LED Lighting is a Scourge
New Evidence Suggests...
LED lighting is a scourge.
I admit, I’m an old guy. But this is absolutely ridiculous. Two generations, at least, full of people who wear headphone-style hearing protection when they run a lawnmower also insist on blinding each other on the highway. The colors of the city lights from a mountaintop sorta still look nice, with the comparatively-yellow glow of scattered streetlights salted with gobs of bright white. But of course, that’s now. As incandescent and sodium-vapor lights are replaced with LEDs, it eventually will become just a refrigerator-white blur down there.
Meanwhile, my old Jeep still has yellowish, dimming incandescent headlights, while almost everybody else on the road is preceded by a great plume of blue-white light. And it’s really hard to tell when somebody dims them for you, because it’s no longer a clear step-up or step-down. They just drop down a little bit and then come right back up. Many headlights roll with the pavement, leaving the impression they are dimming and brightening continuously, very distracting.
And the lights themselves? There’s a model out there with a brilliant white stripe the whole way across the hood, accompanied by four round white headlights, all brilliant white. And that’s the low beam. Highs are impossibly bright. After passing the guy, I can’t see a thing, for a bit.
All of this is worsened by the walking dildos who leave ‘em up on bright, all the time. My Jeep is jacked, so it’s headlights, when on bright are directly in your line of sight. So if I see someone coming with the high beams up, I turn mine up. Often they don’t turn theirs down, so I don’t, either. All of which is a duel to see who is the bigger prick.
It’s usually a draw.
So the local building supply is pushing their newish LED outdoor lights, which people gobble up and mount everywhere. Man, they are all ugly, and the guy down the road who keeps his flagpole illuminated 24-7, bought two of them. I’d hate to be his neighbor across the street. My neighbor bought one, and he put it in his front yard so I always know when he’s not home.
If state laws were modified to mandate a safe level of properly-aimed light from anyone’s headlights, almost all cars on the road would need to be parked. Fines would need to be levied for failure to dim for oncoming traffic. Make it so, baby.
New evidence suggests I’m not alone. There are highway issues AND health issues to consider. Please have a look.
https://carbuzz.com/aaa-study-bright-headlights-serious-problem/
https://thehighwire.com/editorial/blue-light-from-leds-the-silent-mitochondrial-killer/
That’s my rant for today.