Turn down the city lights, make streets safer, and reduce light pollution

Paul Bogard, BLOOMBERG VIEW
Feb 24, 2013. The City of Light dimmed? It’s true. Thanks to a new law, not only Paris but all of France will see its lighting level reduced, beginning this July. Window lighting in commercial buildings and the lights on building facades will be turned off after 1 a.m., and interior lighting in office buildings will be off an hour after the last employee departs.
The new law promises to reduce carbon emissions and save energy — the annual equivalent of 750,000 households’ worth. Most significant is its potential to turn the tide against light pollution by changing attitudes about our unnecessary overuse of light at night.
In almost every U.S. city, suburb and town, the streets, parking lots, gas stations, and commercial and public buildings are lit through the night. Over recent decades, the growth of this pollution has been relentless, yet slow enough that most of us haven’t noticed. Parking lots and gas stations, for example, are now often 10 times brighter than they were just 20 years ago, and light pollution continues to grow at 6 percent every year.
The cost of all this light, monetary and otherwise, is high. The connections to sleep disorders, cancer, diabetes and other disease are serious enough that the American Medical Association has declared its support for light-pollution control efforts. Every ecosystem on Earth is both nocturnal as well as diurnal, and light destroys habitat just as easily as any bulldozer can. And when eight out of 10 children born in the U.S. today will never see the Milky Way, we have even lost the stars.
SAFETY IMPROVES
The usual justification for these costs is that we need all this light for safety and security. This simply isn’t true.
No one doubts that artificial light can reduce the risks of being out at night, and no one is saying that we ought to exist in the dark. But increasingly, police, doctors, astronomers, economists, business leaders, communities and now the French government agree that we should reduce the light we use, and that too much brightness at night actually reduces our safety and security. Bright lights may make us feel safer. Alone, however, they don’t actually make us safer.
The research bears this out. In 2008, PG&E Corp., the San Francisco-based energy company, reviewed the research and found “either that there is no link between lighting and crime, or that any link is too subtle or complex to have been evident in the data.”
Read more via Turn Down the City Lights and Make Streets Safer – Bloomberg View.