The dangers of light glare from high-brightness LEDs

I learned to drive in 1966 when I lived in Nashua, New Hampshire. At that time, it was a major traffic violation to drive a car with “dazzling lights”. That piece of common sense seems to no longer apply in this modern era.

This front-page article in Figure 1 was recently published in our local newspaper, Newsday.

Figure 1 Front page of a recent issue of Newsday highlighting the hazards of bright LED headlights.

The article’s author describes the extremely dangerous issue of visual interference being experienced by drivers here on Long Island, but elsewhere as well in my own opinion.

Just as an example, this second image in Figure 2 was captured in a local diner. I was having dinner, and I could see my chicken cutlet, but the visual impact of high brightness LEDs from a nearby business is self evident.

Figure 2 The glare from high brightness headlights in a local Long Island diner.

I wrote an e-mail to the Newsday article’s author as shown below. I allowed myself to vent a little, but the issue is of grave concern to me. The email can be seen in Figure 3.

Figure 3 A letter from myself (John Dunn) to the editor of the “Glaring Issue on LI Road” article published in Newsday.

There is another LED abuse being committed by some homeowners as illustrated below in Figure 4.

Figure 4 Abusive lighting from nearby home blinding neighbors, pedestrians, and passing traffic.

This form of abuse has been enabled by the ready availability at Home Depot, Ace Hardware and so forth, of LED light sources with 5000°K color temperature. Light being emitted from such fixtures can be highly penetrating and intrusive. By comparison, LED illumination at a color temperature of 2700°K to 2800°K approximates the color temperature delivered by an incandescent lamp. Such lighting doesn’t tend to cause visual stress.

The lights shown in Figure 4 have are being turned on roughly an hour after sunset and are allowed to remain lit until 10 or 11 PM. If they were any part of a security system, they would be lit all through the night to facilitate camera imaging, but they’re not. For a variety of unrelated reasons, I submit that these lights are being used as a tool for neighborly harassment.

To me, this is a form of trespass, but there is no way of my awareness to restrain such behavior. With merely the flick of a switch, the glaring light is imposed on its intended victim. To my knowledge, there are no laws governing such misanthropy and even if there were such laws, there would be no way to achieve effective enforcement.

The only practical remediation I can imagine would be the discontinuation of 5000 °K LED products. Quartz halogen lamps and high wattage incandescent lamps have been recently discontinued for good reasons so I see no reason why that logic should not be further applied.

John Dunn is an electronics consultant, and a graduate of The Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (BSEE) and of New York University (MSEE).

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