Let us not forget that LED lights give a horrible cold clinical light CFL are only slightly better many pubs and bars round here are going back to filament lamps simply because they give a much more pleasant warm light

I've a recent feeling after passing near a street near Hadar city center of Haifa, which have a new LED installation of Gaash Venus or Mini Venus LED lanterns. They are blindery bright, but the road was almost invisible, and the horrible light of these lanterns caused it to look like the gates to the helll.

The thing is, with the LED's the lifetime of all the components (LEDs, ballast, optics, housing, wiring) is about similar (long or short, depend on the overall quality).
So that means you would have to be able to replace every of these components separately.
And other aspect is, many times with not working fixture you end up with bad contacts here and there, mostly on the sockets.
These things are not new to LED's, I do observe the same issues with other technologies as well, mainly those long life types like HID or fluorescents.
So from this perspective it is better to just skip those trouble makers and replace the fixture as whole and let it get repaired in properly equipped shop. By the way that was the rule with non working MV's here (once the power feed to the fixture was determined as OK): The MV's alone were known to be so reliable, the failure was all the time somewhere else. And repairing that on top of the pole was rather inefficient business.
In many places even the relamping was made that way: Replace the whole fixture and use the opportunity of relamping to thoroughly inspect the fixture and repair all starting faults before they really start to pose any issues.
So I think once the life is expected to be longer than 4..5years, I see that maintenance model as quite viable.

Another factor with LED life is the heat that's generated. The cooler they stay, the longer they last. I've seen LEDs where it was a color changing lamp and theLED had its metal negative plate on the back heatsinked and thermal pasted. The LED failed because of a bad resistor a and the power transformer shorted.

No home user is going to get a lantern repaired. It will be trashed the second it EOLs. If the expected troublef-free lifetime of a lantern is 4..5 years thats awfully short

The lifetime of oldest lanterns that i seen was limited by the life of rubber+cloth wiring isolation, that mean ~50 years from manufacture. Later ones using PVC isolation last forever. Many of those were installed in the 60s..70s, and they still work with no maintenance other than GLS lamp replacement every 1000 hours

I've a recent feeling after passing near a street near Hadar city center of Haifa, which have a new LED installation of Gaash Venus or Mini Venus LED lanterns. They are blindery bright, but the road was almost invisible, and the horrible light of these lanterns caused it to look like the gates to the helll.

   Very well put dor. They are al glare and no light.

Gaash make the best LED streetlights i ever seen. They use HID-like reflectors, and position a Fortimo LED module in the focus point where a HID lamp would normally go. They dont make more glare than a HID streetlight would

But the lighting effect on the earth is poor because of the LED light source, then compared to the visible lighting effect the streetlight itself appears to be brighter...

I've seen LED retrofits for merc vapor or probe start MH and they aren't bad. They just fit into the fixture with no modification.

The retrofits i seen are for the most part epic fail

The Gaash LED lanterns are really designed for LED, its just that they design them in a similar way to HID, so they have some of the better optics. Then the only problem remaining is the spectrum of the light source, and perhaps reliability (they dont exist for long enough yet to evaluate that)

This is the type of retrofit bulb they are using in the pole lights at the school. It was installed back in 2012ish when the school went from merc high bay to f54t5/HO.

I seen similar ones in streetlight retrofits, and i can ONLY say bad things about those and the retrofit jobs...

Glare bombs

Not working well with the lantern optics at all, their light emitter location is not compatible with optics for clear lamps, and not even with optics for diffused lamps

Some are so huge that they actually require removal of reflectors, reflector towers etc from lanterns, then the lantern is about as good as an empty shell over the lamp....

The drivers (external) are craptastic

Bump the pole a bit and see how the thing detaches from its screw cap (the cap remains stuck in the socket) and remains laying in the bowl. That is, if the bowl was not removed to accomodate it

They claim that a 30W LED can replace a 125W mercury lamp. In reality, it is the other way around even when the mercury lamp is everal years old. All the extra efficiency of the LED is beyond lost with the horrendous optics

The light itself is just like what LEDs emit, a lot of Lumens that carry zero visual information

It'll turn a normal city into Glare City!

The nicer HID bulbs replaced by a corncob LED bulb--BAD-reduced light and a bulb not compitable with the orig fixture optical system-result less light wasted effort-when will these folks learn?

The first mistake my idiot school made was ripping out perfectly good merc fixtures (175w) for 4x f54t5=216. 

You describe pretty well the effect - glare with no usefull light

But the cities involved dont mind telling stuff like "80% energy savings" (the original streetlights weer not incandescent, but HPS and Mercury in good lanterns), "we improved lighting levels" (they really measured, but they cheated by partially covering the sensor under the HPS), and "we put in 30W LED to replace 250W HPS" (while the LED used in that specific location is really 80W, and is 1/5th as bright, effectively much less when compared to its own glare)