2024-11-05
(This is entry 29 of #100DaysToOffload)
I was going along the greenway (a mixed-use pathway) on my bike the other night, when all of a sudden I saw these two lights ahead of me. They were bright light LEDs. I got a little worried - is that a car on the greenway? Surely not! (Cars are disallowed). I was still a little worried until they came a little closer, and aligned more one-on-top-of-the-other than side-by-side, at which point I realised it was actually a couple on bikes, that just each had incredibly bright lights. As they approached and passed me by, for around five seconds, I had no visibility whatsoever: I had to cover my eyes to avoid being blinded by the lights, and in turn could not actually see where I was going (luckily, there are no obstacles, and I know the pathway well).
This happens a lot with car lights also: a car approaches on the other side of the road, and all of a sudden I can't see anything. Or, I leave a sliver of curtain open at nighttime, and catch the streetlight outside when I roll over in bed. It is a horrific, piercing pain to see that light. I'm sure we all have experience of.
Now, in our bathroom we used to have an old incandescent, that took a little while to get to full brightness. This was perfect for a bathroom situation, where you might be going to the toilet at night and want to ease your eyes into light, and where you are going to sleep again after anyways. I am not sure the reason but my parents decided to replace it with an automatic light with a sensor: the problem being, it was a new LED, and went from zero to 1200 lumens or something in an instant. It was horrific if you happened to want to go to the loo at night. That light died surprisingly quickly though, and what we have now is a builder's light, also LED, but that has sheer-white and slightly-orange settings. The difference is unspeakable: the slightly-orange is not as warm as an old incandescent would be, and is still a little cold, but has the advantage at least of not burning your eyes out when you have just woken up. I imagine there is a reason why they haven't bothered to replace the bathroom light, even with all the hassle of having to recharge the builder's light every so often.
I got me to thinking: why have we replaced everything with LEDs? Well, energy savings. Yet, we have now just got lights that are so much brighter instead, and yet make living in the city horrific with how cold and white they are.
Imagine if we just made one change: we took our LEDs, kept their positive attributes, but just borrowed from the older incandescents the lovely orange warmth they used to have? If we made car lights lower (so they aren't at eye-level) and a little bit less bright?
Imagine how lovely the city could become. Again.
The problem with the modern day I suppose is, progress has become quite good, but is now turning extractive. A lot of the "improvements" we have hardly improve, but rather are changes made for extracting profits. Often, that comes at the cost of reversing good decisions made in the past. Cars are now bigger (SUVs) as that drives more profit to the auto manufacturers: but that comes at the cost of higher pedestrian fatalities, greater carbon emissions, less space on the roads, a less evenly distributed modal share, higher expenses to governments and councils for road maintenance, ... (even more reasons omitted for brevity), and of course, the LED lights being at eye-level and blinding every other man, woman, child, and other car on the road.
So many modern industries have this problem. They are not there to serve anymore; shareholder primacy has forced them to extract, to abuse, even when it doesn't really even serve the people doing it.
It's gone political I suppose. At the end of the day, all I want is to walk with peace down an orange-lit road at half ten at night.