r/decadeology • u/Emeraldsinger • Jul 25 '26
Discussion ššÆļø Approximately when did the U.S. move away from this kind of lighting in its cities?
I was alive and aware for the transition. But I canāt really pinpoint a year or range of when this change actually occurred. Does anyone else know? And does it depend on the state? Iām specifically looking for Wisconsin based answers if anyone maybe knows that as well. Thank you.
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u/PhysicsStock2247 Jul 25 '26
The transition to LED makes sense, but why canāt they at least apply orange filters to keep the vibe and make things easier on the eyes? Just applying a plastic orange cover over white led would be so much nicer than the harsh lighting we have now.
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u/wofchristian Jul 25 '26
The last of our towns to not fully switch to LEDS is installing orange LEDS whenever an old light breaks. You can barely tell the difference.
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u/Lucky_Professional_ Jul 25 '26
commercial led's are all about the same as hps lamps in lumens/watt efficiency. all around 130lumens/watt. because of the whiter color with better color rendition (daylight color vs amber color) they can run led's at a lower wattage and produce a similar perceived brightness to your eye (theres much more to this, led's werent as efficient as hps when they were introduced 10ish years ago but could become more efficient, infrastructure, labor, housing type, effect on wildlife/people etc. most of which is ignored unfortunately). because of that lower power level, led's can use less power obviously and last longer. hps lasts 5-10 years, leds 10-15. if u switch to an amber filter that actually replicates the wavelength of light produced by hps, u would have to increase the power level to reach the same perceived level of brightness, thus negating or reducing the "efficiency" of led's.
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u/10000Didgeridoos Jul 25 '26
Or just more simply - filters reduce total light transmission so you need more power for more brightness to get the same end result with a filter on as you would with an unfiltered light
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u/elmananamj Jul 25 '26
Yea but the daytime light produced by these new leds is bad for humans and animals
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u/Stuntman222 Jul 25 '26
Thats a great point, however idk my LED lights i use at work can change the white balance to be more orange, certainly there was something more of a compromise here.
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u/Lucky_Professional_ Jul 25 '26
there is only one led type in the street lamps and thats blue. red and green diodes are less energy efficient than the blue diodes, so they only have blue diodes. but the blue is very purple, thats why when the filters fail on them it looks purple. the white light led street lamps have is achieved through a filter
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u/PrizeStrawberry6453 Jul 26 '26
Fun fact: the phosphor coating isn't a filter. A filter blocks certain wavelengths of light while letting others pass, which is why they reduce the overall luminosity. The phosphor coating on LED lights absorbs the blue LED light and reemits it in a range of wavelengths, creating white light. It's kind of like how glow in the dark things work; you put energy in the form of light in, and the material emits that energy in a different wavelength. The main difference is that phosphor coatings for LEDs don't store the energy like glow in the dark things, they just emit it all right away.
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u/leopargodhi Jul 25 '26
and use light pollution shields so we can see more than 5 stars
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u/Accomplished_Mix7827 Jul 25 '26
God, do you remember the stars?
You weren't getting the true deep country night sky in the suburbs, of course, but you could at least see the stars
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u/leopargodhi Jul 27 '26
i do, and sometimes i wish i didn't. (not really but) i never knew how physically nauseating nostalgia could be. i remember stars, and green leaves, and the taste of living things on the air instead of pollution and scent boosters and why can't i claw a hole in time and crawl through. adulthood is cruel and getting crueler
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u/Accomplished_Mix7827 Jul 27 '26
I saw maybe two or three fireflies last night, and it reminded me of the swarms of yesteryear. The world feels so much more cold and sterile than it did 20-30 years ago
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u/whinenaught Jul 26 '26
In my town all the streetlights were switched to flood lighting LEDs with the shield and light pollution went down dramatically. I can see more stars now than when I was a kid
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u/spyguy318 Jul 26 '26
Funnily enough the orange of sodium vapor lamps has nothing to do with being easy on the eyes or helping dark vision. Sodium lamps are just extremely efficient and reliable, which makes them perfect for street lamps, but they only emit light in a narrow color band of orange.
Itās so narrow in fact that Disney used them in an early method of color chroma (aka greenscreen) that was completely automatic and so accurate that it could pick out any color that wasnāt that narrow orange band, including transparent materials like gauze or glass. Itās how they got such crisp chroma keys in movies like Mary Poppins. It used a special crystal prism to separate out the orange light, which required a special process to make which is now lost to history. CorridorDigital recently recreated the process using digital color filtering and it works like a dream.
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u/snmnky9490 Jul 25 '26
Because that would defeat the point of making it easier to see what's going on rather than "cool vibes"
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u/Accomplished_Mix7827 Jul 25 '26
It's not just "cool vibes", the harsh LED lights disrupt sleep cycles and increase glare. There are very good reasons to use softer, warmer lights at night
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u/Clynelish1 Jul 25 '26
There's impacts on animal populations, too. Arguably worse than the impacts on people.
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u/snmnky9490 Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
I'm actually quite familiar with LEDs at the hardware level. LEDs are not inherently "harsh" and have nothing to do with "glare" other than someone picking brighter replacement than old bulbs they replaced. If you want softer warmer LEDs then you can just use warm color temperature LEDs. They don't all have to be bright blue daylight 6500K diodes.
Edit: I will happily take all the downvotes from everyone who can't figure out the difference between brightness and color temperature
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u/elmananamj Jul 25 '26
They kill tones of bugs, the base of the food pyramid, which collapses without them. They disrupt the sleep patterns of humans and animals, and destroy habitat by artificially shrink it with fake daytime light at night. Blue-light leds fucking suck
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u/Accomplished_Mix7827 Jul 25 '26
Really missing the point there, bud.
We are all aware warmer lights are an option, we're upset that most local governments are actively choosing to use harsh LEDs as a replacement for the old incandescent and mercury vapor builds.
LEDs aren't the problem, the harsh light is
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u/DanMasterson Jul 25 '26
insane that youāre being downvoted for adding verifyable facts to the conversation.
plenty of neurodivergent ppl out here begging neighbors to stop mixing different shades of white in the same fixture.
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u/Adventurous_Bad_4011 Jul 25 '26
Yellow lights make people want to leave the area and not gather.
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u/PhysicsStock2247 Jul 25 '26
I hear you. But when Iām sitting on my stoop at 10 PM I donāt care about lighting up the street like Iām trying to unveil escaped POWs. I just want some light that lets me see good enough to drive and walk safely. The lights we had 30 years ago served this purpose just fine.
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u/elmananamj Jul 25 '26
I find it harder to see with harsh, white and overly bright leds
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u/DeluxeMixedNutz Jul 25 '26
Absolutely. How would we ever survive without these slightly brighter streetlightsĀ
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u/snmnky9490 Jul 25 '26
The actual point is that they use way less power, don't require some expensive guy to go change the bulb every few months, and the human eye can see much better when it can actually distinguish colors.
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u/Grock23 Jul 25 '26
Id say 2010 and by 2015 most were led.
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u/ThatDrunkenScot Jul 25 '26
Around 2011 they changed all the orange lights to white in my town in MD and by 2015 all the street lights were LED
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u/Ok-Map-143 Jul 25 '26
Depends where you are. My small town in PA is still orange for the most part
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u/cisforcookie2112 Jul 26 '26
My city is still mostly orange too with maybe 10% replaced by LED.
Our city said they had a large stockpile of sodium bulbs and parts, and it would make more sense to use that supply up before switching to LED.
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u/Interesting_Tea5715 Jul 27 '26
I've actually read studies that state that the amount of blue light we're getting from LEDs isn't natural and they aren't sure what the long term reprocussions from it will be.
Currently they think it'll affect sleep and stuff.
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u/cattycaker Jul 27 '26
Oh we already know that it increases cancer rates by disrupting melatonin production in the brain. Itās also more hazardous for drivers at night because itās too extreme for the eye to adjust properly between the white light and the darkness around the area.
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u/darth_tonic Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
It depends on the city but the shift from HPS to LED street lighting began as early as 2010 with the bulk of conversions occurring from 2015 to 2022ish.
These days the transition is almost complete, but you can still find pockets of HPS lighting depending on the region.
I agree that itās a bit of a vibe killer, but theyāre more efficient and supposedly provide better color rendering - i.e, easier to make out shapes etc.
Not the first time this has happened by the way. Boomers are often nostalgic for the blueish mercury vapor street lighting from the 70s and 80s. You can spot it in a lot of films of the time.
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u/stoicsilence Jul 25 '26
Not the first time this has happened by the way. Boomers are often nostalgic for the blueish mercury vapor street lighting from the 70s and 80s.
Its for this reason my dad likes the LEDs because the color rendering is similar to the old mercury vapor.
All that being said, my city has been tuning their lights to 2800k ~ 3000k and it looks pretty good
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u/CloudCumberland Jul 25 '26
There have been many iterations of bulb technology. These feelings were felt each time, I bet. Imagine the charm of gas lamps, and this tech bro patent troll from New Jersey ruins it with a trendy new metal filament. Granted, their newspapers weren't inundated with daily nostalgic pics full of warm colors.
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u/Adventurous_Bad_4011 Jul 25 '26
The reason they switch was to force people to leave the street and not gather under the lights. It a very subtle way of keeping people inside at night. In the 1990s it was discovered that this yellow light make people uncomfortable.
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u/Kriscolvin55 Jul 25 '26
My small town on the Oregon coast still has old style.
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u/itsmeonmobile Jul 25 '26
Iām bouncing around the coast right now! Can you tell me where?
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u/Kriscolvin55 Jul 25 '26
Coquille. In Coos County.
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u/IllegalPancakes08 Jul 29 '26
I was just thinking about how North Bend still had those lights as of 8 years ago or so! I hope Coos County is still quaint and pretty
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u/Accomplished_Mix7827 Jul 25 '26
2010s was when the transition to LEDs happened, leading to the harsher light of today
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u/dlhoff432 Jul 25 '26
This is why I love this subreddit. It makes me notice things that I never would have thought about. After doing a google search on LED streetlights, this started in 2006 in Ann Arbor Michigan. Los Angeles in 2009 and New York in 2013.
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u/coochiemaster8 Jul 25 '26
Here in flagstaff az itās a dark sky city. They use leds with the same color spectrum as the old lamps
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u/jericho74 Jul 25 '26
I recently watched an interesting video essay on why movies ādonāt feel like movies anymoreā that was specifically citing this change from amber to LED which rolled out between about 2007 to 2014.
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u/Careful-String-2171 Jul 25 '26
They started switching them with the ugly ass white LED lights because of energy efficiency and climate related stuff. The mid-late 2010s is when the shift is noticeable.
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u/Lucky_Professional_ Jul 25 '26
in the late 00s and early 10s i would see new city projects with one lone small led lamp installed at something like the start of a new bike path or paved walkway, sometimes with a solar panel. i think those were like test runs. they didnt start installing them en masse until about 10 years or less ago. yes it varies a bit by state
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u/mindcontainer Jul 25 '26
Most correct answer. Varies between federal and local but early 2000s they began the process.
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u/Illustrious-Mail7598 Jul 25 '26
Theres actually a really cool YouTube video explaining the different āerasā of lighting used in US cities and its relation to filmmaking! Highly recommend!
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u/Illustrious-Mail7598 Jul 25 '26
https://youtu.be/y51VUsotZe4?is=bsAXN9IAdMsXEVXs
Its called āCollateral & the Death of Neonā
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u/void_which_binds00 Jul 25 '26
For me the worst is hotel rooms. The only lights now, even on bedside lamps, are cool white LEDs. Makes it really not very cozy. Iāve started traveling with 2 little votive candles in metal cans just so I can have better cozy lighting
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u/InternationalHair725 Jul 25 '26
Restaurants for me. Absolutely nothing worse than getting excited to go out to eat and walking in to a hospital ward
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u/DanMasterson Jul 25 '26
yep, forgot my amber book light last weekend and the only option was a 4000k led right next to my head (the other, not matched cfl bulb in the same fixture was already burnt out)
naturally that fucked up my circadian stuff realllll good
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u/joesoldlegs Jul 25 '26
most major cities and residential areas transitioned from sodium to LED lights in the early to mid 2010s
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u/LeatherHovercraft Jul 25 '26
I have a friend who rented a bucket truck from Herc to put up golden gels on the street lights outside her place. No permit, nothing official. None of the neighbors have complained - I imagine they appreciate it as much as she does.
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u/Allpieisgoodpie Jul 26 '26
Probably around the same time people started to really act crazy if you take a minute to think about itā¦ could be related on a deep down psychological level?
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u/Jdadonn Jul 25 '26
I remember when people hated those lights and missed the really old lights from way back
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u/Icy_Prior_5825 Jul 25 '26
Itās all fucking white and blue lights now. My migraine-suffering retinas miss the amber.
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u/JBN2337C Jul 25 '26
Memories of college in the 90s. Campus mostly used the warm tones lights, and it was especially cozy on misty nights.
Now being outside is like being inside a WalMart.
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u/East_Extent_2948 Jul 25 '26
Itās kinda funny. People say we should always trust Engineers, then this is what you end up with. LEDās are efficient but soulless.
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u/kbn_ Jul 25 '26
I mean, only at the temperature they chose. You can buy LED bulbs in whatever warmth you want. It's just the civil engineers decided to optimize for efficiency above all else, and so they selected cooler temperatures.
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u/50ShadesOfKrillin Jul 25 '26
2015 sounds right. Although my area still has a mix of these lights and the newer LED bulbs
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u/Malibooch Jul 25 '26
Reminds me of the struggle of playing a Game Boy Color or Advance
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u/Anxious-Education703 Jul 25 '26
Mostly when they switched to LEDs during the 2010s. LED street lights can be produced that produce the color temperature as the traditional high-pressure sodium bulbs (and it's likely preferable for a number of reasons), but some cities have chosen to go with a bluer "daylight" color with a high CRI. There was a manufacturing defect from around 2017-2020 where a number of the LED bulbs were defective and failed early and produced a bluish-purplish color, but that was not intentional.
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u/olivegardengambler Jul 26 '26
About the early 2010s. I know that 2011's Drive with Ryan Gosling was amongst the last major Hollywood productions to be shot in LA before it switched to LEDs.
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u/Hot-Confection-7121 Jul 27 '26
Wanna guess like 05-10 was the transition by 2012-2014 sodium lighting was gone
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u/trace501 Jul 30 '26
This color is also better for wildlife, light pollution, and for human night vision. You can encourage your towns to transition to this color of LED ā look up the Flagstaff Dark Sky Initiative!
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u/BrickBanshee Jul 25 '26
If I never saw another white light streetlight for the rest of my life, I'd be happy about it. Same with car headlights
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u/Pink_Slyvie Jul 25 '26
Outside of medium to large cities, Why do we even have street lights. Sigh.
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u/InternationalHair725 Jul 25 '26
We destroyed the earth and all human spaces for the same reason - so a few auto executives can get a stronger q3
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u/PandaRider11 Jul 25 '26
I started seeing LEDās pop up in the early 2010s and always felt they were a massive improvement.
I lived in San Francisco and the orange street lights were never strong enough to shine through Bay Area fog but the LEDās do.
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u/reychango Jul 25 '26
I never noticed the change until a few years ago. It was snowing and I was wondering why there wasn't an intense yellow/orange hue. I never realized it was the street lights that created that.
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u/mzsigler Jul 25 '26
https://youtu.be/wIC-iGDTU40?is=uDfArjUiw219Fq70
There ya go, everything you ever wanted to know.
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u/Housedownboots86 Jul 25 '26
Where I live it still looks like this at night.
The only part where it changes are the lights on the highway at the entrance/exit points are led white (but they turned purple)
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u/thatsmymoney Jul 26 '26
Isnāt the transition currently happening right now? I wonāt claim the pun was planned but I accept any credit for it.
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u/BikeTrainDude Jul 26 '26
I know the intersection of Shoreline and Central Expressway when I see it
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u/Pagepage220 Jul 26 '26
I live in Kansas City and they had fully changed over significantly later than when it happened to everybody else it seems because we still had them in some areas until like 2018
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u/KrAEGNET Jul 26 '26
My town doesnt even turn on the street lights on my street anymore.
Edit: yes, i could file a complaint at borough hall, but theres probably someone else on the street who may have complained about it shining right into their bedroom, and quite frankly i dont care enough about it
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u/Unhappy_Classroom370 Jul 26 '26
D.C. did all alleys and apartment buildings in the early 10's and the regular streets in the late 10's and early 20's
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u/Planeandaquariumgeek Jul 26 '26
Daly City, California still has incandescent streetlights and IIRC is the largest city to still have them. They work really well in fog and since Daly City is the foggiest city on earth thatās why they havenāt switched
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u/hyphychef Jul 26 '26
I hate it, off in the distance it sometimes looks just as bright as day time.
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u/yubbastank14 Jul 26 '26
I'm not sure but I can confidently say we didn't have LEDs in the 90s and early mid 2000s when I was a kid. Id say sometime in the 2010s they started to switch over.
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u/trae_curieux Jul 26 '26
I'd say that replacement of high- and low-pressure sodium lighting (the type depicted in your photo) with white LED modules really became evident in the mid-2010s in my area of California.
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u/sabertoothturkey Jul 26 '26
Before 2008, most streetlights were high-pressure sodium lamps, which produced a warm amber glow with very little blue light. This type of lighting was much closer to the warm spectrum that we evolved with after sunset and therefore less disruptive to our circadian rhythms. As we replaced those lights with bright white LEDs over the past decade, nighttime environments became richer in blue wavelengths that the brain interprets as daylight.
This constant exposure signals the brain to stay alert, suppresses melatonin, increases stress on the mitochondria, and creates a harsher, less relaxing nighttime environment. This is why we all instinctively feel that older streetlights seemed calmer, softer, and more comfortable than today's cooler white LEDs. Not good.
2009-2012 was the rollout, and by 2020 LEDs became the standard for all replacements across the US. There is legislation proposed to ban all incandescents by 2028 that has thankfully gotten some pushback.
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u/torch9t9 Jul 26 '26
ew. Those awful line-emitting HMI lights drew a lot of power, on top of being monochromatic
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u/SigSauerSucks Jul 26 '26
I know certain places started using blue lights to allegedly stop people from shooting up
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u/Glarder Jul 26 '26
Mid 10s-early 20s in most major cities but there are a few holdouts like Newark, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Columbus, and San Diego AFAIK.
Suburbs, small towns, and rural areas are kind of a crapshoot and it depends mostly on the state and the utility (there are still some large areas that are mostly sodium vapor).
There are also a few utilities that still use mercury vapor (the type of streetlight that preceded sodium vapor), and even incandescent (which preceded mercury vapor).
I fully expect that there will still be towns that use sodium vapor in 2040 if the bulbs don't get banned.
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u/Unlikely-Aside-6078 Jul 26 '26
Does anybody know if there was a change in asleep-at-the-wheel car accidents between the orange sodium lamps and the white/blue LED lamps?? Up in the PNW, esp on long freeways like I5 or 101, there are occasionally these super bright blue streetlights and I always thought it was to help keep drivers awake, as blue light apparently disrupts our circadian rhythym. Driving around up here is DARK b/c of all the hills and trees, it can get very sleepy if you've been on the road a long time
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u/SupaFasJellyFish Jul 26 '26
This is a hot take: despite being nostalgic for a lot of things, Iām not nostalgic for the orange glow of the sodium lamps. That light always looked wrong to me.
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u/somerville99 Jul 26 '26
I worked for a NJ electric utility and can remember when we did a street light conversion to High Pressure Sodium in the mid 80s. We replaced Mercury Vapors and a few old Incandescents that some towns still preferred. The HPS gave off more lumens and used less electricity. They lasted longer too.
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u/Wonderful-Impress261 Jul 26 '26
In my town it heavily depends on where you are. Places that are newly built and on the highways they're all white LEDs. In older neighborhoods and in downtown it's mostly orange lights.
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u/FaithlessnessCute204 Jul 27 '26
High pressure sodium lightings been going the way of the dodo for atleast 15 years
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u/OmericanAutlaw Jul 27 '26
on my street we had orange lights until 2019. los angeles started to replace theirs shortly after 2013/2014
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u/BellSkyemarble Jul 27 '26
whenever they(you know) found out it would be cheaper so it saves the company that little bit of money even tho they get government grants/subsidies.
genuinely no clue probably 2010's.
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u/Greedy-Inspector919 Jul 27 '26
lol I know what you mean. I had these exact lamps in front of my house and one day presumably after coming back from college one time I noticed they were different. I was like āsince when did the lamps look like that?ā Because I noticed bright white squares of lights and a different design instead of that round dark yellow hued lamp. But I was told theyād always been like that. Just pulled up an old picture and yup, they definitely used to be yellow. I think the change happened after Covid or something.
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u/yourobviousanswer Jul 27 '26
The switch started during the Obama Administration
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u/zaindada Jul 27 '26
Thank god we finally transitioned to LEDs in most cities around the country. These incandescent lights were expensive to run (due to being inefficient) and almost useless in actually lighting up the roads.
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u/thatguydylan314 Jul 27 '26
iām from chicago and they mostly still had mostly orange lights up until about lockdown. the first time iād seen led lighting pop up there was on belmont avenue on the northwest side in january of 2018, and ever since then, itās been extended to most every light pole in the city. i moved away to california three years ago but as far as iāve seen on google streetview, there are still some orange lights that still exist every here and there within the last year but for the most part they use led lighting by now.
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u/DrankTooMuchMead Jul 27 '26
City of San Jose stubbornly kept it for a really long time all the way up until like 8 years ago, I think.
You would always know you were entering San Jose by the lights, if driving at night.
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u/No_Geologist3880 Jul 27 '26
NYC started its transition in December of 2013 and was done with it by around 2017.
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u/Dettyboy93 Jul 28 '26
Small towns still do. My small Ohio town did this. The park 3 houses down from me looks like this and I love hanging out there at night
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u/DontKillJustChill Jul 28 '26
The movie āDriveā is one of the last movies that highlights the vibes of those older street lights before LED took over LA. Highly recommend.
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u/Beautiful-Cup4161 Jul 28 '26
Am I in the minority by liking the newer stuff better? I'm not a fan of yellow/orange lighting.
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u/docthrobulator Jul 28 '26
Fun fact: "Drive" (2011) was one of the last movies shot in LA before the switch to LED street lighting
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u/RamblinMan4 Jul 29 '26
I miss the near single frequency low pressure sodium vapor lamps than made everything shades of yellow. No color at all. Such a vibe.
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u/Buddha-Not-For-Sale Jul 25 '26
I donāt remember when I noticed it or the year but looking at this makes me want to cry almost.