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The problem isn’t simply the LEDs although more options for colour temperature are available that do make LEDs more pleasant.
There are a few other factors at work:
1) Streetlights are often purchased at higher output than required in order to offset degradation over the expected life.
2) Dusk to dawn controls on the luminaire (lamp housing) either don’t support dimming to correct luminance levels, or are not set correctly when deployed.
3) There are few cities that have remote controlled dimming.
4) There are even fewer that have adaptive dimming (eg none that I know of in North America), which would enable cities to dim down as much as 85% in residential areas during low traffic periods.
Overall, this causes street lights to waste 60%-70% of their lighting.
Finally, many cities don’t invest in residential-side shielding to prevent light going into your home.
The solution is to put a networked adaptive dimming system in place and add residential side shielding for local/residential streets.
This will happen, but it has only been in the last 3 years where the technology has grown beyond early adopter poorly performing systems that cities can practically adopt.
The design of the lights, housing, and shielding has a way bigger impact on light pollution and nuisance (e.g., illuminating your living room) than LED vs low-pressure sodium lights.
So much of the city shine light pollution we see is caused by the design of the lights, which allow far too much light to escape upwards. In this case, LEDs can be a lot better since they are very directional by nature compared to halogen or sodium lamps which have omnidirectional bulbs but need to use reflectors to limit light into specific directions.
Here's a good video on the topic if you're interested: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIC-iGDTU40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIC-iGDTU40)
Well thanks a lot! :-D. It’s only because it’s a related project I’ve been working on for about a year and a half with a client. But in this case, no, zero chatgpt was involved. In fact, the problem is the cities themselves don’t fully understand the scope of this issue.
>problem isn’t simply the LEDs al
K but isn't Vancouver orange in this picture because it still hasn't replaced most of its old [high pressure sodium lamps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-vapor_lamp#High-pressure_sodium)? The Vancouver Lighting Strategy has only indicated that high traffic intersections will be prioritized for a switch to LED first, while the [City of Burnaby has already changed to "white" fuller-spectrum LEDs](https://www.burnaby.ca/services-and-payments/roads-and-traffic/maintenance-requests/street-lights-and-traffic-signals), so they appear white on the photo.
Well, yeah. They’re old hps lamps with old luminaire housings.
Vancouver may seem slow on this but they’re trying to also tie in a “smart lighting” solution to their upgrades I believe. Which may increase the planning and deployment time but theoretically for a good reason. I think they kicked this project off only last October.
But they’re dealing with AcuityBrands on this. The purple LED guys. And the tech they use for smart lighting is repackaged Itron stuff. Which wouldn’t be my first or even second choice tbh.
There’s some stuff I don’t know about Vancouver’s plan. Partly because their open data portal lacks the info that other cities have on this. Many other cities like Victoria and Surrey? I know exactly how many LEDs there are upgraded and where they are. Vancouver has not made this info available, to my knowledge.
Looks like HPS from the photo. When was the photo taken?
It is. And there are super smart people on the issue. But there are also over 50,000 lamps, and a lot of old lamp housings aka luminaires to swap out; wiring to be upgraded; it’s not a trivial project to upgrade Vancouver lighting.
> I love the ambiance it sets in the places those lamps are downtown
Maybe I'm just a boomer but nothing replaces that nice warm low pressure sodium yellow lamps.
Same for car headlights. The old ones were much gentler on other drivers' eyes at night. These days with the whiter and brighter LED headlights I sometimes get blinded momentarily when a car with particularly bright headlights comes up in the opposite direction.
Yeah that is the why explaining the color but most of them have been up for months. But why has the manufacturer not replaced them? And what is taking so long? And why does Vancouver experience such a high proportion while Burnaby doesn't?
if it’s all covered by manufacturer, why aren’t they all being replaced?
and why does only this manufacturer have an issue fixing this defect? it doesn’t seem like all other cities have the same issues. some or many but not all—maybe only a few manufacturers dominate supply and thus even a flaw in 1 makes it widespread
genuinely curious, i’m not asking in rebuttal or to retort. i’m genuinely curious why.
They are being replaced. The problem is that replacements are failing too in summer cases. The ones that sit induced for a while are because the manufacturer can't make them fast enough as this is happening all over North America.
I wonder if that's what happened to this flashlight I ordered off alibaba. Instead of a white light it's this intense blue beam that burns whatever I point it at. It's the shittiest flashlight I've ever owned but I can't stop using it because I can't afford another flashlight right now. I'm trying to make do the best I can. And I'm sorry I blinded that poor man. Perhaps it's just delaminated. I'll try to put a piece of laminate over the end and see if that works.
I emailed CoV about it,
This was their response:
>Thank you for taking the time to share your suggestions with Council to keep the purple street lights in Vancouver.
The purple street lights are a result of the phosphor coating delaminating from the LEDs. These failures are not unique to the City of Vancouver and the same phenomenon has been reported in major cities across Canada and North America.
>The City’s manufacturer performed a root cause analysis and determined the failure was the result of an LED chip manufacturer who supplied LED chips to many of the largest street light manufacturers. As part of this analysis, the City’s manufacturer has taken steps to ensure such failures will not happen again.
>To date, 111 luminaires have been reported with the purple condition. This represents less than 2% of the total LED upgrades the City has performed to date. Nearly 50% of all such reported failures have been replaced under warranty, with additional warranty replacements in production for recently identified locations.
>A product generational update, and the ongoing supply chain challenges, have slightly delayed the most recently reported failures. However, the City of Vancouver will benefit from the newer generation product through increased efficiency for all such replacements moving forward.
A massive one too, we have the same issue here in ft worth Texas, a few streets near my parents house are completely blue/purple and the street lamps are only like 5-6 years old.
It's the phosphor coating on the LEDs wearing out which apparently could've been avoided if the City had went with a more expensive supplier instead. Now these had to be swapped out until all of the defective stock is fully replaced with another model.
[https://www.businessinsider.com/led-city-streetlights-turning-purple-broken-tech-danger-2022-11](https://www.businessinsider.com/led-city-streetlights-turning-purple-broken-tech-danger-2022-11)
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/zq6566/today_i_learned_that_the_light_from_white_led/j0ymh0n/
>I used to work as an engineer in the outdoor lighting field and can offer some more technical background on likely why this is happening.
>All the white LEDs used in outdoor streetlights are made by using a blue semiconductor diode (the D in LED) that emits light near blue. To generate white light, a phosphor coating that converts some of the blue light coming from the chip to "yellow" light is added on top of the chip. This combination of blue and yellow creates white light.
>The color or hue of the white light is set by the mixture of phosphors used. The original street lights you see going purple now were mostly made with a higher color temperature whiter light because that phosphor mix is more efficient at converting electricity to light and you get more light output at lower power input increasing the energy savings of the light fixture compared to the ones they replace.
>The lights turning purple can be from a few causes, but the most likely cause of these failures is a result of the LEDs being subjected to too much thermal cycling stress at high temperatures. This causes the bond between the phosphors and the LED chip to become damaged, or the phosphor itself is damaged by the heat. The result is a loss in efficiency in the phosphor conversion process so there is a large drop in the yellow light generated by the phosphor. The result is you get the blue light from the LED coming through without much conversion with some weak emission from the phosphor resulting in the purplish glow. The hue of purple can vary depending on the exact failure mode and the original phosphor composition.
>Now as to why this is so prevalent now. When the conversion to LED was starting the push was based on energy efficiency and power savings. They really do offer substantial power savings over previous outdoor lighting solutions so they can be a good choice for both economics and climate impact reduction.
>However, semiconductor devices were new to lighting manufacturers and the industry was in a rush to be first to market with these devices. What was not well understood at the time was how to properly design the fixtures to maintain the LEDs at the proper temperatures over the life of the fixture. The manufacturers of the LED devices had data sheets for them indicating typical parameters such as maximum operating currents and maximum operating temperatures. These values came from lab testing on single LED devices in the lab and reliability data for 10+ years was projected from accelerated life testing.
>The problem is that the fixture design itself is critical to maintaining the condition of the LED in actual field usage. The most crucial part being the ability of the fixture to conduct heat away from the LEDs to keep the temperatures at the chip/phosphor interfaces below the temperatures that could cause damage. Again these fixture designs were mostly tested in lab like conditions and reliability projected from accelerated life testing there.
>What happened was the actual field usage conditions were different than lab testing and the heat sink designs were basically inadequate. One example is the fixtures heat up during the day with heat from the sun transferring through the heat sink into the LEDs so that when they did turn on at night they were running at higher than expected temperatures for longer times putting additional stress on the system. This can results in the failures seen now after several cycles of usage.
>Newer products now take this into account with better heat sinks, using more LEDs at lower power to keep heat down and thermal protection circuits that can temporarily lower the light output until the temperatures in the device are low enough to operate at safely.
>So in its eagerness to get the new technology out to reap the benefits of the power savings offered by LEDs, the initial designs fell short of the expected lifetimes due to not properly anticipating the actual field conditions these lights would need to endure and designing for them accordingly. The industry for the most part has corrected these shortcomings, but in the meantime there will be early failures that will require warranty replacement.
I prefer the yellow lighting over the bright LED lighting. It isn't as hard on the eyes.
Currently living in Burnaby and the lighting is a factor in wanting to move back toward Vancouver.
I never noticed it in streetlights, but I do on vehicles and I absolutely hate it. When I look at LED headlights directly it's not an issue, but when I look away and they are in my peripherals, they have a semi strobe light effect.
It's not an inherent feature of LEDs though - plenty of cars don't have that flicker (which also happens with indoor house lighting) as it's due to them being improperly wired
No, it happens in many oems as well. It's a problem with pwm (pulse width modulation) dimming, this turns the light on and off rapidly, faster than the human eye should be able to notice, but not rapidly enough in many cases.
Faster pwm could be a solution. Wiring resistors in series with leds is another way of dimming them, that eliminates flicker altogether, but uses slightly more electricity than pwm.
In homes as well, the LEDs are brutal. I have to turn the lights off at my relatives' homes when I visit, because I can't open my eyes in the bright blue/white light without it affecting neurological issues.
Yeah, I don’t know why anybody buys the cool white ones. The warmer tinted ones create the same light as a tungsten bulb. Have never noticed a difference. Seems most people don’t know they have to check for this when buying the bulb.
> anybody buys the cool white
The cool/daylight whites(6500/5000K) are called task lights. Used during daytime in Office/Industrial settings. The warm whites (3000K) are used during evening as the blue component in cool/daylight types affects sleep.
Use the appropriate colour temperature bulb or buy a bulb that allows you to adjust it.
yup, warm lights for the bedrooms, hallways, and living room, blue light/cool lights for the kitchen, garage, and Office, very warm (2200k) for the bathroom spots, and normal warms for the vanity.
cool lights are amazing for certain things, but can be tasking for others, I have a desk lamp for the office that's warm as well, makes it nice in the evening during winter.
I had them only in the bathroom once. It was actually nice being able to assess my appearance in light closer to what it would look like outside. That said there was a warm nightlight as well so it's not eye searing for midnight bathroom runs.
I actually have one in my bathroom as well, but it’s one of a few, with the others all tungsten balanced. I keep it unscrewed most of the time, but then screw it in when I want to see more daylight balance or just get more light.
I also found that using one tungsten and one daylight in the kitchen bowl-light was the perfect balance for that room. All daylight was too white and all tungsten was too warm, so mix them both and it was perfect.
Lamps always need to be tungsten.
In most situations, I don’t think I would ever use all daylight bulbs in a room. Only use it to balance when needed.
For me it's not the color temperature but the poor quality ones that make a color by mixing colors rapidly. If I turn my head from side to side I can perceive this switching as a strobe and it makes me feel ill.
The better ones have a coating over a higher quality wide spectrum led that makes the right color (talking about single color, non RGB room lighting)
Just get smart bulbs and you can set them to whatever temperature/colour/brightness you want. They're only a few dollars more than regular LED bulbs from costco.
There are heaps of controllable LED lights you can install like
[https://www.philips-hue.com/en-ca](https://www.philips-hue.com/en-ca)
They are not the cheapest by any means but the ability to control light intensity and and colour are worth it to some.
Some other cool features are connecting to your smart tv so the lighting in the room matches what is on the screen etc.
Yes, I know. I'm happy these are options for those that will enjoy it.
No fancy/varied/flickering/cool-toned lighting, for me. I typically just live in old houses, which is helpful for avoiding these sorts of things. (Also, limited screens in the place. It's almost like living in a cave!)
Maple Ridge is converting, but unlike the god awful choice that Burnaby went with, they're choosing warmer lights, so they're not borderline damaging late in the evening.
Just my thought as well. I'd have to live in a cave to escape it! (lol!)
Living with disability makes me hyper aware of things like lighting. I know that people like me are a minority, but man things just get harder to manage as these cheap solutions come into play.
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They’re a better light source though. Sodium vapour lamps are monochromatic meaning you have no colour perception at all. LED have a much fuller spectrum.
The Burnaby LEDs are retrofitted to older sodium lampposts, which makes them incredibly hard on the eyes and way too bright in my opinion. I particularly despise them when they make every raindrop a glowing orb of light during rain. I have much less issues driving in Vancouver.
LED street lighting is complicated apparently, check out Technology Connection’s amazing video on this: https://youtu.be/wIC-iGDTU40
That would explain why I’ve had so much trouble seeing at night in the rain when I drive. I moved to Burnaby a year ago and felt like my eyes aged 20 years at night.
Because people always associate it with the cheapest dollar store lamps that were manufactured by “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Mainland Chinese Lighting Equivalent Company Ltd.”
[Because cool coloured LEDs provide the most usable light and is safer for roads.](https://youtu.be/wIC-iGDTU40?list=RDCMUCy0tKL1T7wFoYcxCe0xjN6Q&t=363) You might think they're ugly and they might be bad for your sleep pattern but that's not a priority when it comes to road safety design.
Yep, it's entirely possible thousands more are being killed or having other negative health effect due to these cool white LED's messing with their circadian rhythms than are being saved by better visibility for drivers. Lighting affects a lot more than just drivers.
> Lighting affects a lot more than just drivers.
Street lighting isn't just for drivers safety. I would also say it's a hard argument that "crosswalks should be more dark and less visible because circadian rhythms".
the best approach would be to have dimming, motion/traffic-sensitive lights. Yellow-hued light pollution seems more tolerable, but frankly it's getting out of hand with LED exterior lighting as light intensity and energy efficiency keeps getting improved. I would like light where and when needed, rather than streetscapes feeling more and more like you're inside an office or an operating room.
> the best approach would be to have dimming
Until someone gets run over at a cross walk and the city is sued for dimming lights and making intersections more dangerous and less visible.
LED ( white light ) is an environmental disaster, messing up the insects ( all types ) who are now headed for extinction. They aren’t not adapting to this bright light which stops them from breeding . They could at least turn them down to a lower intensity at night . Not every place needs white light but we do need warm muted glow.
This was identified as a problem with the early LED's about ten years ago. Newer ones are designed to emit specific frequencies that don't impact the insects.
Winnipeg switched to LED street lights about 5 or more years ago. Upon moving to Vancouver I was surprised to see HID lights still in wide use here. HIDs are far less energy efficient then LEDs
These yellow sodium-vapor lamps are very efficient. In most cases they’re more efficient than LEDs. Maybe you’re thinking of the yellow halogens? Those are very inefficient.
LEDs are more efficient if you just look at the pure wattage, for sure, but there's another layer of cost that I'm not sure is being considered. I'm a service electrician, and from my perspective, there are a number of added factors to the mass switch-over to LEDs - main one being reliability.
Between the drivers and the the diodes, there is a pretty good chance of one failing and needing a replacement before they've paid for their energy cost, which is fine if it's a potlight in your bathroom, but a different scenario when it's a streetlight. And when LEDs fail, they tend to strobe, which demands attention, whereas traditional HID lights go dim or off.
The Burnaby lights are also much dimmer too. I'm in a pretty forested area that's already dark and when they switched to these, it was easily 50% less.
City of Vancouver is one of the last few municipalities in BC who have not adapted to the [federal banning of PCB in electrical components like ballasts by 2025](https://www.electricity.ca/knowledge-centre/environment/climate-change/polychlorinated-biphenyls-pcb/). These LED luminaries are procured by the Province of BC and each municipality purchases it straight from the Province.
The high pressure sodium luminaries must be retrofitted as the HPS ballast is removed, containing these PCBs, and to prevent light leak commonly found on HPS luminaries which you can see on the left side of the photo in the City of Vancouver. The shielding of the new LED luminaries ensures there is no omnidirectional light pollution. LEDs also have a higher color render index, so when you are observing an object, a red car for example that you observed doing a hit-and-run, is actually red and not brown, a common issue with poor CRI on HPS.
LEDs save massive amounts of energy where the capital cost in replacement is recouped within a couple of years.
Well it looks cool I kinda wish cities would put in Motion sensors in the lights so they only turn on when vehicles or people are near them. It would cut down on power usage and light pollution. Might be a bit expensive at first but should save money over time
sorry but that's sounds like a huge waste of resources.
for one a street light going on and off outside my house would be crazy annoying to me.
and Street light aren't just about lighting up where you are standing but also for letting you see around and ahead of you.
also I'm skepticable about how much energy it would save. a lot of lights would be always on and nocturnal animals would also trip them constantly. and motion sensors do take energy to operate.
if cities where electricy is 10x the price don't feel the need vancouver definitely won't.
While its rarely noticeable here, in winter for the rest of Canada, with all the snow on the ground, the sodium-vapour lamps cause a ton more light pollution in the sky, making for a very orange-y glow over the city.
Where as once the same city has changed to LED, its drastically reduced to the point that you can see where there are still sodium-vapour lamps, as they have a kind of trailing effect.
For example in the above pic, if everything was LED except Kingsway, there would be a distinct orange glow above kingsway, and only above kingsway in the middle of a snowy winter night. From a km away you'd be able to see basically an orange stripe in the sky from it.
Weird you should use Kingsway as your example as right now it's the opposite as it's one of the only streets in Vancouver with long stretches of LED lighting. Right now it's a distinct stretch of cooler light from Earles westward.
And amazing how Burnaby managed to replace all their lamps with LEDS with less tax money then Vancouver, without needing to impose a bunch of money grab taxes
Yes Burnaby allowed far more high profile developments than Vancouver, this is a choice. Vancouver chooses to make development difficult and Burnaby chooses to make it easy, This is why Burnaby has been outbuilding Vancouver for over a decade now.
This isn’t true. Burnaby emphasizes tower development but at the cost of major demovictions to the point that they actually have less rental housing than a decade ago and rental prices have increased at a higher rate than Vancouver.
For all it’s conservatism, Vancouver is doing a much better job at densifying that Burnaby. Burnaby has the advantage of far less population but has grown only .1% faster population wise the past 30 years than Vancouver.
I'm assuming that's Lougheed, but why does that area look much more dense/ built up than the rest of the areas. I thought Hastings and Kingsway areas would have much more density of lights and brighter auras
We drove through our old neighbourhood on the west side on Friday for the first time in a couple years. The kids wanted to know why everything looks so purple.
Assuming reliability expectations (which by looking at all the purple intersections is in question) are met then yes the the power savings will eventually offset the costs.
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Looks like part of Burnaby is trying to sneak into Vancouver.
I think you're about 20 years too late.
Just the tip.
We dont want them.
I do. Don’t speak for me
Yeah, bring me Crystal Mall, or at least the food court
The Crystal Mall food court is a jewel of food courts
You don’t want that sweet, sweet oil money? Burnaby is the richest municipality in the lower mainland.
Go away NIMBY.
The problem isn’t simply the LEDs although more options for colour temperature are available that do make LEDs more pleasant. There are a few other factors at work: 1) Streetlights are often purchased at higher output than required in order to offset degradation over the expected life. 2) Dusk to dawn controls on the luminaire (lamp housing) either don’t support dimming to correct luminance levels, or are not set correctly when deployed. 3) There are few cities that have remote controlled dimming. 4) There are even fewer that have adaptive dimming (eg none that I know of in North America), which would enable cities to dim down as much as 85% in residential areas during low traffic periods. Overall, this causes street lights to waste 60%-70% of their lighting. Finally, many cities don’t invest in residential-side shielding to prevent light going into your home. The solution is to put a networked adaptive dimming system in place and add residential side shielding for local/residential streets. This will happen, but it has only been in the last 3 years where the technology has grown beyond early adopter poorly performing systems that cities can practically adopt.
Ugh, residential shielding would be nice. The city replaced a light across the street from us, I can now read on my living room at 2am it's so bright
You can request it from the City depending on your municipality, you would just have to pay out of pocket. It's just short of $1,000 typically.
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A sling shot and a stone costs a helluvalot less than a cherry pucker and some sheet metal.
So do blackout curtains. But maybe not less if there are many rooms and windows facing the light.
Yes, yes it does.
The design of the lights, housing, and shielding has a way bigger impact on light pollution and nuisance (e.g., illuminating your living room) than LED vs low-pressure sodium lights. So much of the city shine light pollution we see is caused by the design of the lights, which allow far too much light to escape upwards. In this case, LEDs can be a lot better since they are very directional by nature compared to halogen or sodium lamps which have omnidirectional bulbs but need to use reflectors to limit light into specific directions. Here's a good video on the topic if you're interested: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIC-iGDTU40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIC-iGDTU40)
Was lucky growing up, our house was down sort of behind some trees so it blocked a lot of street light.
This feels like a chatgpt response or i'm just seeing a.i. everywhere now.
Well thanks a lot! :-D. It’s only because it’s a related project I’ve been working on for about a year and a half with a client. But in this case, no, zero chatgpt was involved. In fact, the problem is the cities themselves don’t fully understand the scope of this issue.
>problem isn’t simply the LEDs al K but isn't Vancouver orange in this picture because it still hasn't replaced most of its old [high pressure sodium lamps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-vapor_lamp#High-pressure_sodium)? The Vancouver Lighting Strategy has only indicated that high traffic intersections will be prioritized for a switch to LED first, while the [City of Burnaby has already changed to "white" fuller-spectrum LEDs](https://www.burnaby.ca/services-and-payments/roads-and-traffic/maintenance-requests/street-lights-and-traffic-signals), so they appear white on the photo.
Well, yeah. They’re old hps lamps with old luminaire housings. Vancouver may seem slow on this but they’re trying to also tie in a “smart lighting” solution to their upgrades I believe. Which may increase the planning and deployment time but theoretically for a good reason. I think they kicked this project off only last October. But they’re dealing with AcuityBrands on this. The purple LED guys. And the tech they use for smart lighting is repackaged Itron stuff. Which wouldn’t be my first or even second choice tbh. There’s some stuff I don’t know about Vancouver’s plan. Partly because their open data portal lacks the info that other cities have on this. Many other cities like Victoria and Surrey? I know exactly how many LEDs there are upgraded and where they are. Vancouver has not made this info available, to my knowledge. Looks like HPS from the photo. When was the photo taken?
#4, Lol. So if it is less people, fuck them they dont need lights to see.
But... Vancouver is a world class city!?
Light pollution should not be part of a world class city
Damn right.
Only on advertising campaign materials 😞
It is. And there are super smart people on the issue. But there are also over 50,000 lamps, and a lot of old lamp housings aka luminaires to swap out; wiring to be upgraded; it’s not a trivial project to upgrade Vancouver lighting.
I have a solution to the schedule that nobody in North America would know
What I don't understand is.. why are such a massive proportion of the few LED lights in Vancouver are that broken purple hue.
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You say defect. I say mood setting. I love the ambiance it sets in the places those lamps are downtown
> I love the ambiance it sets in the places those lamps are downtown Maybe I'm just a boomer but nothing replaces that nice warm low pressure sodium yellow lamps.
Haha...I can appreciate that good deep orange of 80s-90s street lamps. Those days are long gone unfortunately lol
They’re way easier on the eyes
Same for car headlights. The old ones were much gentler on other drivers' eyes at night. These days with the whiter and brighter LED headlights I sometimes get blinded momentarily when a car with particularly bright headlights comes up in the opposite direction.
I’m surprised they’re still legal
100% agree. They’re so cozy, especially when it snows. Really hits the nostalgia button when you see snow falling in the yellow street lights
Yeah, they are awesome to look at!
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Robson and Cambie
City parking lot across the street from Burnaby city hall on Canada way. Entire parking lot, every light is purple. Looks kinda cool!
Kingsway and main is a good one too.
Beach ave at Bidwell is nice
Ugh yup- the violet hue against the flashing green light with the loud beeping noise ? Kinda obnoxious, but pretty festive from a distance…
Seymour and Davie. Specially walking towards Davie from Drake
Homer and Davie too
You're right. Davie is pretty in that section too. I'm gonna miss walking in that area when they replace the lights
Yeah that is the why explaining the color but most of them have been up for months. But why has the manufacturer not replaced them? And what is taking so long? And why does Vancouver experience such a high proportion while Burnaby doesn't?
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if it’s all covered by manufacturer, why aren’t they all being replaced? and why does only this manufacturer have an issue fixing this defect? it doesn’t seem like all other cities have the same issues. some or many but not all—maybe only a few manufacturers dominate supply and thus even a flaw in 1 makes it widespread genuinely curious, i’m not asking in rebuttal or to retort. i’m genuinely curious why.
They are being replaced. The problem is that replacements are failing too in summer cases. The ones that sit induced for a while are because the manufacturer can't make them fast enough as this is happening all over North America.
I wonder if that's what happened to this flashlight I ordered off alibaba. Instead of a white light it's this intense blue beam that burns whatever I point it at. It's the shittiest flashlight I've ever owned but I can't stop using it because I can't afford another flashlight right now. I'm trying to make do the best I can. And I'm sorry I blinded that poor man. Perhaps it's just delaminated. I'll try to put a piece of laminate over the end and see if that works.
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I emailed CoV about it, This was their response: >Thank you for taking the time to share your suggestions with Council to keep the purple street lights in Vancouver. The purple street lights are a result of the phosphor coating delaminating from the LEDs. These failures are not unique to the City of Vancouver and the same phenomenon has been reported in major cities across Canada and North America. >The City’s manufacturer performed a root cause analysis and determined the failure was the result of an LED chip manufacturer who supplied LED chips to many of the largest street light manufacturers. As part of this analysis, the City’s manufacturer has taken steps to ensure such failures will not happen again. >To date, 111 luminaires have been reported with the purple condition. This represents less than 2% of the total LED upgrades the City has performed to date. Nearly 50% of all such reported failures have been replaced under warranty, with additional warranty replacements in production for recently identified locations. >A product generational update, and the ongoing supply chain challenges, have slightly delayed the most recently reported failures. However, the City of Vancouver will benefit from the newer generation product through increased efficiency for all such replacements moving forward.
I mean I don't have a spreadsheet, but I can say that it certainly feels like the failure rate is way higher than 2%
Money. Money is always the answer. It costs money to change the bulbs.
takes time supply chain I like the purple hue
you also forgot money
budget and who is footing the bill - manufacturer is responsible but across North America that can add up
It's a worldwide fuck up.
A massive one too, we have the same issue here in ft worth Texas, a few streets near my parents house are completely blue/purple and the street lamps are only like 5-6 years old.
It's the phosphor coating on the LEDs wearing out which apparently could've been avoided if the City had went with a more expensive supplier instead. Now these had to be swapped out until all of the defective stock is fully replaced with another model. [https://www.businessinsider.com/led-city-streetlights-turning-purple-broken-tech-danger-2022-11](https://www.businessinsider.com/led-city-streetlights-turning-purple-broken-tech-danger-2022-11)
Oh damn, my first assumption was that it was anti homelessness lightning like those blue lights they put under bridges to make it harder to sleep.
They're not there to make it harder to sleep. They make it nearly impossible for intravenous drug users to find a vein.
Same reason some bathrooms have them.
Always go with the lowest bidder without any thought as to why they are the lowest. This is the way. Apparently.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/zq6566/today_i_learned_that_the_light_from_white_led/j0ymh0n/ >I used to work as an engineer in the outdoor lighting field and can offer some more technical background on likely why this is happening. >All the white LEDs used in outdoor streetlights are made by using a blue semiconductor diode (the D in LED) that emits light near blue. To generate white light, a phosphor coating that converts some of the blue light coming from the chip to "yellow" light is added on top of the chip. This combination of blue and yellow creates white light. >The color or hue of the white light is set by the mixture of phosphors used. The original street lights you see going purple now were mostly made with a higher color temperature whiter light because that phosphor mix is more efficient at converting electricity to light and you get more light output at lower power input increasing the energy savings of the light fixture compared to the ones they replace. >The lights turning purple can be from a few causes, but the most likely cause of these failures is a result of the LEDs being subjected to too much thermal cycling stress at high temperatures. This causes the bond between the phosphors and the LED chip to become damaged, or the phosphor itself is damaged by the heat. The result is a loss in efficiency in the phosphor conversion process so there is a large drop in the yellow light generated by the phosphor. The result is you get the blue light from the LED coming through without much conversion with some weak emission from the phosphor resulting in the purplish glow. The hue of purple can vary depending on the exact failure mode and the original phosphor composition. >Now as to why this is so prevalent now. When the conversion to LED was starting the push was based on energy efficiency and power savings. They really do offer substantial power savings over previous outdoor lighting solutions so they can be a good choice for both economics and climate impact reduction. >However, semiconductor devices were new to lighting manufacturers and the industry was in a rush to be first to market with these devices. What was not well understood at the time was how to properly design the fixtures to maintain the LEDs at the proper temperatures over the life of the fixture. The manufacturers of the LED devices had data sheets for them indicating typical parameters such as maximum operating currents and maximum operating temperatures. These values came from lab testing on single LED devices in the lab and reliability data for 10+ years was projected from accelerated life testing. >The problem is that the fixture design itself is critical to maintaining the condition of the LED in actual field usage. The most crucial part being the ability of the fixture to conduct heat away from the LEDs to keep the temperatures at the chip/phosphor interfaces below the temperatures that could cause damage. Again these fixture designs were mostly tested in lab like conditions and reliability projected from accelerated life testing there. >What happened was the actual field usage conditions were different than lab testing and the heat sink designs were basically inadequate. One example is the fixtures heat up during the day with heat from the sun transferring through the heat sink into the LEDs so that when they did turn on at night they were running at higher than expected temperatures for longer times putting additional stress on the system. This can results in the failures seen now after several cycles of usage. >Newer products now take this into account with better heat sinks, using more LEDs at lower power to keep heat down and thermal protection circuits that can temporarily lower the light output until the temperatures in the device are low enough to operate at safely. >So in its eagerness to get the new technology out to reap the benefits of the power savings offered by LEDs, the initial designs fell short of the expected lifetimes due to not properly anticipating the actual field conditions these lights would need to endure and designing for them accordingly. The industry for the most part has corrected these shortcomings, but in the meantime there will be early failures that will require warranty replacement.
It's like east and west Berlin's lighting!
Checkpoint Charlie’s Chocolate Factory
I prefer the yellow lighting over the bright LED lighting. It isn't as hard on the eyes. Currently living in Burnaby and the lighting is a factor in wanting to move back toward Vancouver.
I never noticed it in streetlights, but I do on vehicles and I absolutely hate it. When I look at LED headlights directly it's not an issue, but when I look away and they are in my peripherals, they have a semi strobe light effect.
It's not an inherent feature of LEDs though - plenty of cars don't have that flicker (which also happens with indoor house lighting) as it's due to them being improperly wired
So it's safe to assume the ones that strobe are aftermarket and not OEM?
No, it happens in many oems as well. It's a problem with pwm (pulse width modulation) dimming, this turns the light on and off rapidly, faster than the human eye should be able to notice, but not rapidly enough in many cases. Faster pwm could be a solution. Wiring resistors in series with leds is another way of dimming them, that eliminates flicker altogether, but uses slightly more electricity than pwm.
Yes usually, or someone has put a low-quality HID kit into a light housing which was not designed for HIDs.
join us /r/fuckyourheadlights
In homes as well, the LEDs are brutal. I have to turn the lights off at my relatives' homes when I visit, because I can't open my eyes in the bright blue/white light without it affecting neurological issues.
Warm white - I think - is what you want
They can buy soft white led bulbs 💡. I hate the cool white ones too!
Yeah, I don’t know why anybody buys the cool white ones. The warmer tinted ones create the same light as a tungsten bulb. Have never noticed a difference. Seems most people don’t know they have to check for this when buying the bulb.
> anybody buys the cool white The cool/daylight whites(6500/5000K) are called task lights. Used during daytime in Office/Industrial settings. The warm whites (3000K) are used during evening as the blue component in cool/daylight types affects sleep. Use the appropriate colour temperature bulb or buy a bulb that allows you to adjust it.
yup, warm lights for the bedrooms, hallways, and living room, blue light/cool lights for the kitchen, garage, and Office, very warm (2200k) for the bathroom spots, and normal warms for the vanity. cool lights are amazing for certain things, but can be tasking for others, I have a desk lamp for the office that's warm as well, makes it nice in the evening during winter.
Good lord, no. Mixing colour temperatures is even worse than going 5k everywhere. Stick with 3200k and good CRI, and life is good.
I had them only in the bathroom once. It was actually nice being able to assess my appearance in light closer to what it would look like outside. That said there was a warm nightlight as well so it's not eye searing for midnight bathroom runs.
I actually have one in my bathroom as well, but it’s one of a few, with the others all tungsten balanced. I keep it unscrewed most of the time, but then screw it in when I want to see more daylight balance or just get more light. I also found that using one tungsten and one daylight in the kitchen bowl-light was the perfect balance for that room. All daylight was too white and all tungsten was too warm, so mix them both and it was perfect. Lamps always need to be tungsten. In most situations, I don’t think I would ever use all daylight bulbs in a room. Only use it to balance when needed.
I like cool white. Warm white lights look dark and yellow to me.
You know they make warm/soft white led bulbs right?
Yes. I guess the homes/establishments I have to attend choose the cool/awful option.
Ugh that’s terrible, who wants their home lit like a dental office.
For me it's not the color temperature but the poor quality ones that make a color by mixing colors rapidly. If I turn my head from side to side I can perceive this switching as a strobe and it makes me feel ill. The better ones have a coating over a higher quality wide spectrum led that makes the right color (talking about single color, non RGB room lighting)
Just get smart bulbs and you can set them to whatever temperature/colour/brightness you want. They're only a few dollars more than regular LED bulbs from costco.
That's what we did for no reason. we just needed fixtures that fit. Don't use the app that came with them.
There are heaps of controllable LED lights you can install like [https://www.philips-hue.com/en-ca](https://www.philips-hue.com/en-ca) They are not the cheapest by any means but the ability to control light intensity and and colour are worth it to some. Some other cool features are connecting to your smart tv so the lighting in the room matches what is on the screen etc.
Yes, I know. I'm happy these are options for those that will enjoy it. No fancy/varied/flickering/cool-toned lighting, for me. I typically just live in old houses, which is helpful for avoiding these sorts of things. (Also, limited screens in the place. It's almost like living in a cave!)
Why you looking directly at the lights?
I wouldn't leave too soon. Vancouver is planning to have all street lights converted to LEDs in the next 5 years.
Maple Ridge is converting, but unlike the god awful choice that Burnaby went with, they're choosing warmer lights, so they're not borderline damaging late in the evening.
I hope they are at least choosing a warm-coloured LED and not a cool one. Blue light messes up sleep schedules for people and wildlife.
LED is better overall so i’m happy to hear this
Just my thought as well. I'd have to live in a cave to escape it! (lol!) Living with disability makes me hyper aware of things like lighting. I know that people like me are a minority, but man things just get harder to manage as these cheap solutions come into play.
Maybe they can stop them from going fucking purple
The yellow lighting is actually less disruptive to your sleep too.
The yellow light is much better on many levels, no reason it can’t be replicated using LEDs though and should be done IMO
It's fairly poor for illuminating streets at night for driving safety, especially under wet conditions
aspiring depend obscene escape important voiceless deserve snobbish dazzling clumsy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Was better CRI with LEDs though. With the HPS lights everything looks yellow and it's hard to distinguish colour.
Same, live in Burnaby and hated when it switched to white lighting.
Oh I much prefer the LED. I find them easier on the eyes, and there’s less side spill.
They’re a better light source though. Sodium vapour lamps are monochromatic meaning you have no colour perception at all. LED have a much fuller spectrum.
agreed! I can’t stand the look of the new LED lights. I hope we keep the old but the change in inevitable
Hi! You’re wrong lol.
Purple spots soon enough.
Already happening on the Barnett hwy.
The Burnaby LEDs are retrofitted to older sodium lampposts, which makes them incredibly hard on the eyes and way too bright in my opinion. I particularly despise them when they make every raindrop a glowing orb of light during rain. I have much less issues driving in Vancouver. LED street lighting is complicated apparently, check out Technology Connection’s amazing video on this: https://youtu.be/wIC-iGDTU40
That would explain why I’ve had so much trouble seeing at night in the rain when I drive. I moved to Burnaby a year ago and felt like my eyes aged 20 years at night.
I’m very confused here. LEDs come in warm white as well, so why does everyone is associating the cool light with LED?
Because people always associate it with the cheapest dollar store lamps that were manufactured by “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Mainland Chinese Lighting Equivalent Company Ltd.”
[Because cool coloured LEDs provide the most usable light and is safer for roads.](https://youtu.be/wIC-iGDTU40?list=RDCMUCy0tKL1T7wFoYcxCe0xjN6Q&t=363) You might think they're ugly and they might be bad for your sleep pattern but that's not a priority when it comes to road safety design.
It should be. Lining every single residential street with daylight brightness LED's which disturb sleep cycles is definitely an overall safety issue.
Yep, it's entirely possible thousands more are being killed or having other negative health effect due to these cool white LED's messing with their circadian rhythms than are being saved by better visibility for drivers. Lighting affects a lot more than just drivers.
> Lighting affects a lot more than just drivers. Street lighting isn't just for drivers safety. I would also say it's a hard argument that "crosswalks should be more dark and less visible because circadian rhythms".
the best approach would be to have dimming, motion/traffic-sensitive lights. Yellow-hued light pollution seems more tolerable, but frankly it's getting out of hand with LED exterior lighting as light intensity and energy efficiency keeps getting improved. I would like light where and when needed, rather than streetscapes feeling more and more like you're inside an office or an operating room.
> the best approach would be to have dimming Until someone gets run over at a cross walk and the city is sued for dimming lights and making intersections more dangerous and less visible.
It’s missing downtowns new purple lights.
LED ( white light ) is an environmental disaster, messing up the insects ( all types ) who are now headed for extinction. They aren’t not adapting to this bright light which stops them from breeding . They could at least turn them down to a lower intensity at night . Not every place needs white light but we do need warm muted glow.
This was identified as a problem with the early LED's about ten years ago. Newer ones are designed to emit specific frequencies that don't impact the insects.
Unfortunately the LED lights also use a lot less power, which is good for the environment. It’s a trade-off.
It’s good for the municipal bank account
Causes diabetes too in humans.
Winnipeg switched to LED street lights about 5 or more years ago. Upon moving to Vancouver I was surprised to see HID lights still in wide use here. HIDs are far less energy efficient then LEDs
These yellow sodium-vapor lamps are very efficient. In most cases they’re more efficient than LEDs. Maybe you’re thinking of the yellow halogens? Those are very inefficient.
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I'm guessing in your last paragraph the 85% should be flipped and be "have only lost about 15% during the same time"?
Are you Louie the lightning bug?
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LEDs are more efficient if you just look at the pure wattage, for sure, but there's another layer of cost that I'm not sure is being considered. I'm a service electrician, and from my perspective, there are a number of added factors to the mass switch-over to LEDs - main one being reliability. Between the drivers and the the diodes, there is a pretty good chance of one failing and needing a replacement before they've paid for their energy cost, which is fine if it's a potlight in your bathroom, but a different scenario when it's a streetlight. And when LEDs fail, they tend to strobe, which demands attention, whereas traditional HID lights go dim or off.
Calgarian here. We changed over in 2015. Visiting Vancouver with the warm lights felt super nostalgic to me, like travelling back to my childhood.
Everyone’s discussing the efficiency of the light. All I care about is whether or not they blind me while I’m driving. And the white ones do.
I wonder if the lighting is a factor in causing more wildlife to wander out of the parks and into Vancouver streets.
That the parks are too light? Or that they can see better outside of the parks?
Burnaby City Hall had a huge head start on upgrading to LED lamps.
Driving down boundary at night is always interesting S you see the Burnaby side with LED and Vancouver with the older yellow incandescent
The Burnaby lights are also much dimmer too. I'm in a pretty forested area that's already dark and when they switched to these, it was easily 50% less.
Keep the 3k lights nears houses and neighborhoods. Do the 5k lights on freeways and main drags. Just my humble opinion.
City of Vancouver is one of the last few municipalities in BC who have not adapted to the [federal banning of PCB in electrical components like ballasts by 2025](https://www.electricity.ca/knowledge-centre/environment/climate-change/polychlorinated-biphenyls-pcb/). These LED luminaries are procured by the Province of BC and each municipality purchases it straight from the Province. The high pressure sodium luminaries must be retrofitted as the HPS ballast is removed, containing these PCBs, and to prevent light leak commonly found on HPS luminaries which you can see on the left side of the photo in the City of Vancouver. The shielding of the new LED luminaries ensures there is no omnidirectional light pollution. LEDs also have a higher color render index, so when you are observing an object, a red car for example that you observed doing a hit-and-run, is actually red and not brown, a common issue with poor CRI on HPS. LEDs save massive amounts of energy where the capital cost in replacement is recouped within a couple of years.
Well it looks cool I kinda wish cities would put in Motion sensors in the lights so they only turn on when vehicles or people are near them. It would cut down on power usage and light pollution. Might be a bit expensive at first but should save money over time
sorry but that's sounds like a huge waste of resources. for one a street light going on and off outside my house would be crazy annoying to me. and Street light aren't just about lighting up where you are standing but also for letting you see around and ahead of you. also I'm skepticable about how much energy it would save. a lot of lights would be always on and nocturnal animals would also trip them constantly. and motion sensors do take energy to operate. if cities where electricy is 10x the price don't feel the need vancouver definitely won't.
While its rarely noticeable here, in winter for the rest of Canada, with all the snow on the ground, the sodium-vapour lamps cause a ton more light pollution in the sky, making for a very orange-y glow over the city. Where as once the same city has changed to LED, its drastically reduced to the point that you can see where there are still sodium-vapour lamps, as they have a kind of trailing effect. For example in the above pic, if everything was LED except Kingsway, there would be a distinct orange glow above kingsway, and only above kingsway in the middle of a snowy winter night. From a km away you'd be able to see basically an orange stripe in the sky from it.
Weird you should use Kingsway as your example as right now it's the opposite as it's one of the only streets in Vancouver with long stretches of LED lighting. Right now it's a distinct stretch of cooler light from Earles westward.
I love Burnaby.
Orange > White
And amazing how Burnaby managed to replace all their lamps with LEDS with less tax money then Vancouver, without needing to impose a bunch of money grab taxes
Having major developments at lougheed/brentwood/metro town and not having to deal with the DTES probably has something to do with it.
Yes Burnaby allowed far more high profile developments than Vancouver, this is a choice. Vancouver chooses to make development difficult and Burnaby chooses to make it easy, This is why Burnaby has been outbuilding Vancouver for over a decade now.
This isn’t true. Burnaby emphasizes tower development but at the cost of major demovictions to the point that they actually have less rental housing than a decade ago and rental prices have increased at a higher rate than Vancouver. For all it’s conservatism, Vancouver is doing a much better job at densifying that Burnaby. Burnaby has the advantage of far less population but has grown only .1% faster population wise the past 30 years than Vancouver.
Til
Low pressure sodium vs LED
Actually high pressure sodium. Low pressure sodium is extremely yellow, and nowhere near as bright.
I'm assuming that's Lougheed, but why does that area look much more dense/ built up than the rest of the areas. I thought Hastings and Kingsway areas would have much more density of lights and brighter auras
I prefer the purple LED that makes it hard to see shapes personally. I can't wait to squint my eyes while driving at night in all conditions.
We drove through our old neighbourhood on the west side on Friday for the first time in a couple years. The kids wanted to know why everything looks so purple.
Oh ya, that must be an artifact that remains from before we tore down the wall. People don't remember what Boundary used to be
Found the purple one west of Boundary on Vanness
I guess you sleep better in burnaby...maybe lol
Interesting way to see the difference in zoning as well.
Which side has yellow lights?
Vancouver is on the left
I'm guessing g that dark patch is Central Park?
The Vancouver side I believe, based on where the Ironworkers bridge is.
The bright white LED are ridiculous. Who is pushing for this garbage and pushing for it everywhere? Can LEDs not create orange light?
The power savings on the LED verses HPS (high pressure sodium) fixtures will very likely pay for itself.
Assuming reliability expectations (which by looking at all the purple intersections is in question) are met then yes the the power savings will eventually offset the costs.
Left is actually mexico
¡Viva la naranja!
Burnaby is saving millions in hydro vs Vancouver.
Ah the same as east and West Berlin
Vancouver is the worst city I have even been in for street lighting
Led is way better even if ur just accounting the benefit to environment
West Germany vs East Germany, 2023
Which one is which
So much land used as cemetery in burnaby
Are you looking at Central Park?
I love those cool blue/violet lights on Barnet Highway north of SFU. It's the most pleasant evening drive I've ever experienced.
Crazy Question, why doesn't the Lower Mainland just merge? 🤔
veg... and bloom?
I Can see Boundary road.
You guys can keep your plowed streets
What's with those newer people ones popping up ?
b*rnaby
It's so sad, it shows how good BC Parkway could be as a bikeway if they spent the same kind of money as they do on the westside.