Comment by lloeki
3 days ago
In my city they started turning off all streetlights at midnight outside of major driving lanes and active center areas.
It's weird and somewhat unnerving at first but brilliant. I'd argue road-wise it is possibly even safer because headlights work so much better when it's pitch black by virtue of the human eye having so much dynamic range.
Pedestrians can't miss cars as they're blasting light through the dark; cars can't miss bikes because even passive reflectors are blaring in the surrounding darkness; even pedestrians end up being more visible because of the higher contrast, cast shadows, and movement that conspire to make them plainly pop out like cardboard props or Doom 3 flashlight jumpscares.
And when you go out of the dark zone into a major axis that's bathed in light that feels warm and safe it's like everything is suddenly muted and flattened as if reality went through a low contrast sepia-tinted desaturation filter. You feel like you see better but everything is muddled together in the sameness of uniform lighting.
The experience is highly cognitively dissonant and counterintuitive.
I'm glad that darkness is respected in some places. The need to live in constant light is, to me, unnerving. Light pollution, like noise pollution, creates a myopic dome of sensory oblivion, separating us from experiencing the sounds of nature, the splendor the night sky, the emotions of isolation. I think we'd be better off with a nightly reminder of the natural world and expansive universe beyond our city block.
People are afraid of the darkness.
I really wish that wasn't the case. But removing lights is an uphill battle powered by irrational arguments and doomed to failure even on the cases where it's clearly the best option.
Even dimming the lights is hard.
I've grudgingly come to admit that also people who don't have great vision love bright lighting. I can usually see perfectly well by starlight, but that's not the case for everyone.
I was once in the US Navy, and stood many a bridge watch. When it got dark, all outside lights except for the navigation lights (red light on port bow, green on starboard bow, a white light up top and another white light on the stern). And on the bridge, we used only dim red lights, to avoid affecting our night vision. None of the navigation lights was easily visible from the bridge. And you could see reasonably well, even on a cloudy night.
Where I come from they did change the lights to LEDs, but they turn off 2/3rds or 3/4ths of them after midnight; still enough light to navigate, but much less power usage and light pollution. There's a bike lane outside of town whose lights were motion activated, iirc that was installed about 20 years ago.
I'm a regular outdoor runner and also an extreme morning person, so I'm often out running at like 3 AM, and it is absolutely not safer to be in complete darkness. Surfaces are not perfectly uniform and unobstructed and the ambient light from the atmosphere and surrounding city, even dead in the center of a major metro area, is nowhere near enough to see everything you might hit. I've tripped many times and even broken my hand before. It is effectively impossible to ever go full speed.
if you're out running at night, perhaps you should also be carrying some lights? both to help you see your environment and to help others see you.
I run at night on trails (during the summer, when it's too hot to run during the day). I wear a headlamp, and don't trip any more than I do in the day--despite the fact that the trails have rocks and roots. The only issue I have is that because the headlamp is inches from my eyes, shadows are almost invisible.
I walk a lot and support this, even though I am not convinced it makes me more visible when not in front of the headlights. Typically, the danger happens when walking on the sidewalk perpendicular to a road. I can see the car, they cannot see me until I'm a few feet in to the crosswalk when I'm not lit up by a street light.
WTF? What about pedestrians? Are they walking in full darkness?
This seems to be totally oriented to cars. I find American cities incredibly dark by night. Walking around feels too dark and unpleasant.
> WTF? What about pedestrians? Are they walking in full darkness?
During a normal night, you get used to the darkness surprisingly fast, and if there even a slight sliver of moonlight, your eyes will within seconds adjust and let you see things again without trouble.
At least that's my experience growing up in the dark countryside in Sweden and seemingly retaining this as an adult, YMMV.
> During a normal night, you get used to the darkness surprisingly fast,
Then a car drives past and your sight instantly adjusts to that, but takes several minutes to adjust back. Then you're stuck in subjective total darkness for a while.
Or, if you're in an area with mixed lighting (e.g. you walk past a house that incidentally lights part of the street) then your eyes can never adjust and you have to walk through pools of total darkness. I know this experience from rare situations where a few streetlights go out in a row, and it's not as easy as you just portrayed it.
> At least that's my experience growing up in the dark countryside in Sweden
That's fair enough IMO. I don't think it's feasible or helpful to plaster every centimetre of every rural road in street lighting. But the comment we're replying to suggested removing them in cities "outside of ... active center areas". That's a different matter.
YMMV as you get older and lose that superpower.
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This is a car-centric ableist take.
Not everyone has excellent vision. In addition to those who are actually visually impaired, your eyesight simply gets worse as you get older even if you had perfect vision when you're young.
And even if you can adjust to the night, which is Moon and cloud-dependent anyway, that completely goes away every time a car goes past with its LED high beams.
LED lights have way more capacity to be directional. There's absolutely no reason why street lights can't mostly point down to light the street and sidewalks with minimal light pollution to any nearby houses.
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Also it's terrifying for safety; way too easy to assault someone in complete darkness.
I suspect your terror comes from lack of familiarity with natural light outdoors, and is a product of always having the lights on plus not being out of a house often.
The night is not 'complete darkness', we can generally see fairly well.
Also, I suspect your presumption on assault risk and assault rates comes from media, which is designed around building fear. Fear sells.
So I agree that you find the natural world terrifying, I just wish you didn't. Because the natural world is what we are fit for.
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Let's put it this way. The fear is someone hiding in the shadows to jump a person, and then dragging the victim back into the shadows.
Bright lights on the street create more shadows. All you have to do is step out of the streetlight and no-one will see you, because the light-level contrast between the lit street and the surrounding space.
If there aren't any streetlights, so the surrounding space has the same illumination as the roadway, then that space is more present in more passerby's visual awareness.
So your proposed solution, "Streelights on every street" actually increases the risk you are so concerned about.
Completely the opposite.
Numerous studies show crime goes down when streetlights are turned off.
Simply put, you don't get scrotes hanging about in groups up to no good without lights, and anybody who is walking around is carrying a torch, making it obvious what they are doing (e.g. if you are breaking into a house, needing a torch instead of using a streetlight makes it obvious to everybody what you are doing).
No to mention a lack of streetlights makes if harder for somebody to hide in the shadows.
The real question to ask, is why people like yourself are 'terrified' [sic] of the dark. Statistics show the real truth of what you should be worried about.
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I'm don't see why this is downvoted, I think it's an honest and legitimate question. What are pedestrians supposed to do when there's no car passing them right this moment? Carry their own torch? Rely on ambient light from the moon and reflected from nearby lit streets? Are we assuming there's such a high volume of cars that there's never a gap? I'm genuinely confused.
Where I live, even with streetlights, most people I see walking after dark carry a torch.
It’s easier than ever to carry one.
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> Carry their own torch
You state this like it is a bad idea.
If you have a cell phone, you have a torch.
If you are walking in a place where there are cars, having a light on you is a great way to reduce your risk of being hit. So yes, you should absolutely be carrying a torch if you are walking near streets after dark. Nordic countries teach this in kindergarden.
When I'm crossing a street after dark, I always flash my torch at potentially oncoming cars. Even if I'm at a lit crosswalk.
If you are walking in a place without cars, then the place probably doesn't have the infra to provide street lighting. You may want a torch, depends on the phase of the moon and your comfort level with dim lighting.
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Get a flashlight?
> The experience is highly cognitively dissonant and counterintuitive.
Hitting the next homeless person and throwing them 10 meter in the space will be quite the experience.
Honestly, this is not shitty experience because of regulation, this is just councils cutting costs everywhere except their salaries. Los Angeles these last couple days has showed what it means to do that. You'll literally be on fire some day.