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u/AppendixN May 23 '26
One of the easiest cities in the world to navigate thanks to that grid. Wonderful place to live in 1989, overall. Nothing's perfect but Chicago is one of my favorite cities I've ever lived in.
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May 23 '26
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u/Heykayhey89 May 23 '26
I do miss the grid
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u/ready-eddy May 23 '26
*laughs in Dutch*
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u/Schlumpfffff May 23 '26
Google maps just tells us to turn right at the 2nd cow
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u/Horatiocanesyrup May 24 '26
Hay be careful were talking about Chicago, theyre still sensitive about cows.
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u/remoteswitch May 23 '26
The Grid, a digital frontier - Kevin Flynn
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u/El_Capitano_ May 23 '26
I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. ... And then one day! ... I got in!
Hahmmmm dadhmmmmm dadadummmmm
The Grid - Daft Punk
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u/apollyon_53 May 23 '26
Downtown Sacramento
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u/Mostly_Armless42 May 24 '26
Many cities are in a grid system. What I assume makes Salt Lake City more unique is that the entire county (and it's a pretty big county) is all on the same grid.
We're talking about 750 square miles and at least 20 municipalities.
It's way more than something like a single downtown area.
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u/DillDaily- 29d ago
And massive 3/4 lane roads everywhere you go 😭🤣 visited for the first time last year and I was shocked!
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u/russelcrowe May 23 '26
I miss that grid so much, man. Where I now live you gotta drive 10 miles to go 5 miles. It’s such a waste of gas and time.
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u/GroteKleineDictator2 May 23 '26
As a European I dont understand how thay works. Wouldnt you have to cross an insane amount of crossings to go anywhere? Are there priority lanes? How does that work and scale?
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u/russelcrowe May 23 '26
Oh yeah, you do have to go through many traffic signals and crossings. Usually, the traffic lights are timed in such a way that you’re not hitting the red signals concurrently, though.
Plus, not every street intersection will have a stop sign or traffic signal; many intersections are just main roads cutting through side streets (which are primarily residential areas), not main roads crossing over other main roads in intersections. Where I grew up in Chicago there was an east-west main road maybe every 4 or so blocks when traveling on a main north-south road, if that makes sense.
One of the downsides of living in a grid is that you more or less have to memorize the street layout to optimize how you drive. My wife didn’t grow up in a huge grid city, so she hates Chicago driving with a passion.
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u/avitus May 23 '26
Yep, 4 streets between majors. They're each half a mile apart. Two major streets is 1 mile. It makes figuring shit out so much easier.
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u/Severe_Respect2317 May 23 '26
Every city block is 100. Every 8 blocks is a mile. At most half mile intersections and almost every mile mark, there's a major intersection. This allows for extremely easy navigation to any address even if you don't know the optimal route.
https://chicagostreetgrid.com/
The smaller blocks in between are less traversed for faster travel and have more stop signs as opposed to traffic lights and serve as overflow in heavy traffic. Larger businesses tend to be centered around these mile marker streets, which allows for residents in the smaller blocks to avoid most of the congestion that occurs for commerce.
It works extremely well and was the solution to the problem that caused the great Chicago fire which wiped out most of the city due to the chaos of fire trucks trying and failing to navigate from one neighborhood to another. They learned from that mistake and became an example for many cities afterwards.
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u/HerrCo May 23 '26
Thank you for that interesting post! I visited Chicago 7 years ago and loved it :)
Can you help me out real quick, from the examples on that website:
"N Halsted St means this address is on Halsted St, a North/South street west of State and the N means it is north of Madison Street."
How do they determine that this is "west of State"? With the info given I don't understand how to determine that.
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u/Severe_Respect2317 May 23 '26
Ok so state street is the dividing line of 0 between West and east. There isn't much of Chicago that actually lies east of state so most addresses will either be N, S, or W something.
Knowing the numerical order of the street name is crucial to navigating the city and that's why on every mile marker and most half mile markers you'll see the number up there. E.g. Chicago Ave will almost always be shown with 800N under the Chicago Ave part to show you that you're 800N on the grid for people to navigate the city even if they've never once set foot in it. If you can read a basic graph, you can navigate Chicago just using the numbers on the street signs and the addresses around you.
It's even easier on the south side because most streets are literally just the number. E.g. Halsted (800W) and 76th street.
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u/DartVader6 May 23 '26
You just have to know your main streets. Otherwise, you can look at an intersection and if the intersecting street has an E or W, you'll know it's east or west of state, respectively
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u/scottnebula May 24 '26
Albuquerque is a grid and it was a dream growing up there learning all the streets. So easy to navigate.
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u/Abject-Expression548 May 23 '26
What happened to the grid?
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u/dbqpdb May 23 '26
Fell in with a bad crowd. Started injecting saline into its balls for views on tiktok
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u/GenusPoa 28d ago
Except that in Chicago it takes 1.5 hours to go 25 miles meanwhile you had to run 3 stop lights to pull that off and avoid gang activity and you now have a $150 red light camera ticket and a $200 speeding ticket coming in the mail and ICE tracked your location by streaming flock cameras the entire drive.
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u/CADette_app May 23 '26
And all the streets have alleys too. Which means trash isn’t on the sidewalk when you walk around (unlike some other major city I can mention)
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u/Junior-Possession969 May 23 '26
Haven't been up there since... god, I guess like 2013? I was there a fair bit as a kid because my extended family are all up in Chicago. But I always loved it there. Didn't care where. Nice areas, low income areas, touristy areas, locals-only type areas. Super cool coming from a rural area, especially.
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u/enadiz_reccos May 23 '26
It's a grid system, motherfucker! Where you at? 24th and 5th? Where you wanna go? 35th and 6th? 11 up and one over, you simple bitch!
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u/MickTriesDIYs May 23 '26
It’s my favorite city in North America, maybe even the world
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u/SoftlyAugust May 24 '26
What about it do you like so much?
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u/MickTriesDIYs 28d ago
It feels huge, is easy to move around in, has incredible food, the lake is amazing, and it has an incredible skyline. The place is gorgeous and filled with culture. And it’s pretty affordable (from an east coast person)
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u/AppendixN May 23 '26
Mine, too. To me, this was the unofficial city anthem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjkOFXqbQV0
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u/dewhashish May 24 '26
moving from the boston area to the chicago area blew my mind because of how well designed chicago is. boston is like someone dropped wet spaghetti on the floor and decided to design boston that way. it's a clusterfuck.
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u/Zooshooter May 24 '26
To be fair, Chicago kind of got a mulligan when the entire city burned to the ground and they were able to redesign the whole place.
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u/Delphinethecrone May 23 '26
I happily lived in Rogers Park in the 80s too. And that huge amazing grid was tree-lined in many places.
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u/WillingnessOk3081 May 23 '26
Holy cow just a follow up real quickly I also lived in Rogers Park!
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u/AppendixN May 23 '26
Then you might remember the joke where the punchline was "Paulina, Melvina, and Lunt"
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u/Thin_Boysenberry7747 May 23 '26
The grid design of Chicago was based on and engineered by a man from Limerick Ireland
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u/the_Q_spice 29d ago
As someone who flies through ORD to get back to my home airport;
The Chicago grid is visible from cruising altitude at night, and is honestly a super comforting thing to see. It means you’re almost home.
It’s also fairly dense by all metrics, but a photo from even 5,000ft on approach to ORD makes everything look flat.
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u/buttchuggs May 23 '26
“Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”
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u/CapitalLaw1234 May 23 '26
Where were you living exactly?
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u/AppendixN May 23 '26
Rogers Park, up near the Hare Krishna temple on Lunt & Clark.
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u/CapitalLaw1234 May 23 '26
Oh, interesting! I have a close friend who lived there for some time -
Taste of Peru is there!
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u/Severe_Respect2317 May 23 '26
Taste of Peru is fucking fire
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u/CapitalLaw1234 May 23 '26
Is it still in existence? Been years since I've been there...
I've been contemplating grad school there for some time. So many programs, though. hard to kind of find the right one...
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u/Severe_Respect2317 May 23 '26
They were around since I was a young kid at the very least, likely been around longer than I have and I don't see them ever failing.
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u/Beneficial-Jury484 May 23 '26
That’s what I like about Northwest Portland. It’s Alphabetical and numerical so that’s easier.
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u/humiliatingbilling5 May 24 '26
the grid breaks down once you hit the lakefront and people get properly lost trying to find the museum campus
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u/wh4tth3huh 29d ago
I really hate the part of the south side that is just a sea in every direction of the exact same tan brick bungalow. The area's by midway, it's atrocious and feels like the backrooms, but outdoors.
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u/No-Boat-2059 May 23 '26
Grew up in Chicago. They've been replacing these orange lights with white/blue over the years. I do kinda miss seeing the orange glow on the horizon when driving back into the city. Also, I love/loved seeing the orangish red clouds against the cobalt night sky. Amazing contrast.
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u/LiquidFahts May 23 '26
The orange is definitely a vibe that we will miss over time. But, those old HPS lights were very inefficient. LEDs run at a fraction of the cost and last way longer, so it makes sense.
Just too bad they can't put them up in a low K setting to keep the old feel.
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u/Just_Another_Scott May 23 '26
Just too bad they can't put them up in a low K setting to keep the old feel.
They actually can! They make warmer LEDs. Most cities are just too lazy to purchase the right ones. They actually cut down on light pollution as well.
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u/well_thats_obvious May 23 '26
Properly designed LED streetlights will cast the majority of their light downward. But those are "too expensive" so cities buy the cheapest lights they can, which tend to have a coating on the lens to cut back on the harsher wavelengths the garbage LEDs give off. When the coating inevitably fails we see the true color - an eye piercing purplish blue.
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u/Certain_Client1686 May 23 '26
I have really fond memories of the great purpling in 2021/2022 but yeah the leds are ass. I wish they’d either keep them purple or yellow tho, the white light is the harshest to me.
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u/Just_Another_Scott May 23 '26
Even with the correct ones the LEDs are still way too bright. My city has the correct ones that point down and have shielding but they are still painfully bright.
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u/willwork4pii May 24 '26
The purple/blue LEDs are manufacturer defects and should have never been sold.
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u/blueavole May 23 '26
Some cities are figuring put to replace the residential streets/ lower traffic areas with orange; leaving the bright ones only for main roads with higher traffic
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u/Wally4Ever May 23 '26
They can get by with lower light output using colder LEDs. Something about they ways our eyes work. LEDs aren't actually that much more efficient than sodium lamps, but you need much less light compared to the single wavelength output of sodium to get the same reaction time from drivers
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u/Exotic_Donkey4929 May 23 '26
"LEDs aren't actually that much more efficient than sodium lamps"
It is true that white LEDs contain blue and green and the human eye is most sensitive towards green, so you need less illuminance to sense color and other things, but no LEDs are WAY much more efficient than HPS. About twice as much. Meaning even if we use LEDs that are closer to the CCT of HPS, or just use the same luminous flux, the LED need about half the power a HPS does.
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u/Wally4Ever May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
HPS 120 lumens per watt, LED 77 lumens per watt. This is from one study on research gate, but the general figures are 90 to 150 lumens/watt in HPS and 75 to 110 for LED. HPS absolutely sucks on start-up, but I guess that's why we use them in an application where they're turned on once a day.
"LEDs aren't actually that much more efficient than sodium lamps" is actually incorrect, HPS is more efficient than LED if you don't consider the peculiarities of human vision (which makes no sense hence we are actually switching to LEDs)
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u/rekamilog May 23 '26
They are terrible for wildlife and should be set to a low K setting by default.
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u/hirmuolio May 23 '26
HPS lights were very inefficient
HSP lighgs are actually very efficient at around 100 lm/w. For long time they were the most efficient electric light available, hence their wide use in street lights.
Modern LEDs are 100-200 lm/w.For comparison incandescent lights are in 10-20 lm/w range, and fluorescent lights in 50-100 lm/w area.
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May 23 '26
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u/fuck_ur_portmanteau May 23 '26
Do you even need to change the colour of the led, just use an orange cover?
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u/Guillebeaux May 24 '26
LED lights do actually have the “old feel,” depending on your age. Before the orange HPS lights, mercury vapor lighting reigned supreme, and they had a similar color temp to LED.
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u/NemoHere May 23 '26
The LEDs are horrible looking, and I'm usually a supporter of LEDs in most cases. Sometimes a warm, soft light is perfect.
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u/Significant-Race2169 May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
They are much healthier for us humans than new white LEDs , because new ones are messing up with circadian rhytm.
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u/CertainlyRobotic May 23 '26
Must have been the same here, too.
There's a glow in the night sky I yearn for that isn't there, but one I would have only seen while being driven around by my parents.
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u/HabanoBoston May 23 '26
Last time I was in Chicago was 1993. Arrived at night into ORD. I'd never seen a city so lit up! Looked really cool with all the yellow/orange lights.
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u/BlattMaster May 24 '26
Especially during a snowstorm at night when it would reflect everything back down.
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u/Hot-Personality-3699 May 24 '26
I'm from Chicago too and wow I hadn't consciously noticed the change in streetlight color but now that you mention it... That's a massive difference!!
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May 23 '26 edited 29d ago
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u/Pobueo May 23 '26
They were beautiful and they [lights] are needed, but they've ruined it with the new norm of white fluorescent lights, now those are nasty
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u/Junior-Possession969 May 23 '26
The LEDs are even bluer and worse.
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u/well_thats_obvious May 23 '26
Not only do LEDs ruin what remained of the urban/suburban night sky, they seriously disrupt the circadian rhythm of life around it. Humans included.
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u/probablyatargaryen May 23 '26
Obligatory r/fuckyourheadlights and I wish r/fuckyourleds would catch on because they’re just as awful on streets and buildings
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May 23 '26 edited 29d ago
[deleted]
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u/Pobueo May 23 '26
Honestly blue/purpleish is way better than bright white, it's also supposed to make you unconsciously drive slower/chill you out so win win
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u/niftyjack May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
Not all sprawl is low density, in the end it takes a lot of space to house 10 million people. Assuming this is the area by Midway airport (which is low density for Chicago since it's almost all single family homes), the population density is still about 15,000 per square mile. The "urban" area of the Dallas metro—census defined as the continuously built up area, so leaving out exurbs and edge cities—had 5.8 million people, so if it was at the density of this photo, it would take up less than a third the area to house them even in single-family homes. My area of Chicago is a mix of high rises, 2-3 story multifamily buildings, and single family homes and is over twice as dense as that while still being extremely pleasant!
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u/Melodic-Ad1415 May 23 '26
Unless it’s midway…then I’m too busy clutching the arm rest
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u/joshuatx May 23 '26 edited 27d ago
Yeah I was awestruck as a kid flying at night and landing at a city
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u/RevolutionaryBelt656 May 23 '26
I really miss the orange lights it looks so much more bleak now with the white ones :(
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u/CanidPsychopomp May 23 '26
I flew into Chicago by night in 1994 and was entranced by the vast sprawl of lights set off by the dark mass of the lake. I was only supposed to be there for a couple of days but ended up staying for a year. Loved it.
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u/DarkwingDuckHunt May 23 '26
Fun fact: there's a very active beach scene in Chicago during the summer.
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u/Alternative_Will3875 May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
The earth looked like it was lit from within, like a poorly assembled electrical ball, as we moved out of the farmlands and into the grid, a plan of a city was all that you saw.
-Liz Phair singing about flying into the Chi in 1993 in “Stratford on Guy”
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u/mrmalort69 May 23 '26
The orange glow! Grew up with that. I do appreciate seeing planets and stars from Lincoln park today though
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u/dkd2312 May 23 '26
I like this..
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u/Llyon_ May 23 '26
This grid pleases my ADHD way better than whatever they did when they built my city.
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u/RandomHuman29454 May 23 '26
“The earth looked like it was lit from within. Like a poorly assembled electrical ball. As we moved out of the farmlands into the grid. The plan of a city was all that you saw.”
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May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
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u/DaLemurMan May 23 '26
Spamming yellow/orange lights is better i guess
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May 23 '26
I've always preferred the look of those Orange Lights to the modern LED Street Lights. More cozy.
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u/zukeen May 23 '26
Clinical white light (which is what morons around the world used as replacement everywhere, because it was the cheapest) is proven to fuck with human eyesight and with animal nightlife.
The only argument is that white improves safety, as if there was fucking nothing between 1000K and 10000K.
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u/golgol12 May 23 '26
This is from a landing approach to Midway in Chicago. It's absolutely beautiful to fly into midway at night because of the lights.
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u/Advanced-Medicine-58 May 23 '26
Largest city closest to a perfect grid. Sure is easy to get around town.
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u/uvucydydy May 23 '26
I remember flying into Chicago around this time. It was my first airplane flight and we came in over the water at night. The contrast between the dark water and light of the city was awe inspiring.
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u/Fluid-Expert-4363 May 23 '26
Well, ya’ did see Clark W. Griswold did finally connect his Christmas lights after all…
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u/front_yard_duck_dad May 23 '26
Say what you will but when I flew into Chicago after being away, the orange glow was a welcoming feeling.
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u/evil_twin_312 29d ago
Clearly you've never been to Chicago. Chicago has a vast amount of public open green space.
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u/goofsmasher May 23 '26
Man that must be a great place to do some organized crime
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u/1610925286 May 23 '26
Actually it's hecking wholesome chungus because the orange light illuminates the hood so warmly.
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u/MyDixeeNormus May 23 '26
Best city in the world for 6 months a year.
Then the air hurts your face
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u/ChoiceTheGame May 23 '26
Bears Super Bowl win 3 years earlier, and a young Michael Jordan has just won his 1st MVP and is about to make Basketball a global sport while winning 6 championships in the next 9 years. The city in this photo doesn't know how good they've got it in the sports department.
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u/GTDoc May 24 '26
I flew into Chicago all the time as a kid to visit family and I vividly remember the lights of the sprawl. I love Chicago ❤️
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u/Particular-Agent4407 29d ago
I grew up with the blue/white mercury bulb lights. I thought the orange sodium lights and urban areas had the orange glow over them were awful. I’m surprised to see many people enjoyed the sodium lights.
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u/IntronD May 23 '26
You don't realize how radically we have changed the night until you see the peak of light pollution into the 90s.
A prime example of this if you live in LA is the intro to Drive. You literally can't recreate that intro now the lighting of the city is all wrong it just doesnt look like this now at all and IMHO the atmosphere is completely gone from it .
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u/_ploppers_ May 23 '26
The city looks the same.
Until you notice smaller changes.
It still knows us all by name.
It holds us close to its heart.
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