💡 Streetlights, people
Livin' just to find emotion / Hidin', somewhere in the night
Tonight, from my front window, I watched a man in a cherry picker behead the street light and then install a microchip-powered LED array and a new glass dome.
A few years ago, I wrote about this change in an article that’s no longer online:
Changing over our lighting from pressurized gasses and vacuum tubes to semiconductors is not just a tweak, it’s a revolution. LED technology is already changing how we get around and how we live at night, with more promising changes just around the corner.
The main reason to switch is the tremendous energy savings. My streetlight is just one of 75,000 in DC, and once the job is done in 2025, the city estimates it will cut our greenhouse gas emissions by 38,000 tons each year.
But beyond the efficiency, these lamps are capable of so much more than light. I wrote in 2019:
LED street lights, or even just the updated electronics and wiring in the poles, can be outfitted with sensors — measuring conditions like air quality — as well as cameras and other devices. Oslo, Norway, has an elaborate control system that automatically dims lights with the weather and reports outages instantly.
DC’s new lights will be far easier to monitor remotely and are outfitted with “tilt sensors” to identify lean-ers. They are using the same iconic “Millet design aesthetic”, and literally the same poles, as the lights designed for the city 100 years ago.
In some ways, DC benefits a bit by being late to converting: some cities had set the “temperature” too cold, with light far whiter, brighter, and more unpleasant. New York adjusted individual lights, and Davis, California, had to replace their whole system.
How do I feel about it? Sheepishly, I’ll admit to having a bit of nostalgia already. I know it’s silly to prefer a quality of light, but in this moment of replacement, when you can’t even buy an incandescent bulb anymore, indulge me in waxing nostalgic, just a little.
To me, there’s no comparison when looking down from a nighttime flight on a city aglow in orange, or at the warm pink of street lamp light on snowfall at dusk. It’s understandable, normal even, to think back fondly for the way things once were.
My wife Alli’s 96 year old grandmother, Grace Bailey, spent her childhood in downtown Philadelphia. In an account we have printed and saved, she writes, “The things I remember about Philadelphia in those days may surprise you.” In addition to trolleys, horse-drawn carriages, and fresh-cut ice for the ice box:
I enjoyed seeing the lamplighter come down the back alley every evening carrying a ladder and long pole with a burning wick, lighting all the lamps as the sun set.
But at the same time, even though I’ve known this was coming for years, I found myself excited to see the light fixture replaced. Think of it: our rowhouse, next year, will be 100 years old — as old as the street light design. Before the houses were here there was a brick factory, and before that, who knows.
For my home’s entire history, far beyond the five years we’ve spent here, a sealed glass tube has lit the street. From the original streetcars, to the humbled modern streetcars — vacuum tubes.
But on Monday, November 6, 2023, I saw the LED out my window turn on for the very first time. I can’t help but feel a little of the same sense of wonder I feel seeing footage of the Sphere and controlling the color of a lightbulb with an app on my phone. Grace Bailey writes:
I linger in the 20th Century with happy memories of lamplighters and organ grinders with monkeys, and I am totally in awe of you and your world of wonder.
A bit of wonder is called for. Awe too. Maybe the snow will look different, but LEDs will surely excel elsewhere, even if it takes us a while to appreciate it. One day, perhaps, we’ll be nostalgic about them being replaced and marvel that we had them for so long.
—Josh
PS: Couldn’t resist putting Journey in the title.