Solutions

Bright Lighting Does Not Keep Us Safer At Night

A common concern surrounding the shift towards the management of light pollution is the effects of reduced light on street safety. Many cities around the world have channelled huge investments into lighting up pedestrian paths, back alleys and residential areas with lights, all to keep their citizens safe and the city running at night. In fact, because the argument behind such a trend involves a basic logical reasoning that illuminating dark spaces exposes predators and polices behaviours of deviance that commonly occur at night, it is near impossible to disprove the benefits of lighting up our streets. Yet, with increasing light pollution in our cities, we ought to question whether brighter streets directly translate to lower crimes. And the simple answer to that is… no!  

 

Bright Lights and Poor Safety

A study conducted in England and Wales has revealed that there is no causal relation between increased outdoor lighting and local crime rates and safety in the neighbourhood. In particular, the effects of lighting —being turned off (completely and intermittently), dimmed or replaced with white light LED lamps— had no recorded effect on local road traffic collisions or crime incidence across 62 local authorities (Steinbach et al., 2015). 

Instead, poor outdoor lighting has been found to decrease safety by exposing the location of crime victims as shown by high incidence of crime in brightly lit alleyways (Morrow & Hutton, 2000). This essentially debunks the established notion that the number of outdoor lights is proportional to safety of a neighbourhood. While it highlights that the bright lights closely ties to feelings of safety, it reveals a pressing problem that installing outdoor lighting is insufficient in reducing the vulnerability of citizens to crime at night.

Besides, overexposure to bright light or specifically, glare, has the potential to compromise on people’s safety by causing visual discomfort or disability such as momentary blindness (International Dark-Sky Association, 2015). 

From these cases, it is evident that there needs to be a shift from a perception that brighter lights equate to safer streets, to smart lighting. Understanding how light interacts in the environment it is installed in can enable us to position street lamps in the most effective place without thoughtlessly increasing the brightness of the streets. The following video demonstrates how safety goes beyond just the lighting up of pedestrian paths.

 

 

Smart Lighting

What then is smart lighting? Smart lighting constitutes a variety of factors from technical lighting criterias and the positioning of lights amongst other local environmental factors.

In looking at technical lighting criterias, we ought to consider the height of the street lamp as well as its type and wattage (Project for Public Spaces, 2008). 

  • Managing the height of lamps is important as the requirements for illumination differs for a highway, for example, as opposed to a pedestrian path. Opting for shorter pedestrian lamps while numerically requiring more lamps, will allow for greater flexibility of its placement and hence illumination of the street. 
  • The type and wattage of the lamp also differs according to its function and height of lamp. This factor would directly address formerly mentioned problems of glare and overexposure of light to the human eye.

In addition, smart lighting considers how the positioning of lights affects light distribution and interacts with local environmental factors. Smart placement of street lamps makes several considerations:

  • Existing developments: A blind adherence to standard lighting requirements fails to consider how light distribution might be complemented or hindered under local conditions. Smart lighting is sensitive to elements of existing built environments such as street and path widths, the average height of buildings in the area, the abundance, placement, and types of trees (Project for Public Spaces, 2008). It also considers the compatibility of light fixtures with existing light sources such as traffic or commercial lights. 

Altogether, we see that smart lighting is not something that can be replicated simply but requires tedious groundwork under local conditions. However, bringing along with it is also a hope that street safety can be established without an excessive use of lights. It dispels the myth that managing light pollution means dark streets and instead focuses on how light pollution can be managed through appropriate light exposure and effectively directed light. 

Till next time! 

Trudie 

 

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