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Comment by dahwolf | Hacker News Reader

Dutchie here. I haven't see these red LEDs become widespread although I do sometimes see dim green lights on bicycle paths.

Another interesting regulation here is related to insulation. Small bats tend to get inside walls and under roof tops. As people are improving insulation en masse, this act may kill or displace these bats. So you have to check for them and make amends if they're there. A common and easy way is to attach a bat home to your house. Some of them are really cool:

https://media.s-bol.com/gJJMmEXxPyRr/781x1200.jpg

I love my little bat friends. During summer months I can time their forage session to the minute. Then I just watch them circle around the garden picking up the mosquitos.

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> I haven't see these red LEDs become widespread although

That's because they aren't always needed. Only very specific spots pose a real danger.

This location has them since 2015 (even 2014 I thought): https://www.autoblog.nl/nieuws/automobilisten-in-de-war-door... (in Dutch), location on OSM: https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=51.34859&mlon=3.54388#ma...

Everybody complained at first, now it's just a curiosity. The bats thrive though and don't get killed near the roundabout. The lights don't need to be everywhere and only on the spots where the bats fly over regularly and get hurt by traffic and/or the environment (by which I mean the stuff related to the road, called Straatmeubulair in Dutch).

Heh, that part of Zeeland is referred to as Belgium by my friend from Zeeland (from near Goes). Thanks for linking it though. We were at vacation in Zeeland last summer and I wondered if we missed this (I think it would been cool to go there if its not far from route), but we were nowhere near there. I guess we didn't go to Belgium ;)

Zeeuws-Vlaanderen exists for a reason, no? ;-)

Unrelated to bat lights, but a friend of mine who is having a house built in Utrecht mentions that all the homes in the new neighborhood will have integrated bat housing. I assume he means something like the "bat bricks" from https://www.ibstockbrick.co.uk/kevington/eco-products/.

>attach a bat home to your house

Never knew these were a thing but it's exactly what I expected. Deserves a bat signal.

We built one into the gable end of our roof during renovation: https://imgur.io/Gc42NPn?r

(and added appropriately bat-wing shaped bargeboards)

That’s a very pretty house! What country do you live if I can ask and is this a common theme?

Thanks! We live in London. Quite a few properties around in this style.

This is Edwardian, built around 1902.

Do bat houses require any kind of cleaning/maintenance?

I asked this of our bat expert friend. Apparently not. The droppings, of which there won't be many for a small house, are quite dry and will naturally fall out of the opening.

Great. Thank you for following up.

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