August 26, 2007
Turn Off the Bright Lights
David Owen has an interesting article in last week's New Yorker (the Aug. 20 issue - only the abstract is online) discussing light pollution. The bottom line is that leaving the lights on all the time (mainly streetlights and building-exterior lights) not only brightens the night sky, but is also economically wasteful, environmentally damaging and probably causes cancer. It also doesn't decrease crime or have any other real benefits. Lights like the "glare bomb" shown above actually make it harder to see, because they shine light into your eyes as much as they do onto the street.
Austin, despite its progressive, green-energy reputation, appears to be as bad a light-polluter as any other major city. From the ring-of-fire floodlamps brightening our highways to the always-on fixtures illuminating almost every building in the city, our skies stay bright. Thankfully, Austin recently adopted light pollution regulations (part of the new design regs - see section 2.5 on page 58-60 of the pdf), but they don't apply to previously installed fixtures until 2015 and they don't apply to some of the worst light polluters in Austin: the highways. Plus, the city appears to be taking its time bringing the lighting it controls (like the streetlight shown above) into compliance. The International Dark-Sky Association and the Texas chapter have more information about how to darken the skies (or save energy at your house).
Image from outregis on Flickr. Downtown Austin, seen only in its effect on the sky above, is in the background.
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talk about light pollution...look at the intramural fields of UT. Anywhere in town, if you look towards Hyde Park there is a nasty orange glow.
it's so true i live right by there :(
UT turns off the intermural lights at night after the fields close right? I used to live right by there and I could have sworn they were always off at 10:00.
they are, but from 7ish to 10ish they are very present..
Pretty sure federal standards apply to lighting on interstates.
yeah i'd rahter people be driving around in the dark anyway. headlights are good enough!
It's really difficult to ride your bike in areas without good street lights. I have the strongest headlamp I could find, but I still feel nervous on the darkest roads. Getting rid of street lights definitely involves trade offs.
I don't believe that Austin's light pollution is as bad as other cities. From my Hyde Park house, I could see lots of stars. My in-laws live an hour outside of Houston, and you can't see a single star from their yard at night.
The idea is not simply to get rid of street lights. The idea is that lights like the one above, which shine in every direction, should be replaced with "full cut off" lights that only shine onto the street surface. That actually makes it easier to see the road, because you don't have light shining in your eyes and blinding you.
Also, I couldn't find an objective comparison of Austin's light pollution against that of other cities. Regardless of the situation in Houston, I think there is substantial light pollution in Austin, there are reasonably clear ways to reduce it that benefit everyone involved, and we would be handling it better if people had more awareness of the issue.
I think people know about light pollution and how annoying it is. It's like sound pollution - we all know it exists, it's in our backyard, but there are more pressing concerns for most folks.
More than replacing street lights, the city ought to give incentives to places like malls and HEBs and Wal Marts to cut off their parking lot lights at night.
Jane Jacobs would disagree.
I doubt it. Jane Jacobs cared about eyes on the street, not lights on the street. Full-cut-off lights make the street more pleasant to walk on and easier to view, which means more eyes on the street. In any case, she'd be no fan of contantly lit parking lots and highways, where people aren't walking or watching anyway.
One of the more interesting films I saw at SXSW was Alice Sees The Light by Director: Ariana Gerstein in the Experimental Shorts screening. When there was a power blackout in LA a few years back, Police were deluged with people calling in with reports of strange lights in the sky. They were seeing stars, thousands of stars.
At the McDonald Observatory in West Texas, my wife and I saw something we had never seen before, despite many ventures into wilderness before. The Zodiacal Belt. The Davis Mountains are one of the few places in the US dark enough to see it.
Check out the NASA site and photo of city lights at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Lights/