nasty.
Some jackass could have ordered narrow 12-45degree low profile LEDs. These LED lamps come with divergence angles anywhere from 12-180 degrees. Out in Southold the beams are narrow and only light the roads. Perhaps this was done for all the spy cameras going up. (they did the same thing in London)
Many of these LED lamps DO have IP cameras and 5 GHz Wifi boards that transmit to a receiver every 3000 feet. These receivers loop record and can be paged from any anyplace-anyone who has the network address and password.
Its a total invasion of privacy. Yeah, Get busted for sitting on your own stoop drinking a beer or performing preventative maintenance like trimming a neglected city owned tree.
All "for our own good"
Blue light is short wavelntg and is not good for the eyes.these led's are a close color temp to the old mercury vapor lights. A color temp of 3000k is a good compromise.
A wha ? 3000K is dirty incandesent subway brown.
KEEP CALM and DON'T SLEEP.
300ok is easier on the eyes than 5000k,but not as efficient.
In the seventies everyone complained about how bright and orange were the HPS lights .They called them crime lights and were generally in areas of that. They missed the cool white mercury lights. Now everyone misses the sodium lights...No matter what the city does everyone is always going to complain...In 20 years everyone will miss the LEDs...
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