The view from your app

Yesterday we saw some examples of bad street lighting from Spain. Today app user Andreas Hänel provides us with some good examples of decorative street lighting, from Puente la Reina, Spain. Until recently, Puente la Reina was overlit with lamps that produced a lot of glare, and sent much of their light into bedroom windows and into the sky. Now, you can see that the streets are well lit, but that the house facades are quite dark, and there is almost no glare from the decorative street lamps:

Good decorative street lighting, Puente la Reine by Andreas Hänel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

In this photo from the Plaza Julián Mena, you can see an example of both poor and excellent decorative lighting:

Decorative street lighting in Plaza Julián Mena by Andreas Hänel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

The lamp at top left wastes a large fraction of the light that it produces, by sending much of the light where it's not needed. The lamp at center right casts its light only downward, towards the ground. For comparison, here is the daytime view from Google street view. In Puente la Reina, before they changed the lighting many areas were extremely overlit. By directing the light better and using lower ground lighting levels, the town was able to cut its electricity consumption and energy bill drastically. The result is well lit streets, that are more attractive than they were before the lighting intervention.