So, just finished reading an article on WaPo about fireflies/lightening bugs and got me thinking further… Car headlights suck. They mess up our night vision when we pass another dickhead running white/blue lights. We mess up the habit(at) of many animals/bugs. So why not red lights? My hiking/camping headlamp has a red light option, which is the only function I use, and I can see fine. Why the FUCK do we still have these ungodly bright white/blue lights?
Because red light are used for tail lights, which you also see when driving. Different light colors allow you to tell if you are looking at the rear or front of the car.
Kind of shocked this logic isn’t obvious. Red lights on cars in low-light conditions already have a very specific, very important meaning.
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Yeah but it’d be nice if we went back to lights occupying the yellow area of the spectrum instead of the blue area of the spectrum. Bkinding I tells ya
Also, we need to be able to read and recognize traffic signs, and those are often color-coded, red having a very important meaning. With red head-lamps, all traffic signs would be red-and-black at night, great !
Red light is great for a headlamp when you want to preserve your night vision, you’re also walking instead of traveling at +60 mph. Red light also doesn’t provide you with any color differentiation which would be an issue with already existing road lines (yellow vs white) and street signs along with the simple notion that humans are used to light in the full spectrum from the sun.
The biggest issue with headlights is people putting LED lights in older, halogen bulb housings that don’t scatter the light the same as LEDs which leads to blinding lights that are quite bright. Additionally, you get those assholes with lifted trucks that don’t re-aim their headlights and they too add to the annoyance and danger of driving at night.
Better enforcement of existing laws would help, but that’s asking a lot of police these days when they seem to have so many other “better” things to be focusing on. /s
Red lights don’t allow you to see as well in dark/poor visibility conditions that are needed for driving. You’re moving 30 to 60 mph likely on the road vs walking speed while hiking and that reaction time visibility is much more important. The intensity of red light that would be needed would make the benefit non-existent (as they’d be just as obnoxiously eye-destroying as the super brights and blue lights).
Some states in the US allow “amber” colored lights for headlights/brights though, and I think they’re way less obnoxious and still allow for high levels of visibility.
If lights wouldnt chase away wildlife there yould be more animals killed on the roads.
I imagine we need close to white to differentiate colours, see this video for more information on that.
However, the LED lights are way too bright, usually when I see an incandescent headlight its fine, but the LED ones are so bright and I have no idea why that is. I have a recollection of reading somewhere that headlight brightness is based on a unit based on a wavelength of light closer to orange, so the more blue a light is, the brighter it needs to be, but I can’t remember for sure.
WaPo article in case anyone cared : https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/firefly-summer-extinction/
Actually, you can’t “see fine” with the red lights. Sure, once your eyes adjust to the darker light, you can see at some level. But the red light doesn’t allow you to see anywhere near near as well as you can in a white light. also, if you have poor night vision, red light isn’t very good at all. And, the biggest reason why you can’t use red headlights is color blindness. There are people who would be completely in the dark with those headlights.
That’s… Not how color blindness works.
As a colorblind person red light still works for me
How early did you sign up to get this username. Awesome
Usernames are only unique per instance. So it’s easy to get any name you like on smaller instances.
Aha thanks, of course. Still learning over here lol
Yeah. I was so stoked when I got this name before I learned how it all worked
Hmmm for some reason it says my username is Lemmy on some instances I’ll have to fix that
Isn’t there some specific color blindness that would make people unable to see reasonably under red light because they lack red cones and the other cones aren’t sensitive enough at that wavelength, so they’d effectively be seeing like a normal sighted person would see with only 10-20% of the light that’s present?
Shouldn’t affect the area outside the fovea since there are also rods but that’s not too helpful.
I’m not personally colorblind, but lots of men on my wife’s side are, including my son. My understanding is that it doesn’t affect brightness, it affects being able to differentiate colors.
It’s important to note at this point that we’re talking about mixing dye or paint colors, which behaves differently than mixing colors of light. When you mix red and green light, you get yellow. When you mix red and green paint, you get brown.
So to my son, for example, when you have an object with a mixture of mostly red and a little green - I would see that as “mostly red with a little green,” while he would see it more like “brown.” My expectation would be that if he was in an otherwise dark room illuminated with only red light, that he would see objects with a similar clarity as I would, but that his experience of the color would be different from mine in a way that I could never really understand (and vice versa).
Since I have access to a relatively large number of colorblind people, this makes me want to do an experiment.
Just read the WaPo article before posting. The article didn’t specify which type of light sources cause the issue. Is the car headlights different today compared to decades prior? If we can switch bulbs to the older ones, what would it take?
Is it the strobe light effect of the LED light source or simply the color white/blue itself? need more information.
In the defense of blue light, it will help keep you awake
It’s because car light colors are actually just the Doppler Effect in action. When a car is coming toward you, its lights look white. When it’s moving away, its lights look red. This is also why when your wife or girlfriend is shrieking and running towards you with a knife, her voice sounds very high.
This is a really good “explain like an idiot” account of Doppler effect. A++++ would upvote again.
