But you make some good points. I support your recommendations.
You are confusing color temperature with how the lights are installed. If your streetlights were 4000K and spaced properly you wouldn't have an issue with them. The penny-pinching distribution (high lumens, wide angle, distantly spaced) of lights chosen by your city is at fault. That layout will create maximum glare and is the most miserable layout imaginable since distant lights will always be shining directly in your eyes.
I have spent 10 years studying color science. I know what color temperature is. I’m just explaining why the moon is a poor analogy. I have an issue with bright short-wavelength light sources at night, regardless of lamp configuration. It knocks out night vision.
There is a wide literature (dozens if not hundreds of research papers) on this topic. It’s not exactly some deep mystery.
The lamp configuration just makes things worse (and the use of fewer, brighter lamps provides much of the economic incentive to install the new lamps, along with federal subsidies).
That is a problem that LEDs could enable (by making very bright lamps available) but is not really a problem of LEDs but a problem of using any bright light source wrongly.
My understanding is that the use of lower-energy and more durable light sources provide most of the incentive to install new lamps. I.e. electricity bill is lower and you need to change the lamps less frequently which reduces maintenance cost.
This makes the installation cost more attractive to the city.
The electricity bill is (potentially) lower if you replace very old lamps with LEDs at the same brightness.
The best sodium lamps are quite efficient though, so LEDs have only marginal advantage compared to replacing the old lamps with newer sodium lamps. If you make the LEDs dramatically brighter, then they actually end up using more electricity.
I haven’t seen any especially convincing numbers about an LED lamp project that saved on electricity bills. I’m not an expert in the subject though, and I haven’t looked too deeply into digging up data.
As others have noted, we sleep poorly under strong moonlight.
I live in a very rural wooded area, and I can leave my blinds open except when the moon is at its brightest -- I sleep very poorly if I don't use blackout curtains.
Perhaps the fittest humans were the ones who stayed the most awake and aware of nocturnal predators during the brightest nights of the month?
The moon is one (1) singular source of light with a known peak intensity, often blocked by trees or clouds, and only at its brightest one day every month. On a full moon night, the moon is high overhead, not directly in your field of view if you’re looking straight ahead.
LED streetlamps are a dozen or more point light sources, directly in the field of view, each one of them individually brighter than the moon. The 4000K LED streetlamps installed on my street last year have a very sharp spike in the short wavelength part of their spectral power distribution (come to my street and I’ll lend you some diffraction grating glasses to see the spectrum for yourself). The LED lamps are also incredibly bright, I’d say 2–4x the luminance of the prior streetlamps or the sodium lamps on nearby streets.
Because the new lamps are brighter, cities save money by using fewer of them, spaced more widely. This causes the light to be less even than past streetlamps, meaning some parts of the street are intensely illuminated and other parts are in shadows. The lamps are shielded at the top, but they shine out to the side at a very wide angle, meaning they still cause a ton of glare from a block away or more. When originally installed they had poor shielding in the direction of people’s second-floor bedroom windows. They’ve since fixed that problem and only people on the first floor still have light shining directly into their windows.
Seeing these and objects they illuminate in your peripheral vision causes the eyes to become bright-adapted (i.e. entirely knocks out night vision) making objects in shadow appear darker than under other lighting, and the whole scene to have very high contrast. (It takes something like a half hour to become dark-adapted once again.) The glare is extremely distracting. Overall they make the street feel like an industrial warehouse.
The light is not like fire, or past streetlamps.
Beyond that, the new lamps are not more energy efficient than modern sodium lamps. Indeed, if you make them more than twice as bright, they use substantially more energy than well made sodium lamps.
When I walk my dog at night I’ve taken to wearing orange safety glasses (basically plastic filters which block out the short-wavelength part of the spectrum). That I can see noticeably better after blocking half the light put out by these streetlamps indicates that there is some problem with their current design. (With the orange glasses, my rod vision continues to function properly.)
LED streetlamps should be at ~2700K CCT or below, with almost no light in the blue part of the spectrum. They should be no brighter than past streetlamps. They should be placed close together and not too high up, and shielded to mostly direct their light downward rather than sideways.
Under such circumstances they would be fine. (LEDs aren’t an inherently bad technology. They have the advantage that they last longer without needing to be replaced. This saves money for city maintenance departments.) Unfortunately current models on the market don’t meet those criteria.
Same story for car headlamps. The current LED headlamps are a safety risk (blinding pedestrians and other drivers with the glare). LED technology could be used to make fine car headlamps; it’s the ones currently on the market that are terrible.