we would all be better off with fewer lights on buildings, and fewer streetlights. there is no reason for most of them, and the cost is existentially incredible.
Yes there is, it's crime. Street lights deter crime.
Also simply driving safety. Driving with just headlights causes more accidents than on a well-lit street, since visibility is so much worse.
I love to see the night sky as well, but I don't want to pretend there aren't extremely good reasons for street lighting, and those reasons aren't going away.
That being said, are there ways to reduce outdoor lighting of giant industrial parking lots, of stadiums at 3 am, or whole floors of skyscrapers when 99% of people have gone home? Sure. But at the same time, reducing nighttime lighting by 50% isn't really going to make any difference in sky visibility. It's more about not wasting electricity.
I'm talking mostly about urban areas though -- in rural areas where there's already a decent amount of visibility and the population is small enough that most roads already don't have street lights, then regulation can actually make a difference, e.g. banning always-on floodlights on people's driveways.
On the good side of the spectrum, I've never experienced a city as dark as Tokyo at night, which is also one of the safest on both accounts...
So you're blaming victims for being mugged -- or worse? Because they weren't "prudent" enough?
Rather than realizing that dark areas create opportunities for criminals where they won't be recognized, or caught on camera, and where they can escape without people spotting them?
The lower rates of crime in Japan are due to cultural factors. And lighting doesn't change cultural factors.
Of course not, I am merely pointing the fact that the feeling of safety may not be actual safety. Changing the environment alters the behaviour of criminals and potential victims.
You also ignored that in the same sentence I blamed perpetrators: imprudent drivers.
> The lower rates of crime in Japan are due to cultural factors. And lighting doesn't change cultural factors.
That's basically where I was going with this.
As if the Japanese had always been tidy, the Dutch always fervent cyclists, the Italians smug about their food quality, etc. Culture shifts.
Kinda, sometimes. But this field is also fraught with tons of "bad implementations of a good idea", making the problem worse, as well as intuitions that don't hold up to empirical studies.
Classic example is a neighborhood adds extra bright streetlamps and neighbors install extra-bright flood lights on their garages. This illuminates some areas, but the areas that are missed become even "darker" because the extra light in people's eyes ruins night vision. Hiding in the bushes with your black thieving skimask (or along the fence line, or just off the road) becomes even more effective, and everyone else just gets a bright streetlight shining into their bedroom window all night long.
There's a whole subculture of designers talking about what makes effective street lighting, but it basically comes down to less blue light aimed more downwards.
And the best crime deterrent is having a lively neighborhood with more eyes on the street in the Jacobs-ey fashion. I heard of one crime study that considered lighting and cameras and all those things but found the best predictor of low crime rates was how many dogs lived in the neighborhood (and therefore people outside walking their dogs).
What we have is a situation where our city, state and federal governments know jack shit about the science behind proper lighting or why it's so important for both people and wildlife to get high-quality, whole-spectrum, 10-25KHz+ PWM lighting.
And contractors take advantage of this, charging exorbitant amounts of money for intentionally sub-par lighting systems. It's a crime against both nature and humanity.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/led-streetlights-are-giving-neighb...
Considering the context of crime prevention, it is rather ironic therefore that police stations traditionally have none other than blue lamps above their doors!
I don't want to walk in dark even if there is literally no other person.
I completely agree. But, it's very rarely a full moon.
When there's no moon at all, which is literally half the time, you might be surprised at how pitch black it is at night. Or just, you know, when there's heavy clouds.
Lighting affects property crime more than violent crime. It also depends on where the lights are, both in terms of neighborhood[1] and country[2].
On the other hand, lights dramatically affect how safe people feel[3] in an area, even if that feeling is not necessarily based on actual danger.
[1]: https://doi.org/10.3386/W25798
> Also simply driving safety. Driving with just headlights causes more accidents than on a well-lit street, since visibility is so much worse.
Accepting your points for convenience, wouldn't we get the same benefits with lights that only pointed downward? And if you further restrict to warmer colors (which interfere less with low-light sensitivity, also less diffraction reducing light pollution), with a sensible but low max intensity (again keeping the human eye more dark-sensitive, allowing better visibility into the non-illuminated spaces)?
Reducing nighttime lighting by 50% would make a huge difference in sky visibility.
Some of these things won't be gone for generations or more, whereas you can turn lights off pretty easily. Ideally we'll swap out the older designs of streetlights and such as better designs become prevalent and there's economic incentives to do so.
I don't know if an IR emmitter would be reasonable, but that could augment the headlights to provide some really good visibility even without street lights.
Some light pollution is unfortunate but it’s essentially trivial in comparison. It causes no long term damage and doesn’t really do anything but make the sky less interesting.