Assessment of pedestrian discomfort glare from urban LED lighting

Abstract

Due to different visual tasks and gaze patterns, the discomfort glare experienced by pedestrians may differ from that experienced by drivers. This paper investigates the discomfort glare experienced by pedestrians under various urban LED luminaires through psychovisual experiments conducted on a test track. The ability of state-of-the-art models to predict the level of discomfort glare, measured on the de Boer rating scale, for this application is also investigated. With one exception, the models all overestimate the mean subjective discomfort glare compared to the experimental data. Models proposed by Lin et al (2015) and Bullough et al (2008Bullough et al ( , 2011 perform well. However, the implementation of these models is not straightforward because choices are needed to estimate some of the variables such as the background luminance and the glare source area.

Critical review on life cycle inventories and environmental assessments of LED-lamps

“…Villa et al investigated pedestrian discomfort glare from urban LED lighting. The findings confirmed previous studies, which recommend frosted or opalescent lamp covers to limit the maximum luminance and therefore the discomfort glare (Villa et al, 2016). Light pollution is connected with excessive and misdirected street lighting on a global level.…”

Measuring Discomfort from Glare: Recommendations for Good Practice

“…The second is that, there may be semantic bias during the translation process with the result that some descriptors may lose their original meaning. Villa et al [2017] included in their report the original French language of the five discomfort labels they used, and similarly Adrian and Schreuder [1970] for work conducted in Germany, but these are rare examples. Adjustment settings within the multiple criterion method are frequently made to the 'just' thresholds.…”

Using Category Rating to Evaluate the Lit Environment: Is a Meaningful Opinion Captured?

“…A nine-point response range is often used to quantify the magnitude of discomfort due to glare, and for evaluations associated with outdoor lighting this is often known as the de Boer scale. De Boer scales have been used in studies associated with glare from outdoor lighting (Bullough et al 2008;Tashiro et al 2014;Villa et al 2017), vehicle headlamps (Christiansen et al 2009;Lockhart et al 2006;McLaughlin et al 2004;Reagan et al, 2016;Schmidt-Clausen and Bindels 1974;Sivak et al 1989;Theeuwes et al 2002), and interior lighting (Bangali 2015(Bangali , 2015Lin et al 2014). Figure 4 shows one example of the de Boer scale in which the descriptors of glare magnitude range from just noticeable to unbearable.…”