This is probably going to seem like a really random topic, but it's been bugging me. Has anyone else been seeing like all (or most) of the public lighting around them switching to LED? I’ve been seeing the change for awhile, but this past week has been crazy.
I’d say the retrofitting became a thing in my area in 2017/18, but at that point it was more just that newly-installed lights were LED and even then there were still some new orange ones.
Well, in June 2023 they changed all of the public streetlights in my city from HPS to LED (barring about ten old ones that they kept, but that probably wasn’t intentional), so that was a huge chunk of them that immediately changed. Then last Summer, Miami started replacing them near both my grandparents’ houses and every month I see the LEDs spreading farther out of that area.
For better or worse, I almost always like what I know and I feel like usually the newer version of things is worse in quality and often not to be trusted. This is an extreme case of that. I LOVE the rare times where I still see the classic orange ones and I hate that almost all of my streetlights are bright ugly white now. It makes everything feel so modern/sterilized. It feels like I’m in a hospital or a CVS, as someone said. Also, they’ve gone from nice bulb-shape to just ugly flat circuit boards.
There were still a few “safe havens” near me that kept the older lights and looked great at night, but two of these areas were replaced in the past week. I saw one driving home from track practice (which is a shame because I liked driving through that neighborhood’s main road at night and running down it at practice). Now it’s ugly. All of the orange ones were perfectly fine (maybe one or two out of 50 were burnt out, but they held up really well), but now they've all just been converted to LED.
Anyway that was annoying so I told myself I would run through one of the only other areas with the old lights that i still know of to feel better about the loss lol. I started driving there and I was shocked to see they were all bright white as well (these areas were several miles apart and different neighborhoods in different cities, so it must've been a coincidence). Both of these changes had to have been within the past five days because I keep close tabs on this topic and am constantly looking at the lights lol. It feels like a real short matter of time before they are all gone.
I really thought these two residential areas that had kept the older HPS lights were intentional holdouts and preferred them, but they were probably actually just waiting for the budget or whatever to replace them. Most of the highways near me and a few small parts of the residential areas are still orange, but there are no longer really any big stretches of neighborhoods which is a shame.
I know this probably seems like a really specific and dumb gripe, but I can’t tell you how much I hate these new ones. They give me really bad feeling that I can’t justify - just dystopian. I put this in the same figurative basket as everything becoming digitized - it just seems like a depressing “new normal”. The old lights felt so much realer to me - nice color, can generate heat, have a warmup period. Just warmer, more comforting and more interesting.
Don’t even get me started on the fact that there are already more dead LEDs two years after their installation in my city than there were HPS at the time of replacement (and most of those had been in place for yeeeeears). These things are cheap junk and I just don’t see the point in adding them.
Anyway lol, let me know if you’ve seen the same recently and what you think.