Lighting strategies in England

A number of English councils are experimenting with replacing dusk-till-dawn lighting with a different lighting regime, either involving dimming of lamps, or else switching them off. The Campaign to Protect Rural England has done a survey of councils to try to understand how widespread this practice is, what the councils reasons are, and to learn more about what types of strategies are being used. They've produced a 32 page report summarizing their findings that you can download for free. They've also made the short slideshow below to present the main findings:

Lighting survey results from cpre

If you found that interesting, you may also be interested in a related report submitted to the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs: A review of local authority road lighting initiatives aimed at reducing costs, carbon emissions and light pollution.

Finally, my group recently published a paper discussing recommendations that we suggest policymakers should adopt in order to reduce energy consumption, and reducing light levels during periods of little activity was one of our recommendations. The paper is unfortunately not open access, but you can download an author's copy from my personal website, Redefining efficiency for outdoor lighting.

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Paul Marchant is a chartered statistician from Leeds, England, who is investigating whether or not brighter street lights improve traffic safety or reduce crime. He showed this image of a burned out car directly beneath a streetlight during his talk at the recent international conference on Artificial Light at Night.

Burned out car under streetlamp by Paul Marchant is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

The point of the photo is that lighting by itself can't prevent crime, and simply making lights brighter is not a very effective way to try to reduce crime. So far, Dr. Marchant has observed that changes of lighting in London have not had a measurable impact on crime rates. He worries that earlier studies showing effects due to change in lighting have been affected by similar problems to many medical studies. This includes publication bias (researchers are more likely to publish exciting results) and statistical errors (e.g. crime and fatal traffic accidents have been falling for years in many countries, so regardless of what the intervention is, you could incorrectlly see it as "causing" a drop in crime).