UK To Dim Highway Lights To Save Money 348
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that street lights on thousands of miles of major roads in England will be dimmed during quiet periods to save money and reduce carbon emissions. The Highways Agency has already turned off the lights on more than 80 miles of the motorway network and will soon begin a survey of where this can be done on the 2,500 miles of A roads it controls. Nigel Parry, of the Institution of Lighting Professionals, says that technology enabled lights can be controlled individually and remotely. 'The idea is that when traffic is busy, such as during the morning and evening rush hour, you have them at their brightest. When the traffic disappears you can dim them. You can maintain safety and use half as much energy.'"
Highway lights??? (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt that highway lights are an actual safety improvement, considering that the german Autobahn don't have them at all.
Re:Highway lights??? (Score:5, Interesting)
Autobahn (Score:5, Interesting)
Long answer: street lights reduce the glare from oncoming vehicles, which is at its worst at busy times. On 'A' roads, they also let you distinguish motorcycles from our increasing number of one-headlamp drivers. On the other hand, I've seen the result of the Porsche that overtook me once doing at least 200k at night meeting the Polish artic with tiny lights covered in mud. With street lights, the Porsche driver might have seen the truck in time. As it was, Darwin claimed another victim.
Why not traffic signals, too? (Score:4, Interesting)
In the US in the 1930s it was common for major cities to turn off traffic signals in the middle of the night, also to save money on electricity costs. The criminal element quickly learned to use these times for their getaways, since they could cross town quickly without attracting the notice one gets when running red lights (cf. The Valachi Papers [wikipedia.org]).
I know there are few traffic signals on A roads but, as this is the UK, I can't decide whether "in for a penny, in for a pound" or "penny wise, pound foolish" is the more appropriate idiom.
Re:Electricity consumption -- where does it go? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nuclear power platns don't have that, but coal and water plants do. And as you're not actually surprised by reduced energy consumption at night, reducing their output is feasable within a few hours. For the small, unexpected movements you have gas plants that can be turned on within a few seconds.
On the other hand, the street lights in populated areas (not highway lights, we don't have them here) are indeed used for load shedding of nuclear power plants. (Worked in a town with one until two years ago. saw the streetlights on at day quite a few times)
Re:I might just be a luddite, but (Score:0, Interesting)
It wouldn't really have occurred to me that street lighting (other than on Motorways) was primarily aimed at drivers. I would have thought that pedestrians were the main beneficiaries.
Re:Highway lights??? (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt that highway lights are an actual safety improvement
I've done quite a bit of driving on UK motorways late at night and in bad weather and have to say I really appreciate the lit sections. Particularly in heavy traffic with fog, rain and snow it dramatically improves your visibility and I feel I can judge distances a lot better with them. I don't mind being on an empty unlit road at night, but a busy one (e.g. parts of the M62 on the north side of Manchester) can be pretty horrible.
Re:Electricity consumption -- where does it go? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I might just be a luddite, but (Score:5, Interesting)
Without street lights, the area outside of where your headlights land will be dark if there's a moon, or a pitch-black void if it's a moonless night, vs. with street lights where the whole road is lit up.
Your point about the interface between the lit and the non-lit is correct, but it has unintended consequences. I did a fair amount of research into street and highway lighting as part of astronomy related "dark sky" issues. Some things are counter intuitive. It would seem that the brighter the light, the better and safer the roadway would be. That might be true when entering a well lit area, but upon leaving it, you will see much less until your eyes adapt.
It's a matter of intuitively and practically knowing that daylight is best for vision. But we cannot afford to light up the globe to daylight levels. So we try spot lighting, which doesn't work all that well. In addition to the light/dark interface, we often have the light source being visible to the drivers. Given the intensity of the light hitting the surfaces versus the intensity at the source, your eyes will adapt to the source. So it is always safer to have shielded lights if you have them.
There is a particularly pernicious "brighter is better" issue going on right now with the new headlights that are very bright and focused. Unfortunately, this transcends from the counterintuitive to plain stupid. The light beams are so focused that differentials in height can blind you. My first experience with one of these "gamma ray headlight" vehicles was being followed by a person down a country road with a lot of bumps. Every time his car was a little higher than mine, it would look like he was flashing the high beams. It was very distracting Worse is when they are coming toward you. The opposing driver might have their low beams on, but if they are at the crest of a hill, and you are coming up the hill, you get treated to a blinding flash of blueish light. I wonder about the safety of a blinded driver coming straight at you. Apparently the designers came from flatland.
But it is the same thing as the "er" effect used so well in marketing. Bigg-er, Bright-er, Bett-er. It;s hard to convince everyone that brighter isn't safer.
I think that dimming the lights might actually make the roads safer. Oops, there's that -er again!
Re:I might just be a luddite, but (Score:5, Interesting)
>Because headlights only light up what is in front of a car
Correct. It's worth mentioning, for the benefit of our cousins, that we British drivers tend to change lanes much more often than Americans.
Until very recently, it was mandatory in the UK to return to the lane furthest from the median immediately after overtaking. Only very recently has this been changed to allow you to remain in the centre lane for extended periods. In the UK it is still illegal to hog the lane nearest the median and it is illegal to "undertake" (i.e. to overtake on the furthest lane from the median) unless you are using a ramp/exit/sliproad.
So in the UK where we drive on the left, you can only overtake on the right and most people have been trained to return back to the left pretty much immediately. That makes visibility (and therefore lighting) of the whole width of the road vital during busy periods.
My experience of driving in the USA is that overtaking is allowed on any side and that most motorists pick one lane and stick to it for most of the whole journey, regardless of speed. (Re-wrote this half a dozen time to try to get the terminology UKUS neutral. Probably still not quite right. Bah.)