Lights at night must not be so bright

If you swap out one street light from incandescent or sodium to LED, and turn it’s intensity down deep into the night, you can save the town $25 a year. I swapped all my household lightbulbs to LED this last year. My electricity bill has dropped $30 a month. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Translate to a town’s whole street light bill and the town could save a couple of thousand per month. So far, so good, right?

But there’s another issue here, besides the obvious one of saving energy (and cost): Why turn our townships into well-lit cityscapes in the first place? If we wanted to live in the perpetual-bright of the city, move there.

Seen from space at night, the East and West Coasts of America are one long carpet of lights, even at 2 in the morning. Millions of street lights glow, defining streets barely traveled and, of course that American dream, blazingly bright parking lots without a motion sensor even considered. Gone are the quiet star-lit skies seen one crisp evening, replaced by a horizon to horizon haze of back-lighting and the glare of a well-intentioned, insurance mandated, string of powerful idiot street light for those whose car headlights surely must be defective.

Several years ago, my wife and I were stopped by the police in Lausanne, a sizable city on Lac Leman in energy rich Switzerland. It was the dead of night and they pulled us over because we had our low-beam headlights on. They explained that, since they had spent considerable effort to design and install low light, street-only directed illumination, the pollution, the disturbance caused by the car’s beams, as we swung left and right through the hilly city, might disturb the good citizens of Lausanne who are, after all, entitled to a peaceful, light-free, sleep. We turned off our headlights and, surprise, we could see just fine. As you left the city, a sign reminded you to re-illuminate the road and turn on your headlights. Not one single stanchion-mounted street or highway light was to be seen after that point. The countryside was dark, car parks had motion detectors, and only the city streets were closely lit by focused stanchion beams, leaving a country quietly saving energy and providing, after all, a basic right at night: darkness.

Let me bring one other argument into all this: The energy crunch in California is a warning to us all. New York state receives much of its electricity on the cheap from Canada, from hydro-electric power produced by a series of dams on an artificial flood plain of vast proportions in Quebec. In the 1970s about one-third of all the electricity used in New York state went to the MTA and the incredibly wasteful, antiquated, subway power grid. That one $25 saving, turning down one street lamp, when seen across the state could result in lower taxes, a more beautiful countryside and, not least, a reduction in our energy consumption. Unlike California, now extinguishing street lights, turning off air conditioners in summer, shutting factories early and scrambling for any other source of power (even nuclear in rural areas), all of America should plan for the future and operate within generating capacity. It might also save the need to dig in National Parks for more energy resources as our new President promises to do.

Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.