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Comment by aeharding | Hacker News Reader

> there are no street lights in the entire city.

Yikes. Street lighting is one of the most important safety improvements, especially for people walking, as most pedestrian deaths due to drivers occur at night.

https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/provencountermeasures/lighting.c...

Of course, if we weren't so dependent on cars to do literally everything this wouldn't be the case, and we could safely get rid of a lot of street lighting.

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Similarly, the installation of public lightening by Colbert in the XVIIIth in Paris, lowered criminality by an order of magnitude.

It also enabled women rights, since, with the ability to somewhat walk securely at night or in the early morning, comes the ability to go to the factory and work somewhere else than in the house.

Some studies found no evidence for an association between crime and switch off or part-night lighting [0]

[0]https://jech.bmj.com/content/69/11/1118.short?g=w_jech_ahead...

We’ll need more and more of those studies as we switch off those lights to save energy. If it was possible to VC-fund them, that’s where I would put most if my money.

I appreciate how important it was in the past, but in the era of inexpensive and powerful LED flashlights, streetlights do seem rather redundant and wasteful.

Maybe in rural environments, but they're quite important in urban environments

Do people in the US just walk in the middle of the road ?

The critical question is, do people in the US just drive on the sidewalks?

(It's impossible to walk on sidewalks in a city without crossing streets every block, and that's where car/pedestrian conflicts occur)

> do people in the US just drive on the sidewalks?

I think you must first ask, "What percentage of roads in the US have sidewalks?" It's nowhere close to 100%.

estimate for me, is it closer to 20, I really dont know.

I live in a small village in the US, pop. ~1,000. I'd guess that less than half the streets within village limits have sidewalks.

And of course outside the village it's miles and miles of fields and forests with none.

Urban life is very different from rural.

For that they first would need to walk ...

I know some people think this is a silly question but the answer is, in my experience, yes. That's both in urban and exurban environments, in my experience.

Not usually, but sometimes cars drive too close to the edge of the road, and the road has no sidewalk.

And despite good advice (or simply due to a momentary circumstance), some people walk at night with dark clothing. You can turn a corner a hit a person very easily if they are in any half of your side of the street.

Depends on the road. My neighborhood has no sidewalks. I prefer it. Prevents the cars from acting like they own the place.

Street lights aren't just important for cars? Imagine being a woman walking around a city at night in the dark by yourself

I was under the impressions that street lights promote safety by reducing chances of person to person crime. It’s harder to hide in the shadows and get away without people seeing you with streetlights. So a handheld flashlight doesn’t solve that problem.

Absolutely does. Here's the data to back that up https://urbanlabs.uchicago.edu/projects/crime-lights-study

I feel this push for being able to see the Milky way every night fails to recognize the realities of urban life in non-matcha latte neighborhoods

Maybe the non latte neighbourhoods need streetlights. But we could get rid of them in the latte neighbourhoods.

The problem is that extremely powerful lights, as many cities are tending to more and more, can actually create more blind spots and makes it harder for our eyes to adjust to those dark spots. If cities adopted more, weaker, warmer lights we'd likely see much less damage to the ecosystem AND increased safety

Modern LED's are so darn bright, the right handheld flashlight might as well be considered a weapon.

In typical night conditions, a single Nichia 219-series LED at full drive would temporarily flash-blind someone with just a quarter of a second of exposure.

This is true, and among high-power LEDs, the 219 series is typically chosen for its color rendering and tint, not its output or intensity.

Street lights can also aggravate the problem of safety. Unfortunately most cities seem to believe that more lumens = more safety. But often times this creates more stark dark spots and makes it harder for our eyes to adjust to them

What would really improve safety the most is having more, warmer, weaker lights. One city in the UK ended up taking down their streetlights after some attacks and replacing them with christmas lights strewn across some city trees.

Not only did it look nicer, end up costing less, and was less damaging to the local ecosystem, but it also likely made the area much safer

Flashlights? Reflectors? We don't need streetlights illuminating empty roads all night.

Another approach is to have personal lighting. I regularly attend an event in one of the darker parts of Colorado where it's considered common courtesy to have a glowy something or other attached to you. There can be collisions even between pedestrians. Nobody gets hurt but it's awkward when it happens so you start to appreciate the extra cues.

It’s LA, no one walks.

These days we'd tap into the cell phone network/radio waves to track pedestrians. It's the modern safety reflector or high-visibility clothing.

Are you not carrying your phone with you? Well, "it would be a shame if something happened to you."

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