No. The lights aren't effective at keeping sleepy people more awake in the moment. They're effective at disrupting sleep over time by disrupting the hormonal system.

They should be banned in favor of lower-color-temperature lights.

>They should be banned in favor of lower-color-temperature lights.

As the article indicates, they are less effective at disrupting sleep than a LCD monitor or smartphone.

If we're banning an outdoor light for being less disruptive than your phone, should we also mandate Flux style warm color phones at night by law?

It's not exactly banning an outdoor light so much as regulating outdoor lights for the sake of public health.

And yes, it is reasonable to do so. For one, everyone's got to share the same streetlights. For two, if these lights really are harmful to sleep, then the cost of using lights that are engineered to not produce certain wavelengths is probably minuscule compared to the net public benefit, even if you only want to limit the criteria being considered to things that are easily assigned a cash value.

Mandating Flux on phones, on the other hand, is a very different proposition in every way but the most superficial of similarities. People can make their own decisions about their phone's color scheme, and those decisions don't really affect anyone else in any direct way.

Why not. I already use flux on my laptop and would love it if my phone supported that too.

http://www.macrumors.com/how-to/use-ios-9-3-night-shift-mode... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...

Maybe it's just me, but Twilight never felt as pleasant as f.lux and redshift do on my PCs. Instead of changing the screen color, it seems to add a red layer over the content.

EDIT: It's not just me: https://forum.justgetflux.com/topic/2591/exactly-why-do-you-...

If you've got a phone supported by CyanogenMod, it has a very nice mode called "LiveDisplay" which will adjust the phone screen's colour temperature on the fly based on time of day and both the brightness and colour of the ambient light.

The blue light also burns out retinae. It's been linked to cataracts. It seems like an industrial regulation is needed to me.

Citation? That's a bold claim.

As phrased, it also sounds really far-fetched since cataracts are not a disease of the retina. Maybe that's a problem with the phrasing and not the claim, though.

A quick goog of blue+light+retina+study brings up quite a few legit sites. The one I am going to read for my edification on the subject:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3144654/

I think there's some miscommunication here. Certainly, it's possible for light to damage the retina. It's likely that blue light is more apt to cause damage because it's higher energy. This doesn't mean that LEDs producing a larger blue component are more damaging than LEDs (or other lights) with a smaller blue component. It's entirely possible that at the intensity artificial light is used for indoor and street lighting, how much of the light is blue is irrelevant.

I didn't read this entire article, but it seems to be discussing the general mechanism of light damage. There was no reference to LEDs. I'd want to see something that gave reason to believe that the blue in LEDs poses a threat.

You are correct, no LED specifics in my link.

Edit:Adding LED to the search results in many spurious sources in 1st two pages, with a single NIH study. Again, more reading required: http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/122-a81/

This particular topic falls into the same category as 'phone radiation & brain cancer' news, where claims are made, proven, disproven and so on. If either proves true enough, we'll all be in the same boat together, I guess.

just look up 'welders eye' or 'corneal flash burns' or 'photokeratitis'

high intensity UV light most certainly causes both corneal and retinal damage, both acute and as an ongoing effect over time.

i have never seen nor can i find any reference to visible blue light. i think* that heavily phosphored leds with high CRI and low color temp do emit quite heavily above visible and translate it down. so maybe there is some leakage?

No one disputes that sufficient light can damage the eye. The question is whether there's any evidence that LEDs cause damage to the eye sure to the higher percentage of blue light.

The fact that exposure to extreme amounts of light can damage the eye is not evidence for the claim that LEDs at typical brightness damage the eye.

I'm not an eye doctor. It was explained to me that LEDs output blue wavelengths not present in the natural environment. Our eyes filter out many wavelengths but never saw these during evolution so the light goes right through their filters. The energy then dissipates in your eye and causes damage.

> It was explained to me that LEDs output blue wavelengths not present in the natural environment.

So I'm no expert but I don't think this is true. All wavelengths of light exist naturally in some amount.

> The energy then dissipates in your eye and causes damage.

Energy "dissipating" in the eye is how you see.

I thought this was already common around the world, say in Europe.

Where 4 lane / artery / highways get brighter, whiter (bluer) lights, while 2 lane feeders and smaller roads have warmer yellow lighting.

It produces an interesting nighttime aerial effect as the color indicates the nature of the street.

I can't find any source to corroborate so I'd love if someone with more worldly travel experience could corroborate.

I first became aware of the phenomenon playing Cities: Skylines, a European developed city builder game which features the multi-colored street lights in European skins.

IDK, but this could simply be an effect of bigger roads getting more frequent upgrades, and/or bigger roads tolerating a larger cost per light since the total cost per meter of road is already higher.

Have more faith in European engineering and regulation, it's something we excel at :-)

There are 9 grades of lighting, ranging from that required on a motorway interchange, through urban motorways, rural motorways, major roads, etc, to residential areas.

Here's the relevant standard: http://vili.pmmf.hu/~mate/oktatas/VilTech_levelez%F5/EN13201... (BS = British Standard, but EN = European Norm, so the British Standard implements the European Standard. [I think that's how it works.])

This is the code of practise for Britain: http://persona.uk.com/orga46newark/ha_docs/disposit_docs/dd1...

The "Manual for Streets" has an overview, from p120: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

(Similar documents should exist for every EU country, but the British ones are in English and easiest to find with Google.)